What shifts? What drifts? What remains?
Three questions that create the climate of inquiry for documenta 14’s aneducation. An education suggests one of many potential environments of collective study. aneducation, the program, develops relationships with learning institutions, artist-run spaces, and neighborhoods to investigate the correlation between art, education, and the aesthetics of human togetherness. As a coherent project, documenta 14—with the working title of Learning from Athens—cannot be divided into exhibition, public program, and education. Instead, documenta 14 relies on collective action and individual capacities, building friendships as it grows. Likewise, aneducation develops an artist-led, process-based approach through research, personal exchange, listening, conversing, walking, reading, and looking—gathering knowledge but also dispersing it like a breathing organism. The encounter between art, artists, and the public is our point of departure, learning from the context in which we are situated. A neologism sitting somewhere between anarchy and pedagogy, aneducation rolls off the tongue when spoken, becoming again something else. Depending on which voice or voices breathe it—how loud, how soft, how long—aneducation is embodied differently in the world. A trickster term: listeners cannot know how aneducation is spelled, leaving space for productive misinterpretation. Indeed, aneducation is therefore less an attempt at a curriculum than a cacophony, a chorus of voices that not only speaks but listens, shifts, doubts, and dreams. It is a mode for unlearning, or, conversely, a nourishing act, a warm gesture that reaches out to the possibility of learning otherwise.
In Athens and in Kassel, aneducation is a daily practice and a public learning. It addresses education as an open form, referring to the methodology of Oskar and Zofia Hansen, and as a space for spontaneous gestures and occurrences that “will awaken the desire of existence.” aneducation is a walk through rather than a walk around: walking into rumors and strategies of silence and the unpredictability of art. aneducation is also a meeting point where a series of erratic paths that track the question of the self in space and the moments of unrelenting instability in which we live intersect. It invites the visiting public to engage with contemporary artistic practices and to leave traces in Athens and Kassel. It thinks with art to explore how it feels to belong to a community, to occupy a body, to speak a language, and to care, to resist, to persist. The program is not based on either/or dichotomies: knowing and not knowing, sense and nonsense, significance or insignificance, but rather on an absence of grand narratives. aneducation approaches the project of working and learning together through a reorientation guided by shadows and echoes.
What educational methodologies are being employed and challenged in Athens, Kassel, and elsewhere? aneducation addresses educational modes devised by the work and understanding of artists, architectural practitioners, thinkers, and educators, on learning as a process that engages one’s body and senses in an active way. aneducation addresses collaborative, public, and political aspects of learning in the broader context of documenta 14 and the collaboration between Athens and Kassel.