Trains of thought: On educational practices crossing Venice

Learning how to think is one of the most difficult things about being human. I don’t mean learning for the sake of a curriculum, or for a degree, or for success, but learning to inhabit a world in relation with what exists—perhaps wounded, struggling, denied, or held to be “too complicated”—and what is not yet given. I want to follow this inquiry across two recent trips I took. One was to the 61st Venice Biennale, curated by Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025) and organized around the theme “In Minor Keys.” Here I saw, among other things, the exhibition “SLOW DOWN: CATTLE BATTLE AHEAD,”1 curated by the Ghana art collective blaxTARLINES. The exhibition unfolds the collective’s decade-long practices of what the Ghanaian teacher, artist-intellectual, and blaxTARLINES KUMASI co-founder kąrî’kạchä seid’ou calls the “nonreciprocal gift.”2 The second trip was to blaxTARLINES’s base of operations in Kumasi, central Ghana, on the campus of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). 

Being human is not neutral. Or, as novelist and dramatist Sylvia Wynter suggests, “Human beings are magical. Bios and logos.”3 Learning how to think is a praxis that unsettles what Wynter calls the “overrepresentation of Man”—the West’s misapprehension of the Eurocentric genre of the human for universal humanness as such. Departing from the emancipatory practice of blaxTARLINES in relation to the world’s oldest art biennial in Europe makes clear that learning how to think does not need state structures, but it does require continuously posing the question of an outside from within, of an escape that never fully arrives.

As the 2026 Biennale’s governance board demonstrated, non-state-affiliated institutions still operate geopolitically, according to state logics. The curators of national pavilions are usually appointed by ministerial decree of state power. The Venice Biennale Foundation benefits from art’s promise of freedom and autonomy, while its own governance structure contradicts these values. The Biennale is an art-geopolitics complex. How then does one learn to think under such compound pressure? What possible forms of praxis might allow us to breathe within this matrix of power that lubricates the creation of a multipolar world? The riot? The protest? The strike? The withdrawal? The refusal? The statement of resignation? All of them are valid. Most of them were in fact performed, organized, practiced, and exercised in Venice this year, some for the first time. For the first time since 1968, the entire prize jury resigned after the Foundation refused to exclude Russia and Israel from awards consideration. On May 8, Art Not Genocide Alliance organized a strike of Biennale artists in solidarity with Palestine, which was joined by some twenty-seven pavilions; it was the first artists’ strike of that scale in the Biennale’s 131-year history. These compounded ruptures are without precedent at the Biennale.

Nowhere is the longue durée of the overrepresentation of Man more on display than in Venice, for instance in Vittore Carpaccio’s Miracle of the Relic of the Cross at the Ponte di Rialto (c. 1494–6), housed at the Gallerie dell’Accademia. The painting takes its name from a church-sanctioned miracle—the healing of a possessed man—yet that miracle is pushed to the very edge of the canvas, almost hidden, “as if the eye is supposed to miss the miracle,” as novelist Maaza Mengiste writes. Near the stairs of the Ca’ del Papa, the palazzo of the Patriarchs of Grado, Mengiste points us to a Black gondolier in the painting: one of many at the time, shipped and enslaved from “the Continent,” likely West Africa, by Europeans arriving on the shores of Venice.4 It is not merely an illustration of that rupture but an artifact of the European Renaissance that defined the study of art and the museum going forward. The Arsenale, a Biennale venue since 1980, manifests Man’s maritime power in the form of an architectural version of what Wynter calls “the coloniality of being, power, truth, freedom to which such an overrepresentation leads.”5 This is the ground on which Koyo Kouoh, from the perspective of the contemporary, proposes to listen, to step back, to turn fugitive, to breathe. She looked for what could be found below the reach of authoritarian power in the Renaissance era, with its “new world view,” as much as in today’s shattered, multipolar, post-global world.6

Vittore Carpaccio, Miracle of the Relic of the Cross at the Ponte di Rialto, ca. 1494–6. Tempera on canvas,146 × 154 inches.

