http://www.rietveldacademie.nl/
Each e-flux Education Survey prompts a dialogue between an arts educator and one of their former students, or—in some cases—a colleague or collaborator. Here, Clare Butcher, who currently serves as head of the Image & Language department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, is interviewed by Richard Finlay Fletcher, an associate professor in the Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy at Ohio State University. The resulting exchange expands upon an ongoing conversation about education and “aneducation” that Butcher and Fletcher have maintained for over eight years.
Richard Finlay Fletcher: We first met at the Toronto Biennial of Art in 2019. As a newcomer to the field of art education, I found inspiration in how, both in Toronto and previously in Athens and Kassel during your work within the aneducation public education program at documenta 14 (2016–17), you demonstrated a commitment to collaborative place-based learning. You are sensitive to how the practice can translate beyond its immediate contexts. Following these temporary roles in learning programs at large-scale biennial-style exhibitions, what does art education look like from your current position as head of the Image & Language department at the Rietveld Academie?
Clare Butcher: In the Netherlands, we’re in the midst of a wider political process that could see higher education return to conducting classes within internationally accessible programs in the Dutch language, as opposed to English. The department that I work with started as a specifically Dutch-language writing program within an art academy context. It has made an important space for itself in the field. It’s been a real challenge for my predecessors to navigate between being steeped in a very particular linguistic, literary, and cultural context and the need to become more polyglossic. Folks from all over have taught and studied here, and they bring a tremendous amount to the cultural sector and wider community as they stay here, continue to practice within, and add their voices to this place. Because of the advocacy done by art academies all over the country, the most recently proposed policy was rolled back, but it’s jarring to be reminded how fragile that space of collective learning and living is.
RFF: I imagine this issue is also very personal for you, given what I know of your trajectory. You were born in Zimbabwe, studied and worked in South Africa, and have had formative experiences in Kassel and Toronto, so I presume you’re not only concerned about the particular policies themselves, but fearful that where they’re coming from—a certain exclusive, nationalistic ideology—limits the range of people you can be in conversation with to do your best work. Here in the US, the political attacks on non-Americans have prompted many of our international students to ask: Why am I here?
CB: And perhaps, to add to that question: Is this even the conversation I want to be part of?
The language of education is so vital in that sense, and I’m not just speaking about terminology (though we will be touching on particular terms that have stuck with me over the years in this conversation), but also about the ways in which language has been weaponizd in the educational project. I am thinking of the imposing of colonial languages on learning processes the world over, the violent erasure of ways of knowing through the suppression of Indigenous languages, and the exclusive registers of academic voicings that leave many feeling so voiceless, so extracted from and then, finally, silenced. By working in a space committed to thinking critically and creatively through language in the context of art education, I am hopeful we can start to bring other words, ways, tones, citations to the curriculum. And there are thankfully so many artists who are speaking, writing, and working against these grains.
RFF: At the same time, working in the academic field of art education, I sometimes feel like, while artists and their work may be centered in scholarship and teaching, they are not introduced to collaborative dialogue, co-authorship, and relational learning as ways to and move beyond institutional contexts and norms. This is why I really appreciate the grounding work you have done with artists at documenta 14 and the Toronto Biennial of Art, and also the beautiful collaborative piece you wrote with Amy Halliday and Helina Metaferia in the Journal of Arts and Communities, “Taking A Seat: Curating spaces of (un)learning” (2023), which focused on artist-led approaches to exhibition- and program-making in educational contexts.
Even as we’re having this conversation right now, I know that we won’t get far without bringing in artists that we’ve collaborated with in significant and transformative ways. For example, Alutiiq/Sugpiak artist Tanya Lukin Linklater, with whom you worked in informal and artist-led educational initiatives such as the gathering Under the Mango Tree at documenta 14 and then again within the Tools for Learning and Mobile Arts Curriculum at the Toronto Biennial.
Your thinking influenced my approach to developing a year-long public programming initiative (This Insistence: Preparations for Gathering) and monthly radio show (Radio Insistence) for Tanya’s exhibition here at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2024, for which I was inspired by her concept and practice of insistence. For Tanya, insistence combines iterative, everyday acts of resistance and refusal grounded in Indigenous and Sugpiak ways of being and knowing. Tanya welcomed my focus on the pedagogical—to unlearn, to decolonize, and to stay with the idea of an Indigenous artist, respecting the context but also opening it out to students.
