Workshop: The Instant Class Kit: Socially-engaged art as radical pedagogy

Workshop 1: Fluxus & Socially-Engaged Art as Radical Pedagogy

This virtual workshop will introduce Fluxus radical pedagogy and the Instant Class Kit. The workshop will include lectures and discussion. Participants will be introduced to artworks from the kit and will be invited to activate a work by PA Systems that draws on the idea of giving something intangible (dream or feeling) tangible form. There is a curatorial publication for the kit that you may read prior to the workshop (optional). The publication can be found on the website.

Materials required:

Ideally playdoh or airdry clay. You can make homemade dough (many recipes on the internet that require flour, oil and salt). Alternatively pencil and paper.

Workshop 2: The Museum of Care

This workshop encourages critical conversations around individual and collective actions of care, and their implications for the production and transformation of the communities we inhabit or wish to create. Participants will be asked to contribute to creating a virtual Museum of Care using found objects and materials from their immediate surroundings.

Materials:

Use of a camera phone (optional).

Workshop 3: Love Letters to a Possible Future (with guest artist Syrus Marcus Ware)

Activating a number of items in the kit including Tania Willard’s Bush Manifesto and Syrus Marcus Ware’s Activist Love Letters participants will discuss intimacy and love in activism, survival, and radical pedagogy and will engage in a letter writing project for a future to come.

Materials:

Pen and paper. Envelope and stamp (optional).

Workshop 4: Redundancy

Drawing from a score designed by Chris Cuellar in The People's Mycrophony Songbook by Elana Mann, this workshop seeks to hold reflective conversations around the social, aesthetic, and political potential of listening and speaking or what Mann calls ‘radical receptivity.’ The performance, which repeats phrases over and over again, plays with the idea of redundancy – the state of no longer being needed or unnecessary. Collectively participants will engage in a virtual performance on zoom.

Materials:

Paper and pen or pencil.

about the facilitators:

Stephanie Springgay is Director of the School of the Arts and Associate Professor at McMaster University. She is a leading scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. She directs the SSHRC-funded research-creation project The Pedagogical Impulse which explores the intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy. With Dr. Sarah Truman she co-directs WalkingLab – an international network of artists and scholars committed to critical approaches to walking methods. www.stephaniespringgay.com

Andrea Vela Alarcón is an educator, community artist and Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto. Her work is inspired by over a decade of working at the intersections of community development, popular education and socially engaged arts in Peru and Canada. From participatory documentary to collaborative installations, her work is driven by a desire to engage with communities seeking social justice. Her research interests lie in the crossings of contemporary art and relational encounters through pedagogies of solidarity. Andrea co-directs the Instant Class Kit activations.

Syrus Marcus Ware is an LTF Assistant Professor at McMaster University in the School of the Arts. He is a Vanier scholar, visual artist, activist, curator and educator. Syrus uses painting, installation and performance to explore social justice frameworks and black activist culture, and he’s shown widely in galleries and festivals across Canada. He is a core-team member of Black Lives Matter – Toronto, a part of the Performance Disability Art Collective, and an ABD PhD candidate at York University in the Faculty of Environmental Studies. His on-going curatorial work includes That’s So Gay (Gladstone Hotel, 2016-2019) and BlacknessYes!/Blockorama.