Re–Directing: East X Empathic Pedagogies

Re–Directing: East (RDE) is a peer-learning workshop, a group residency, a seminar, an open assembly, an extended site exploration and a research opportunity for a group of international and local makers, thinkers and organizers, hosted annualy by the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw. In 2020 its participants will research, study and activate new and historical pedagogical practices located on crossroads of art and education.

RDE 2020 will be curated by Marianna Dobkowska in collaboration with the Empathic Pedagogies Network, which gathers cultural institutions and independent agents from Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Spain, Norway, and Poland, which, under the perspective of a common wellbeing, work as a living and multicultural agency dedicated to exploring the hybridizations and limits between artistic and educational practices for social change.

Other encounters of Empathic Pedagogies Network in 2020:

ESPORA España: Reparación
Seminar and residencies
Museo Reina Sofía, Matadero, Pedagogías Invisibles & Felipa-Manuela, Madrid, Spain
May 18–June 7, 2020

Copia, Réplica y Apropiación
Tercer Encuentro Iberoamericano de Pedagogías Empáticas
NC-arte & Laagencia, Bogotá, Colombia
September 6–13, 2020

On Empathic Pedagogies:
Empathic Pedagogies inhabit the realm of affections, understood as a common space. They insist on shedding light on the invisible and on investing words to name the unnameable, which is evidence that something valuable is there. A compilation of effects—which is what this short text tries to do—resembles a group of ghosts that, despite exceeding the means we have to understand them, bring us closer to other ways of existing, to other planes and dimensions. Our practices bring together ways of doing and ways of being that point to loose and entangled ends, able to teach us about who we are and who we can become, where we are and what paths open up in front of us, which we can then propose as the basis of an effective pedagogy. In general, we have managed to observe that our pedagogical proposal is:
–contradictory, implying at the same time what is inside and what is outside, and simultaneously emphasizing the one, and the many
–resistant to exacerbated individualism
–a failure, error, and prototype
–strengthening links
–subtle, it is activated in specific encounters in ways that correspond to their specific natures
–operating from faith (or something similar)
–a tangled self, along with others
–blurry around the borders
–timeless
–unofficial and nonverbal, just like intuition, feeling, hunches, and memory, which in turn offer a sense of belonging and relevance

To take these observations a little further, we have carried out the exercise of naming various pedagogical-effective avenues. We hope this works as a way of locating them (in a personal field, in various contexts, in the implicit, in art), a way of linking them with specific actions, and of organizing or unravelling a diverse range of intricate intentions. We understand that roads are always changing, and that even when we think we know the way, we will always have to walk new routes. We can speak, for example, of a personal and intimate pedagogy that is not based on the individual, but on difference. An overflowed pedagogy, where experience expands beyond instruments, ideas, and methodologies, escaping results. A psychodramatic pedagogy, which presents and represents ideas, turning them into actions, spaces and moments. A pedagogy of contingencies of the context and the spirit of the moment, based on a closeness that can be appropriated, digestible and understandable, merging with everything, becoming invisible. A pedagogy of the future, based on the power of art to affect what is yet to happen. An emancipatory pedagogy, based on the enjoyment and management of freedom.

—Jocelyn Alvarez, Adela González Baca, Marcela Borquez, Mariana García, Lola Malavasi, Jocelyn Pérez, Diana Quintero, Daniela Ramos, Ana Karen Rodríguez, Aisel Wicab