The Pedagogy of the Anarchive is a research proposal that aims to collectively build a hub for neurodiverse/crip/queer art and arts education practices. It is an in-disciplinary three-year project that will deliver multimodal outcomes, like an ever-mutating assemblage/installation, a film and publications. The boldness of the proposal relies on making visible underrecognized modes of perception and relationalities in arts education and artistic research, critically approaching them with pedagogies that deconstruct the archival neurotypical tendencies. To prototype the iterations of the material assemblage, we will use diverse materials and textures, like textiles, pieces of furniture and art supplies. Ideally, the space will be co-composed as we host activities. We will employ the anarchive as our conceptual and operational apparatuses. The anarchive emerged from the necessity to overcome the idea of archiving a past event or proposition. It understands the register or the objects not as representations or essences but through their traces that potentially can activate new propositions. Materials, like furniture, textiles, tape measures, acrylic tools, raw treated bamboo, paints and cardboard, are understood relationally. We ask: how can we assemble them to privilege underrecognized modalities of perception? It is “not documentation of past activity. It is a feed-forward mechanism for lines of creative process, under continuing variation (…) a cross-platform phenomenon (…) between media, between verbal and material expressions, between digital and off-line archiving, and most of all between all of the various archival forms it may take and the live, collaborative interactions that reactivate the anarchival traces, and in turn create new ones.” (Massumi, 2016). The theoretical framework we use is transdisciplinary, in the intersection of process philosophy (Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), Queer Theory ( Lee Edelman, Paul Preciado, José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam), Critical Disability Studies, Neurodiversity and Neuroqueerness (Melanie Yergeau, Mel Baggs, Dan Goodley, Justine Egner) and the New Materialisms (Karen Barad, Stacy Alaimo, Jane Bennett). What the scholars from this extensive bibliography share, besides different their theoretical affiliations, is the appreciation of the concepts of relation and relationality beyond the human scope, recognising the agency of non-human bodies. For us, it is urgent to foreground that to begin undoing the neurotypical ableist and functionalist dominion of arts and arts education. It is also critical to bring awareness to the complex relations of causality that entangle the anthropotechnical construction of the man at the cost of the consequences of the Anthropocene. At the same time, the concerns and concepts shared by these scholars must be "bent" and re-thought by the lenses that detour the dominance of the Global North onto-epistemologies. Pereira (2019, p. 64), while talking about Decolonial Queer Theory, affirms that bending implies "a rereading of the Global North’s theories in order to revise them, bend them, scrutinise their silences and obliterations, and to make them speak differently".

Arts Education environments are mostly ableistic, they re-inforce the dichotomy between what it means to be sane and mad, able and disabled. We understand Ableism as a "system of causal relations about the order of life that produces processes and systems of entitlement and exclusion. This causality fosters conditions of microaggression, internalized ableism and, in their jostling, notions of (un) encumbrance. A system of dividing practices, ableism institutes the reification and classification of populations. Ableist systems involve the differentiation, ranking, negation, notification and prioritization of sentient life". (Campbell 2017, 287–288).

The Pedagogy of the Anarchive

a hub for neurodiverse/crip/mad/queer art

Common notions of relationality undervalue relations with non-human materialities, stigmatising non-neurotypical modalities of sensing the world and difficulting the production of awareness to urgent matters, as the material conditions of the anthropogenic-oriented climate crisis that affects both human and non-human subjectivities. New modalities of pedagogy must be invented: transdisciplinary, fully inclusive and inspired in the post-qualitative inquiry.

Data management plan

Neurotipicality is one of many tendencies in the spectrum of ableism. Neurodiversity criticises a concept of relationality that only recognises human-human relations in traditional configurations, which leads to stigmatisation of neurodiverse subjects as non-relational or unempathetic.

Extended bibliography

difference as mutual inclusion

Process Philosophy: Manning, Massumi. Murphie

New materialisms: Barad, Alaimo, Braidotti , Bennett, Haraway

non-human/more than human relationalities

Neurodiversity/

Neuroqueering, Critical Disability Studies: Yergeau, Egner, Mel Baggs, Manning, Kallio-Tavin, Campbell, Goodley

matter as queer/contingent

Timeline

Post-Qualitative Inquiry: Löytonen, St. Pierre

The Specters of Svalbard

prototyping

That is why our project proposes to build a hub, the Anarchive-Helsinki, at UniArts, where people could create crip/mad/queer art while feeling comfortable with its material/sensorial conditions. Reading circles are the lures, what is going to attract people to participate in the development of the hub and its artistic-research propositions, and facilitate theirs. We think together with the concept of the Anarchive, and we propose two iterations.

Material assemblage

The traces from the digital and physical anarchives will feed the space, while the discussions, activities and the building of the architecture will feed the academic writing, promoting an integrated system of thought and practices.

The Spaze, at the Senselab

Tip

Tip

The Pedagogy of the Anarchive

a hub for neurodiverse/crip/mad/queer art