Together with her curatorial advisors Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie-Hélène Pereira, and Rasha Salti, Kouoh introduced “Schools” as a guiding curatorial mindset—alongside “Invocations” and “Shrines”—to organize more than one hundred artists’ contributions. In the Biennale’s publication, the Schools include six artist-run educational initiatives: blaxTARLINES KUMASI in Ghana; Denniston Hill in the US; Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation in Lagos and Ìjèbú-Òde, Nigeria; lugar a dudas in Colombia; the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute in Kenya; and RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal.7 Instead of treating educational programming as supplementary, “In Minor Keys” positions pedagogical practices—reading, gardening, weaving, archiving, researching, mapping, gathering—as genuinely artistic ventures. Art, if practiced as “a social-spiritual science”—in the words of Kouoh from an interview with the podcast “The Art World: What If …?!”—creates the conditions in which people share without expecting anything in return.

For decades, blaxTARLINES, on the campus of KNUST, has sustained such a praxis of thought-forming. Key to this has been an economy of anti-transactional circulation, “transforming art from commodity to gift,” following the group’s axiom about what art and the curatorial can do.8 It is an economy that generates value not by accumulating it but by passing it on. Instead of property, it operates through shared custodianship, a practice of accountable keeping that ensures the knowledge of past struggles may carry over into collective futures yet to be populated: “What we aim to achieve is a means of 'commoning' that optimizes use values through sharing instead of succumbing to de facto exchange practices based on private property,” the artist and blaxTARLINES member Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh told me.9 Curator Tandazani Dhlakama calls this constellation of artist-curator-run schools a “pedagogy of ‘seeding.’”10 Seeding is not cultivation toward a known yield but relation itself, and it stretches time across distances. “We are able to read the goings-on in the classroom and exhibition spaces alike as instance of pedagogical happenings,” suggests the curator Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, who co-facilitated blaxTARLINES’s presence at the Arsenale.11

Let me follow blaxTARLINES’s trajectory in Venice. “SLOW DOWN: CATTLE BATTLE AHEAD” defines its own space within the existing architecture. An outside within the art-geopolitics complex, it accommodates a video archive, a library, a Kente-weaving loom, and a large-scale map titled “blaxTARLINES UNDERGROUND RAILROAD STATIONS,” mounted on a freestanding wall. Attached to, yet independent from, the art college at KNUST, blaxTARLINES is an “open-source art coalition or an art-labour movement…a support hub, a sharing economy, and an underground emancipation network…but there are many more ‘stations’ along our ‘railroads,’ dispersed across five continents.”12

blaxTARLINES founders and community members during a recent visit to the 61st Venice Biennale. Courtesy of blaxTARLINES.

blaxTARLINES emerged from an emancipatory teaching initiative at KNUST around 2003; key figures include Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson, Adjoa Daiki Apodey Kisser, Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, and Ibrahim Mahama. One of these stations is here in the Arsenale: The speculative topographic map imagines an Underground Railroad like the one Harriet Tubman described, built by fugitives to escape slavery. Conceived by kąrî'kạcha seid'ou and Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh with Tracy Naa Koshie Thompson, George Buma Ampratwum, and Bernard Akoi-Jackson, it renders a 3D topography generated from macro-images of pounded fufu and the crystalline structures of jollof and wheat. Its surface offers shaded reliefs, contours, mountains, and plateaus, replacing place names with the names of African writers, artists, educators, and curators, and bearing seid’ou’s poem “Boundaries, Sores, Scars” (1998) across its terrain. Neither an art piece nor a design work nor a display element, it imagines a networked geography of thoughts—a world conjured by Homo narrans, to think with Wynter, a storytelling species of human that, by combining bios and logos, refuses the overrepresentation of Man. On the map, thoughts become terrain and roads become “Underground Railroad stations.” Kwame Nkrumah, president of the First Republic of Ghana, rises as a massif whose summits carry Bisi Silva and CCA Lagos; an inlier among them, the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami opens onto a plateau, as if to prove that the range answers to no border. Harriet Tubman, James Baldwin, and Wole Soyinka compose a cordillera; Okwui Enwezor forms a plateau, level and self-standing. The map insists that thought, too, needs routes, conductors, and safe houses. This is literally “shifting grounds,” as Oluremi C. Onabanjo writes in her catalog essay, in which “there are new groundings…groundings are everywhere.” quoting the artist Beverly Buchanan.13 The map returns us not to an artwork as single piece but to a network of ideas that “In Minor Keys” follows as a “relational geography of encounters.”14