Working with Tanya in this way is an example of what you have described in another essay as “learning temporarily” (in Commissioned Critique, Sandberg Instituut, 2020), which, looking back from the perspective of today, has prepared us for our current dark times. It concurs insistently with Brecht saying, “yes, there is indeed singing!” You, Amy, and Helina end the “Taking A Seat” article with the following inspiring statement: “When the institution takes a back seat—is decentered as the keeper or certifier of a process’s inheritance and knowledge— we can continue learning and unlearning together as we redistribute resources both in the archiving, presenting and future lives of artists’ works and communities’ experiences through committed engagement within a social ecology.”
There’s so much to that: connecting the role of artists to communities but also leaving open the pivotal role of students. A more urgent form of citation must emerge beyond academic footnotes. It falls on us to show our working, reveal our process, and be more accountable in how we bring our collaborations into learning contexts. Here is where the issue of trust is crucial. When Tanya told me she trusted me to run with her insistence-focused work, it meant the world to me, and I felt the students benefited too.
CB: The ethics of whom we cite in the classroom, in artworks, in publications, in this conversation, are what lie at the heart of curriculum-making for me. Esteemed practitioners like Tanya Lukin Linklater and Helina Metaferia, both artist educators, are asking us to consider our ways of being in, reading, and engaging with the world around us as deeply relational and intergenerational modalities. An ongoing process of coming together, listening, misunderstanding, communicating, looking back, dreaming forward, and sometimes encountering steep growing curves. This takes time and willingness to not know. And this is where institutional infrastructures fall really, painfully, short in their capacity to hold relational, learningful practices.
RFF: You have led us far from those “careless systems and institutional toxicity” that the Curatorium editorial collective—Saada El-Akhrass, Myung-Sun Kim, Camille Turner, and yourself— reference in your forthcoming book The Rest is Up to Us (2026), published by the Burnaby Art Gallery. Just the other day, in an undergraduate committee meeting, my brilliant colleague Ketal Patel referred to “the imaginative limits of the institution,” which really resonated with me. But on the topic of preventing the institution from taking up any more space, I want to ask you about the place of unlearning for you in this moment. Is it a luxury or a basic form of sustenance? I think unlearning has manifested explicitly or implicitly in a lot of the positions that you’ve held as well as in your writing and editing.
CB: Working within a formal educational environment rather than on arts programming in an exhibition-related context, “unlearning” looks and feels very different and has a particular quality… what’s the word? I’m seeing an image of something pointy that can both prick you and also maybe join something to something else…So unlearning is…this pointy thing. I’m often brought back to the global pandemic— the specific and very visceral unlearnings globally of the ways that business is done as usual, and not as usual. The undoings of everyday structures that we experienced remain with us in our bodies, producing lasting effects that come from that scale of isolation and uncertainty.
When I say the word “unlearning” now—in the genocidal, totalitarian world we inhabit—it feels understandably terrifying because there’s so much need to channel energy towards more affirmative, generative directions. Not that unlearning is nonaffirmative in a deeper way, but I get how it resonates with seemingly scary notions of undoing. Maybe we need another word beyond the binary: from somewhere in that middle space of the Venn diagram between learning and unlearning.
In a post-truth era, there’s something about finding ways of study—personally and collectively—that Fred Moten, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and other poetic pedagogues are helping us be wise to. The learning to learn that’s not so much the what, but the mode of study that can bring a groundedness and intention in such an overwhelming seascape.
I’m so grateful to Sepake Angiama and my aneducation colleagues in documenta 14 for the ways in which we walked alongside, listened to, and cooked with many who practiced these modes in their neighborhoods, communities, and the wider cross section of documenta’s vast audience—with artists such as Mounira Al Solh, Nathan Pohio, and Akinbode Akinbiyi as such generous and intentional study companions.
As we moved across contexts with our (always!) working title of Learning from Athens, we were engaging with multiple languages of and approaches to radical, collective pedagogies. Nora Sternfeld’s article on “Learning Unlearning” (2016) helped me move beyond the “un” in English “unlearning,” through the German “verlernen.” Sternfeld describes how the “ver” in “verlernen” speaks of a roundaboutness or a meandering. And that to me sounds like time. Time to go roundabout, meander, affirm, and unravel. Finding that mode of study that cultivates the option to hold the nuance and the possibilities between different extremes seems like the constant call in so many cultural conversations right now. Maybe it’s here where the poetics, the multiplicities, and the speculative possibilities can draw out so much about the real in front of us.
