Art as Unlearning - Arts-based Research and Transcultural Education

In the context of a world that is challenged by nation-state crises, economization, and environmental destruction, all of which bring about new forms of migration and reinforce already existing ones, unlearning has emerged as a term in alternative education and postcolonial theory. This research project builds on the insights and energies developed in and around these studies and introduces arts- based research into the debates on what unlearning might do and be. More precisely, it is the orientation towards practice and theory that enables arts-based research to contribute to these debates in innovative ways. Through arts-based research on unlearning it is possible to theoretically and practically question understandings of learning, that are solely based on the acquisition of knowledge and behaviour, guided by the boundaries of a nation-state or confined to one particular culture. Unlearning can be understood, here, in its most general sense as becoming aware and getting rid of taken for granted truths in theory and practice. Connecting the fields of socially engaged art practices, the educational turn in art, and the transcultural discourse on modernity in education, Art as Unlearning investigates arts-based contexts that have transformed understandings of learning within the modernist projects of education. In the form of collaborative case studies entailing the arts-based practices of situation-making and critical mapping, this research involves groups of actors from non-Western backgrounds in order to examine and practice specific situations of unlearning, in which art has played a vital role. These considerations and approaches will make it possible to respond to the overall question of this research: What constitutes an arts-based methodology of unlearning from a transcultural perspective? The goal of this research is to establish unlearning as an important subject for arts-based research to make new findings available for research on transcultural modernity while developing postcolonial-, educational-, and arts-based research that challenge the modernist projects of education on a methodical, theoretical, and practical level.

What are the struggles, entanglements, and joys of practicing unlearning in predominantly western contexts? This research responds to this question through revisiting and expanding the artistic research projects Sites for Unlearning toward a transnational perspective. The sites are experimental gatherings where unlearning is both studied in already existing articulations and practiced in newly initiated forms. The aim is to collaboratively unlearn dominant forms of thinking and doing, and the affective production of impossibilities within institutions in order to intervene in social injustices. In diverse collaborative settings, we have gained insights into what constitutes a practice of unlearning in a concrete and situated context, and creatively explored their conceptual, artistic-educative, digital, organizational, and ethical challenges. More specifically, we have developed and worked with a practice-based concept of unlearning that builds on the insights and energies developed in social movements and alternative education, as well as queer-feminist, de/post/anticolonial address of everyday norms central to academic canons, forms of institutionalization, and white innocence (Andreotti 2011; Fanon 1967; Spivak 1993; Wekker 2016). As a crucial part of the unlearning research, the potential of unlearning to unsettle dominant concepts of learning that undergird practices of transformation and social change have been discursively investigated. Here, the contribution to the field of art-based research and education challenges and complicates the currently popular currency of "unlearning" in the arts as well as academia as it explores the connecting tissue between "unlearning", "learning" and "lifelong learning" - three concepts that have been explored in their relationship with de/post/anticolonial theories and practices. The different collaborative research practices and settings on what unlearning might do and be are documented, framed, and challenged by creative writing, (collaborative) essays, collective conversations and a digital research platform. Together they form a support structure for further practicing unlearning.