The scene is this: we are a dozen or so in a room together in Toni-Areal @ ZHdK, with another dozen or two joined online. For the hour just before, Kameelah Janan Rasheed presented a talk and Q&A about being a learner, and unlearning, and a great deal of wonderful input that resonated through our own conversation that followed after she signed off.
We did record our own conversation, but without a concrete plan of documentation; now, you are invited to overhear this conversation.What does it mean to document a conversation, anyway? Many hands have touched this transcript, and this version has been edited for clarity, and organized into sections with minimal changes to the flow of conversation. This conversation arose from a collective thinking-process, so attribution of comments has been removed; the speakers include the initial panelists (Mujgan Abdulzade, Marea Hildebrand, Kit Kuksenok, Engy Mohsen, and Eleonora Toniolo) as well as other present in the room from the 2022 cohort, including the host for the guest speaker and the care-taker of the online.hybrid space (Lili Huston-Herterich).
LEARNING & STRUCTURE
– Our idea for this conversation has been to reflect on the School of Commons as a living organism. In the spirit of the previous talk, and its idea of a learner, I've been in this current batch (2022). Maybe you could all introduce yourselves with respect to how you relate to the School of Commons?
– I would also describe myself as a learner, especially after the lecture.
– I'm part of this year's cohort, and being part of the School of Commons is somewhat of a meta experience for me, because I always relate to the questions of connectivity. When you're part of these structures, and you want to also work on a project, it becomes more about the experience than the project itself.
– I have learned with the School of Commons for almost eight years now. I really want to thank everyone that made this end-of-year happening, because it was so amazing. It was what I always dreamt for, that School of Commons members just help themselves and tell us what they need, and then we make it happen together! So thanks so much. Much love.
– I joined the School of Commons last year, and it seems like I’m never leaving it. I feel part of it, and it keeps coming back.
– Part of the preparation for this conversation, we randomly assigned some pairs of questions to ask one another, like a Secret-Santa thing.
– I think I was supposed to ask – first, and with this question you have the freedom to be very big or open with your answer. If you read the description for this event, I think it talks about the School of Commons as being this living organism. Just like I said, when you leave, you don't really feel that you've left and it has a little permeability and also flexibility and it changes with the people in every new cohort, everyone brings something in. And it's about this collective moment of those shared spaces and tensions and everything in between. So you've been part of this for eight years, and constantly changing, you have a lot of people plugging into and out of the structure, we've been joining them. And I think that's a humongous task, of managing everyone's expectations, while joining a structure that keeps changing all the time. So the question, in short, would be how to manage those expectations, while not also compromising the flexibility of the structure?
– We also have an amazing team, so I'm not doing that alone, I'm just the oldest force in town! The word expectations always raises a bit of fear in me to be honest; I think the craziest expectations I always had to handle were my own. My expectations of myself in the programme, and how it's developing; and my expectations of myself meeting the expectations of the participants – were always very high. And the first thing that came to mind when you ask this question was, expectations need to be communicated. The first step I always take is trying to build a framework that is as open as welcoming and as safe for participants to be able to verbalize or otherwise communicate their expectations, or maybe I would say needs. When we want to really facilitate a learning environment that is open and that allows for people to bring in their own curiosity, their own needs, their own setup that they bring with them is that the framework needs to hold space for this curiosity. And we want our participants to shape our programme, we want our participants to shape our structure. That's a really serious thing. It's a lot more organizational tasks, it's a lot more like checking in with everybody checking in about needs. If you're able to do that, if you have a great team, and you're able to do that a very beautiful thing can come out of it because as we see, now this thing would not happen if you didn't ask for a podium, or if you didn't ask for an end of year exhibition! So I think holding the space is the most important thing, and then just flowing with it, but also managing my own boundaries. I have multiple disabilities, and with my disabilities, I'm also learning to say, “hey, that here's what I can do for you.” My boundaries and managing this part is also a huge learning process for me. Did that answer?
– I think so. I think it's also one of those huge questions which is never really meant to be answered, but it's meant to be stored somewhere in the back of your head so that you keep going back to it. Think about this again in a year or five years.
