Agyina: Advisory of Sages

11.00—12.30
On Radical Pedagogy, panel discussion

Participants: Gudskul (Indonesia), Àsìkò Art School (Nigeria), blaxTARLINES KUMASI (Ghana)
Moderator: Exit Frame Collective

These three institutions promote important and successful models of radical pedagogy from which much can be learned. Gudskul is a transdisciplinary educational platform launched in 2018 in Jakarta, Indonesia, by the collectives ruangrupa, Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara collectives. Àsìkò Art School is a five-week pedagogical programme for African artists and curators launched in Lagos, Nigeria in 2010 by curator Bisi Silva (1962–2019), combining a variety of formats, from workshops and laboratories to residency programmes. BlaxTARLINES KUMASI is a contemporary art incubator and open-source collective based in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, focusing on new, "post-Western" approaches to arts education and training since 2000.

14.00—15.00
On Institution-Building in Times of Crises: SCCA Tamale (Ghana), presentation

The Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) is a community-run project space, exhibition and research centre, and cultural repository, focusing on 20th-century artistic and cultural practices and bringing together artists working in Tamale, Ghana.

15.00—16.30
On Architecture, (Socialist) Internationalism, and Repair, panel discussion

Panellists: Doreen Mende, Lama El Khatib, Charlotte Grace
Convenor: Dubravka Sekulić

Socialist internationalism worked towards connecting the worlds in struggle to liberate themselves in networks of support with understanding that for all humans to be free the whole world has to change. It built material and immaterial architectures as fragments of the new world that was to emerge. However, proclaiming solidarity is never the same as practicing it, socialist states replicated some of the asymmetries and dominations they were claiming to undo. Today, while the socialist internationalism seems relegated to the past, the ambers of struggles are still alive, connections latent, ready to be activated…. The conversation will be grounded not in lost pasts, but futures that can be repaired and reclaimed. What solidarity work means for today? Doreen Mende, Lama El Khatib and Charlotte Grace will in conversation with Dubravka Sekulić entangle how can past emancipatory internationalisms speak to present ones and summon the common wind towards the green and red future in which domination and injustice are past.

Doreen Mende, curator, writer, theorist, and lecturer, leads the transdisciplinary project Decolonizing Socialism. Entangled Internationalism, which explores the liminal intersections of art, architecture, and cybernetics. Charlotte Grace is an architectural researcher, organizer and a Theory Lead for MA City Design at the RCA, who just completed a PhD on the Sociospatial dimensions of the decolonial feminist and internationalist revolution in Rojava, Kurdistan.

Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, theorist, and lecturer, who works on thinking through pasts and futures internationalist solidarity through nonalignment and architectures built by Yugoslav construction industry across the non-aligned world.

17.00—18.30
Re-Aligning Non-Alignment: Of Voids, To Begin at the Beginning, performance, installation, discourse

Executed by NAM ChoreoLab
Research, choreography, archive, performance, installation, discourse: Sonja Pregrad, Ana Dubljević, Viktorija Ilioska, Dražen Dragojević
Video: Thilo Garus, Dražen Dragojević

NAM ChoreoLab is a modular research choreography laboratory with the aim of re-reading the Non-Aligned Movement/s at the intersection of speculative historicism and futurism, by way of discourse, installation, performance as well as (queer)feminist and decolonial methodologies.

Programme of the entire Symposium