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".

The Spaze is an ongoing collective assemblage composed by Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Leslie Plumb, Matisse AP-Simons, Francisco Trento, Anouk Hoogendoorn, Halbe Kuipers, Paula Guzantti, among others.

Our proposition is not to create a version of the Spaze in Helsinki, but to think it as an inspiration to build a procedural and contingent assemblage that is going to be composed with its localised appetites.

This work package will be developed during the three years of the research. Alberto Corsín Jiménez employs the term prototyping to discuss material practices in arts, social sciences and critical theory. According to him, it is an understanding of the material’s assemblage configurations as beta, in the way the open software communities use this terminology. The pieces, therefore, are always procedural, as the social relations that are constructed with the atmosphere of the pedagogical spaces. In this setting, the agency is not understood as being unidirectional, as in the case where the human moulds a material according to their intentionality. Prototyping is “what a perception of liberated and self-released social relationships may do to and through the material world; it is also what a conception of a material world ‘in beta’ does to social relationships” (Corsín Jiménez, 2014, p. 385). When referring to the prototypes’ operationality towards the reformulation of the university or the educational spaces in general, he argues: “the fact that the layout of the arrangement may incorporate objects that lay outside the laboratory’s walls has led to thinking of experiments as scale-shifting devices, capable of rendering the world ‘proportionate’ to new onto-epistemic frameworks” (Corsín Jiménez, 2014, p. 386). The distribution of the components into a space in a way that does not conform to the neurotypical orientations, therefore, helps to engender awareness of the existence of modalities of perception that are under-recognised. That is not achieved by mimicking a disability, like Milligan (2019, p. 07) explains, neither a simulation “of disability but a subversion of ability, a performative act at the limits of “valid” embodiment”. The trap, a technique or dispositive in the process of prototyping “displays a complex repertoire of modalities of social agency, including action, subtraction and distraction” (Corsín Jiménez, 2014, p. 391). In an example, he says that a “broken elevator interrupts consensual expectations indeed. Such a scenario, then, ‘compels everyone to produce, to “artifactualize” themselves, in a mode which gives the issue around which they are all gathered the power to activate thinking, a thinking that belongs to no one, in which no one is right’” (Corsín Jiménez, 2014, p. 391). It enables one to disentify with oneself, in the terminology of Muñoz (2009). Corsín Jiménez’s proposal’s ultimate goal is the crafting of new modes of sociality that put the human and the non-human in the same ontological level.

The operationalisation of the project, regarding both its material and digital outcomes, will comply with the recommendations of the AGENDA2030 towards sustainability and equality.

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A prototype for failing