This is not the first time that the pedagogical proposition of “In Minor Keys”—to place “schools” at the heart of its curatorial form—has been employed at a mega-exhibition. It echoes ruangrupa’s approach to curating documenta 15 (2022) in Kassel. Inspired by the Indonesian lumbung—a shared rice barn where resources are pooled—ruangrupa organized documenta 15 around study, conviviality, and the sustaining of practice. ruangrupa is itself a node in a dispersed ecosystem of artist-run study-collectives across Southeast Asia. Just as blaxTARLINES works in association with, yet independent from, KNUST, several of these Southeast Asian collectives have navigated the institutional structures of a university through their involvement with NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore—among them Art Labor and Sàn Art (Vietnam), Sa Sa Art Projects (Cambodia), Post-Museum (Singapore), Green Papaya (Philippines), and KUNCI Study Forum & Collective in Yogyakarta, whose “School of Improper Education” practices unlearning through collective study.15 To mention them here is not merely to name-check but to do what these schools do: widen the circle of study, by putting into conversation a Ghanaian collective and an Indonesian forum without routing it through a European context that takes itself for the measure of the genre of “the human” in a burning world. What holds such an ecosystem together is thought, friendship, and shared practice—a South-South, tricontinental conversation whose geography is imaginary rather than territorial, connected the way spores and seeds travel through art beneath culture.

Seen in the light of this genealogy, the Schools of “In Minor Keys” are not curatorial innovations but iterations of growth in the sense of an unfolding praxis, living organisms that help us learn how to think what the “nonreciprocal gift” looks, sounds, and feels like—what it contains, offers, and unfolds. The form of this living organism is abundant and manifold; it manifests differently each time. Before institution-building, then, community-building follows a “fractal model of collectivism,” as Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh described blaxTARLINES’s radical pedagogy in a recent interview.16 A fractal is a matter of scale: each scale contains the complexity of its iteration. In Venice, this unfolds at the Arsenale into an archive whose knowledge is impossible to possess or master, because it has been lived, passed on, metabolized, mutated, sedimented, unedited, remembered. In that regard, “SLOW DOWN: CATTLE BATTLE AHEAD” offers an emancipatory tool to narrate the “repressed excesses of such repressive canons.”17 Its high-stakes concern not the present alone, still less the individual curator; rather, its display configuration intervenes into the history of display that overrepresents Man and is structured by the logics of European universalism, to which the Black gondolier in Carpaccio’s 1494 painting had already been exposed. “SLOW DOWN: CATTLE BATTLE AHEAD” opens a trans-generational field, invoking the intellectual cartography of the afterlives of independence movements in the present.

In Kumasi, on the campus of KNUST, art-making builds an ecosystem of “social-spiritual science” that engages a practice-theory continuum inspired by the social-historical consciousness of Nkrumah’s pan-African internationalism. The campus, inaugurated as a university in 1961, is mesmerizing. Buildings by John Owusu Addo and Miro Marasović evoke a tropical modernism and seem to be choreographed with the abundant surrounding vegetation. seid’ou and Ediwn Bodjawah, artists and cofounders of blaxTARLINES, live in the campus’s atelier houses. These are close enough to the main campus for students to drop by for a visit, yet they are some distance away from the actual department and its studios, seminar rooms, lecture halls, the Opoku Ware II Museum, and a large courtyard with a mango tree under which group pictures are taken after lectures. The nonreciprocal gift is hard to sustain, because being human together—listening, gathering, caring—stirs a desire to give in return; and yet to return the gift would betray it, because it lives by being passed on.

One of six repurposed vintage airplanes that artist that artist Ibrahim Mahama converted into free community learning spaces and classrooms for local children at his contemporary art complex Red Clay Studio. Photographer unknown.