“as knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented…many educators already report signs of dehumanization, where people may ‘know many things’ but struggle to find direction in their lives, partly due to an inability to connect information with deeper knowledge.” Organized around Freire’s nearly sixty-year-old text, “Radio GAMeC—Pedagogy of Hope,” a Collateral Event at this year’s Venice Biennale, investigates the gulf between active, engaged discourse and what Freire called the rote memorization of “decontextualized information,” stripped of social and historical context—similar to what the Pope referred to when he referenced “know[ing] many things.” Organized by the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo (GAMeC) in Northern Italy, and named after Freire’s 1992 follow-up book to Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Pedagogy of Hope” was the sole Collateral Event in Koyo Kudoh’s “In Minor Keys” that was purely sonic. During the Biennale’s preview week, GAMeC’s director Lorenzo Giusti and the journalist Lara Facco invited artists, theorists, educators, and schoolchildren to contribute to the latest season of Radio GAMeC, which broadcasted live from Radio Vanessa—a pirate radio station founded in the 1970s, and the sole one still dispatching from Venice’s historic center, halfway between the Giardini and the Arsenal.
First launched during a COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, Radio GAMeC has always operated from the museum’s facilities in Bergamo; “Pedagogy of Hope” marks its first foray into a new locale. Operating out of a historic station allowed Radio GAMeC to invert the role that Venice plays in the contemporary art world—as a hyperlocal, long-running organization, Radio Vanessa represents a sharp contrast to the often-generic internationalism of other galleries and museums. Founded by Walter Salvagno, who built a makeshift fifteen-watt transmitter that he adhered, somewhat illegally, to the side of his home, Radio Vanessa has been in its current location for almost fifty years. Unlike the baroque stylings of most buildings in Venice, the station is simple, functional, and refreshingly lived-in for a city that so often feels like a museum.
The interviews, conducted in either English or Italian, invited participants to speak both about pedagogy and about the biennial more generally, and followed no strict formula. Listening to the resulting conversations often feels like eavesdropping; the resulting discussions are more intimate and extemporaneous than what might transpire on a typical artist talk or museum panel. These exchanges consistently adhered to a Socratic model of knowledge production, in which inquiry is based on dialogue. In Phaedrus, a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus written by Plato around 370 BC, Socrates recounts the parable of King Thamus and Theuth, the Egyptian god of invention. When Theuth offers Thamus the gift of the written word, the king declines on the grounds that writing would “implant forgetfulness in the soul” and cause people to “cease to exercise memory.” Worse, Thamus argues, writing would make people conceited as they came to simply expect to have wisdom without spending the time and effort needed to receive it through dialogue. The conversations that Radio GAMeC produced supplanted written description with durational exchange, engendering encounters quite distinct from those between a domineering instructor and passive pupil or an art object and an inert viewer. True dialogue allows two realities to contend with each other, forming meaning through collaboration. Or, as theorist and writer McKenzie Wark testified in her conversation with Guia Cortassa for “Pedagogy of Hope,” “it helps to be able to think that language is one of the things in play as we do an analysis of the present.”
Radio GAMeC’s program was partially predetermined, but Giusti and Facco built flexibility into the schedule in order to adapt to encounters in Venice. This latitude proved useful during one of the most eventful, contentious, and quick-changing editions in the Biennale’s history. After the curator and writer Antonia Majaca penned the essay “What Did the Golden Lion Die Of? On Judgment and Disavowal at the Venice Biennale”—a critique of the Biennale’s fundamental and structural avoidance of political accountability in the wake of the jury’s wholesale resignation on April 30—Giusti invited her to be interviewed on Radio GAMeC. By adopting a semi-spontaneous structure, the ad hoc station could act as a site for secluded reflection and analysis amid the preview week’s blistering pace and fanfare. The interlocutors were granted a great deal of freedom during their broadcast time, and were not prompted to speak specifically about education or Freire. There was a looseness to the process, and the resulting seventy conversations, in sum, do not simply meditate on pedagogy, but enact a model of pedagogy itself.
On May 7, the curator and writer Silvia Franceschini interviewed the writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman for a “Pedagogy of Hope” episode. Hartman was in town to present the performance Minor Music at the End of the World, adapted from a series of her essays, at the Teatro Goldoni during the Biennale’s preview week. In the ensuing conversation, Hartman clarifies that Minor Music is not only a performance, but also a discourse, chiefly drawing its inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 science fiction short story “The Comet.” Written in the wake of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, Du Bois’s narrative takes the form of a dialogue between the two remaining people in New York after a comet strike has killed all the city’s other inhabitants. In her Radio GAMeC conversation, Hartman elaborates on her interest in speculative fiction and imaginative works that she calls “critical fabulations.” She proceeds to explain how she envisions the end of the world as a collapse of systems, rather than a total extinction event. “We’ve lived through serial ends of the world,” Hartman says, “and we are at a moment where most of us are feeling a critical moment of political imperialism, billionaire oligarchy, environmental catastrophe…what do we do? Should we work to preserve decrepit institutions that haven’t produced substantive care or quality?”
Hartman’s framing of institutional collapse and the decomposition of entire systems as opportunities for critical reflection fits well with Radio GAMeC’s own principles. Located in the foothills of the Italian Alps, Bergamo attracted international attention in 2020 as an early epicenter for the COVID-19 outbreak in Europe. One imagines the city’s imposing sixteenth-century Venetian siege walls, which still demarcate the town’s historic center, symbolized a new kind of claustrophobia. During this crisis, Giusti and the museum’s curatorial staff questioned the role of their exhibitions. What does an art institution do without visitors? Radio GAMeC was created to answer that question. “We took it seriously,” Giusti explained when I met him in Bergamo, “as a moment to rethink common practices around how contemporary art serves local communities.” The radio station could connect someone in the city—a doctor, teacher, or local politician, for instance—with a voice outside of its walls, such as an artist, curator, or professor. “The idea was a metaphor about space,” Giusti said. The live radio program created a shared, albeit immaterial, site not limited by locality.
