Formless beginnings by Sjoerd Westbroek

What does it mean to begin something as an artist, to embark on a new project? How does a beginning materialise your beliefs, intentions, hopes for the future, as well as your indebtedness to what is there and what has happened before? What rituals do you design to prepare beginning? As an educator, to what extent can each class be seen as a new beginning, in a sense that the outcome can never be predicted? And, how do you support others in beginning? These are some of the questions that guide me while exploring the practices at WdKA and PZI that I am involved in. Working for the Teacher Training Programme and the Master Education in Arts, I am interested in the question if there are specific pedagogical practices that prepare working artistically. The complexity of beginning serves as a focal point that allows me to map how a nexus of art and pedagogy could materialise. An understanding of beginning as something that needs a preparation already shows its paradoxical nature, as beginning is also always continuing what is already there. My work on the topic involves theoretical study and writing, as well as developing a more practical approach, collecting stories and creating exercises around pedagogy and art as beginning.

Bibliography

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Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum Books.

Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.

Lewis, T. E. (2016). “‘To be less than you are’: self-suspension, potentiality, and study”. Ethics and Education, 11(3), 340-351.

Said, E. W. (1997). Beginnings: Intention and Method. London: Granta Books.

Verwoert, J. (2008). “On Future Histories. And the Generational Contract with the No Longer and the Not Yet Living And the Pand-Demonium of Irreverent Styles of Nostalgia”, In F. Stok, F. Gierstberg & F. Bool (Eds), Questioning History Imagining the Past in Contemporary Art. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

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