Paper short abstract:

Drawing from the artist's own projects and collaborative and cooperative activities, this audio-visual presentation traces the methods that allow to convene, to gather and to assemble beyond the spaces and the times that are officially sanctioned as learning environments.

Paper long abstract:

This audio-visual presentation commences with a reflection on a set of unadorned questions: How come my name is Christian? How come I speak French, English and Dutch? What is anthropology in Kinyarwanda? The presentation suggests a model of practice that makes apparent how such questioning compels a mobility across disciplines, boundaries and limits of the knowable. The presentation draws from the artist's own practice, which materialises in art, design, theory, but also in dance, botany, cooking, gardening, walking, and in collaborative and cooperative activities, such as his contributions to Another Roadmap for Arts Education Africa Cluster, a research network on the history of arts education undertaken within a network of educators, artists and researchers working in 4 continents around the world. Reflecting on the urgency of such models of working, the presentation indicates that these methods are in themselves ways of making relevant the intertwined histories and the realities that inform the inhospitable conditions of the present and to intervene by rethinking how to convene, to gather and to assemble beyond the spaces and the times that are officially sanctioned as learning ecologies.

The presentation identifies Christianity as the rhythm of modernity that facilitated the colonised subjects to move toward a cultural death, whereby the double conversion of Christianity and modernity produced enduring epistemological and ontological annihilation. The presentation concludes by returning to the artist's models as a movement from the intersubjective to the intrasubjective, as a mode that operates within dimensions of bodies, space but also of time.