AUBERVILLIERS.- Free to move from chair to chair is a group exhibition bringing together works around plural and unconventional approaches to education and pedagogy. Echoing contemporary art’s “educational turn” [1] (while stepping aside from its didactic rhetoric and utopian stances), the six selected artists, through oblique or fragmentary means, explore the role of education as an intimate experience, as an apparatus, a conditioning, or a socio-political stake with multiple ramifications. Education, marked by processes of transition and thresholding, extends well beyond physical and institutional boundaries. Far from the limits of the classroom, it is considered here as a space crossed by conflict and transformation, which involves the political sphere, subjectivity, the construction of self-image and collective memory.

“Free to move from chair to chair" [2] is a quotation taken from a conversation between Robert Filliou and John Cage on the topic of education. In this talk, Cage describes a learning situation characterised by radical flexibility, both in its spatial arrangement (an empty room without assigned seats where one would be “free to move from chair to chair”) and in its content (“nothing is learned that was not already known or knowable before the advent of the learning situation”).

If Cage’s words “free to move” point to an education that is self-directed and open to indeterminacy, such flexibility might today equally meet the neoliberal logics of continuous training, individual plasticity and customisable, digitised knowledge, as well as the current transformation of institutions subjected to the agenda of capitalist hyper-adaptability. This ambiguity emerges from the artists’ proposals, which grapple with these contemporary dynamics where education intersects with entertainment, technological decentralisation, and techniques of attention capture. Each work also delineates a sensitive and poetic mode of expression, valuing art’s capacity to produce non-quantifiable knowledge and act upon the institutional fabric. The exhibition thus offers new ways of understanding how artists may contribute to reframing the structures of transmission and the narratives tied to education in the age of neoliberalism.

Written contributions from the artists - some theoretical, others poetic, often hybrid - will be gathered into a publication that will extend the dialogue initiated by the works in the exhibition. Through their specific use of language traditionally valued in academic contexts (theses, dissertations), these papers enact a reappropriation of such rhetoric, offering diverse vantage points on current research-creation, especially where it intersects with expanded notions of pedagogy.

The curatorial team has also conducted a series of interviews with different people involved in the educational field (academics, teachers, artists, directors of art schools, among others). This material is made available for reading within the exhibition space.

During an exhibition at Ateliers W in Pantin on October 31, two groups of students from Ensapc and Ensad Limoges will show works created during a workshop on the topic of education. This new chapter of Free to move from chair to chair opens space for merging student and artist positions, and intersects sensitive, critical, and imaginative perspectives on education.

Centre d’art Ygrec-Ensapc, as a contemporary art centre directly linked to an art school, is itself a place of education. To foreground questions of education through the voices of a young generation of artists—who themselves graduated from art schools—finds a particularly propitious setting to draw new connections with this institutional context: a site where the act of learning simultaneously entails working on oneself, on the structures and conditions of emancipation.

With : Guillaume Maraud, Irma Name, David Posth-Kohler, Julie Sas and Angharad Williams

Curated by : Ana Braga, Clara Guislain and Guillaume Breton


[1] For reference, see Kristina Lee Podeska, “A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art”, Fillip 6, 2007 (https://fillip.ca/content/a-pedagogical-turn); and Irit Rogoff, “Turning”, e-flux journal no. 0, November 2008 (https://www.e-flux.com/journal/00/68470/turning). The term educational turn emerged in the 2000s to describe a constellation of exhibitions that foregrounded interactivity and often drew on schoolroom or pedagogical aesthetics, repositioning art as a site of knowledge production, or education itself as an artistic medium.

[2] The title Free to move from chair to chair is taken from a conversation recorded in March 1967 between Robert Filliou and John Cage, later published in Filliou’s Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts (Cologne–New York, Kasper König, 1970).