In recent years, the role of education has been increasingly taken up by museums as they reckon with their purposes and functions in a shifting economic and geopolitical landscape. Many artists and curators also find themselves working part-time as professors as the precarity of most curatorial positions and artists’ livelihoods makes the viability of these professions increasingly reliant on a supplementary source of income. Giusti is a guest professor at Bocconi University, a Milanese school famous for its economics program. It feels particularly appropriate, given this set of circumstances, to orient museum programming around critical inquiries into pedagogy. Freire’s critique of what he called the banking model of education, in which “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing,” could easily be applied to contemporary public museums. As an alternative, Freire put forth an approach to education in which information is built on reciprocity and exchange, a kind of dialectical thought production rather than passive knowledge consumption. At GAMeC, in line with that model, “Pedagogy of Hope” posits the museum as a site that could be restructured by this alternative approach to education.
In Sylvia Franceschini’s conversation with the artist Éric Baudelaire, the interlocutors discuss working in schools. Baudelaire describes Un Film Dramatique (2019), a documentary that he made in collaboration with twenty-one children from the Dora Maar middle school in the Parisian suburb of Saint Denis over the course of four years. Instead of treating the students as subjects, Baudelaire gave each a camera, inverting the relationship between filmmaker and documentary subject. “Rather than have a work present in the school,” Baudelaire explains to Franceschini, “the school would be present in the work. In this space, meaning is constantly negotiated.” By compiling multiple subjectivities, Baudelaire turns the documentary medium towards something less like a narrative and more like a conversation. This dovetails nicely with Giusti’s approach to “Pedagogy of Hope,” which he hoped would take education seriously by “moving away from a model based on transmission toward one grounded in dialogue, criticality, and co-production of knowledge.”
Many of the artists interviewed for “Pedagogy of Hope” stress that, while in the process of making work, they are in an active engagement with an unresolved feeling or question. Similarly, in these conversations, listeners are made acutely aware of the improvisational nature of speech, of thought in real time. When posed questions, many of Radio GAMeC’s interlocutors simply say “I don’t know”—they reach for ideas, sometimes only finding the correct sentence after trying out and abandoning a few structures. There is a vulnerability to live conversation. Everything could be important. One or two mistakes and meaning might collapse. But, unlike in the permanency of a written text, a conversation can fall apart, turn to silence, and then begin again.
Baudelaire also described his art-making process as an active engagement with a question, shying away from the idea that his works have any implicit pedagogical qualities. “I am very uncomfortable with the idea that my films would teach anything…or even transmit anything. For me, [they are] a way of teaching myself about the world and then turning sound and image into an experience.” Shirin Neshat, the Iranian artist who premiered her new trilogy Do U Dare! (2026) at the Palazzo Marin on May 8, also echoed this idea during her “Pedagogy of Hope” conversation with Giusti. “I distinguish between my work as an artist and my political activism,” she explains, “because in activism you clarify your point of view, but in art you allow the audience to decide for itself…Art can only be posed as a series of questions…I don’t know many things, if my work is good, if it’s not good.”
In these conversations, many artists situate their practices as gestures towards completion rather than manufactories of finished products. In Pope. L’s 2002 treatise Hole Theory, the artist explains, “Holes are occasions—opportunities…You come and fill the holes with your experience.” The implication is that by leaving space in a narrative, or in the interpretation of a work of art, there is room for a viewer or recipient to step in. Radio GAMeC is uniquely positioned to listen to the Biennale and some of its participants as they work out meaning in real time, serving as this kind of hole in the programming of “In Minor Keys” itself.
“Our intention was not to ‘go there to do something’ but rather to ‘try to be there,’” writes Giusti of GAMeC’s previous initiative, “Thinking Like a Mountain—The Orobie Biennial.” For this two-year-long program in Bergamo, the museum’s curatorial team took on the task of operating on a different timescale, crafting local programming that took place continuously over the course of two years rather than cropping up briefly during the same time frame. GAMeC’s curators have also prioritized longer lifetimes for art and discourse with “Pedagogy of Hope": following their live broadcasts during the Biennale’s preview week, all the interviews have been made available online and will later be added to the Biennale’s official archives. “It is a method that takes time,” Giusti explained, “measured on the scale of interrelation, not on those of production and consumption.”
Giusti describes one question as central to both “Pedagogy of Hope” and Radio GAMeC’s last seven years of programming: “Can we have an international project that takes seriously a local audience?” There is an obvious tension between the municipality of Venice and the international art world that descends upon it. Arguments for localism as a safeguard against globalization must contend with the threat of nationalism, monocultures, and a deafening hegemony of like-mindedness. “The modern growth of worldlessness is the withering away of everything between us,” wrote Hannah Arendt, whose work on statelessness and belonging epitomizes the strain between the imperatives of fostering localism and inalienable, universal rights. Each of these tensions hold contradictions that require constant negotiation. Or, “the problem of humanization has always been humankind’s central problem.” This sentence’s strange tautology, in which humanity requires humanization and vice versa, is a fragile formulation, only possible because of language’s speculative qualities. The solution to these questions, raised by a study of Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, might be the conversation, which allows for multiple realities to hang in the air and exist without resolution.