RFF: I appreciate the tension you point to between the necessary disruption of entrenched systems of oppression and the very real need for grounding, especially in the delirious and dangerous moment we are living through. In my own work, I have really valued conversations and collaborations with Shawnee poet Laura Da’, whose work combines historical investigations into the Shawnee removal from Ohio—first to Kansas, and then to Oklahoma—with her embodied experiences of intergenerational trauma, all of which enters into the challenging call to reengage with Ohio as ancestral homeland but also as the scene of the crime.
Unlearning here in Ohio—especially at a so-called “land-grant” institution like this Ohio State University—necessarily means disrupting colonial forms of spatial ordering by regrounding a place-based arts education developed by Shawnee and other Indigenous nations. These are enacted through a poetic roundaboutness that includes the Shawnee language—something Da’’s poetry does in powerfully exacting ways. I think this tension between disruption and grounding is why I have been so drawn to the aneducation public learning program you helped run at documenta 14, and why I have quite literally adopted it and the broader curatorial and artistic ethos of the exhibition into my research and teaching, transposed onto the context of a public “land-grab” university.
As we have discussed before, your entry on ‘Curriculum’ in the aneducation–documenta 14 (2018) book published by Archive Books quite literally changed my life. This word felt so formal, and as a former classicist, I was drawn to how you immediately disrupted its authority through a sequence of playful etymologies to get it off balance, followed by a story to completely reset what curriculum could mean. You write of how, in Delphi, during the 2017 Winter Intensive “Hearing Voices (School of Voice),” Barbara Casavecchia played a recording of artist Maria Lai reading a story in Italian. Your listening was interrupted by site guards who told you all to be quiet because you were disturbing the archaeologists working nearby.
You told this story to establish a new curricular model, attuned to listening otherwise (“know thyself distracted!”). That echoes what you said about unlearning earlier, as an impetus to meander, to both affirm and unravel the hidden curriculum that is so often delineated and imposed without listening. In that short entry, you taught me that curriculum is everything, which is also the title of a rich and challenging book by the South African collective Chimurenga, and how curriculum is happening while you’re not paying attention to the curriculum; it’s an idiom, not an instruction. Can you speak about the origins of the curricular idiom in your work?
CB: Something that I’ve written about a lot is growing up in a post-independence Zimbabwe at a time when the national curriculum was being actively rewritten. It was remarkable to understand as a young person that what you are educated into, what is considered worth knowing and who gets to decide that, are all very much constructed by someone/s somewhere and can change. The power of curriculum is nonetheless very real and embodied. I was excited about this word’s etymology and its built-in relation to the body—to run a course. Whose routes/roots are we running? What genealogies of practice are we training ourselves within? And who are we returning to in this loop and where do we need to diverge?
I’ll always be grateful to artist Annette Krauss, whose work around the Hidden Curriculum (2007–) expanding upon the thinking of Henri Giroux gets students actively involved in renegotiating those unspoken lessons that we are being inculcated into through our journeys into adulthood, citizenship, tax-paying, family structuring, and so on. Sarah Pierce, Sanchayan Gosh, and the Under the Mango Tree network have taken this term to body and heart in beautiful and transformative ways that move beyond the “bro-dom” of the North/Western avant-gardist legacies of arts education.
Those dominant histories and structures of learning institutions divide us and get many of us entrenched in certain knowledge soils, not wishing to budge for fear of losing everything. That’s what makes unlearning together so very poignant and urgent. (Maybe that’s the pointy image that I was searching for earlier.) Someone who has kept me hopeful for the future of this shared work, however, is bell hooks.
hooks salvaged hope for me as a pedagogical prerequisite. Not in a fluffy, flighty sense but in a grounded, very real, complicated and embodied way with her Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003), where she specifically also talks about “Teaching Towards Death.”
I lost my brother to suicide just over two years ago and had a child a few months later. A counselor I had the privilege of speaking to at the time gave me an image of being in a boat with two oars. One oar was rowed by grief, the other by an everyday motion that had to keep waking up and caring for this new person. And I know we’re mixing terms and images here about running tracks, archeological digs in ancient arenas, and rowing boats, but there’s a circularity to them all that brings me comfort somehow.
Rather than teaching towards some future “investment,” hooks invites us to consider the world as a classroom here and now, not something that we wait to face or “deal with” on some day when we’re ready (to be an artist, academic, fill in the blank). We’re always already ready, and never ready. And that’s the “ver” in the “lernen,” the roundaboutness in becoming or maybe remembering who we are and how we tend to our relationships.