– This question has so many layers! If I want to answer it a bit more pragmatically, maybe I would say the most important thing is communication. I cannot satisfy any expectation that is not somehow expressed. And that was also the biggest difficulty if we're talking about difficulties in the expectation round. What we really try to do is, if we see that a participant is not able to participate, we check in and ask, what do you expect, what do you need, but if we don't get some kind of sign or communication, we can't cater to those expectations. So I think communication is also a very big part.
– I really agree with that. I was just wondering, was this flexibility something that has been there since the beginning, or was more something that was in response to certain needs?
– In the history of the School of Commons, the beginning was pure chaos. I just said, people, let's do something, I had no plan, I had no structure, I had no communications strategies. Still, we always do check-ins with participants in the middle of the programme. And at the end, and the feedback always was, we want more structure, we need more structure. And in the beginning, I was a bit disappointed because I thought, let's just go with the flow. And at some point, I had to admit that that's probably not not a free space when you have too much freedom. So now we are actually designing the boundaries of the School of Commons alongside the needs and expectations of the participants. That's also why your feedback is so important, so that we can shift modules and try to build the most open closed structure possible.
– I think we have the tendency to associate instructions or structure actually was something which is defining or confining. Someone once told me this: when you hold the space, and you say, you go to that space, and there's absolutely no rules – it's also to hold the person responsible for knowing how to act. And I was told by the same person, that when you provide someone with some sort of structure, this is two things: First, it's a form of generosity towards the person. Second, it is also a safety net.
– And that's what people were demanding.
– And it doesn't mean that it is set in stone. Because the thing is, every year you can get feedback, and the structure can be changed again. It's not gonna be like this forever.
– So this year, we had a few projects that have to do with games or conversational protocols. I think that those kinds of things are really about having rules that everybody agrees to, and structure as a safety net, because if you're playing a game that someone invented, and they explain it to you, and you all agree to play that game. That is one of the distilled versions of a mutually agreed upon structure.
– You say, “mutually agreed upon,” and I would like to place this as opposed to implicit. There was a moment when the group kind of came together.
– Yes! It's explicit, as opposed to: “if I already feel welcomed, I feel welcome. And if I don't, I don't know how to become welcome, to find my path.”
Possible reading: Jo Freeman’s “Tyranny of Structurelessness” [PDF] [HTML]
TRUST & UNLEARNING
– How has your experience with the School of Commons impacted your artistic practice and/or your work and/or your life, in a wide sense?
– I think one of the main things that the School of Commons taught me is learning from my peers and trusting the process. I come from a design background, which is a lot about projecting: literally trying to know in advance where you're going. It was really heartwarming to see other people approaching research in a very open way, which I was not used to before. We also approach artistic work as something immaterial, as a process, and finding other people who are almost more interested in the process and in the relationships born in the process, rather than the outcome. This was very affirming for me, because it was something that I felt, but I couldn't find a community that was saying any of this.
– It's very interesting to be continually digesting the talk we just received, because I make it articulates so many things that we've been talking around or experiencing and the past couple of days, and also through the year. I think maybe that's the shared community that we have, that attitude toward learning. I'm wondering whether the idea of unlearning something resonated with you, especially unlearning the rigid design process?
– Yes! Also the difference between knowing and believing: rationally knowing things, but not actually believing. I'm still unlearning things, even things that I think I learned at the School Commons. They are still at the rational level, but not yet fully embodied.
– Do you have a sense memory of either the experience of the unlearning or getting something from that rational to an embodied moment?
– Yeah, for sure. Not going to pinpoint a specific moment because I think it's more like drop by drop, one reminder after another over time, and constantly falling back into the knowing mode and then back to believing and then forgetting and then rediscovering from talking to peers!
– I know that collaboration has been part of –’s practice for a while, and I know that they also have experience with the corporate and the academic world. And I wanted to know how collaboration with the School of Commons is different from these other contexts.
– I really love that question, and I spent some time reflecting on it on the train. I resonated a lot with Kameelah’s notion of conceptual vulnerability. And what – was saying earlier about feeling nervous: “what do you do if you don't have results?” It's difficult. There's a fear of annihilation. It's been interesting to cultivate ways of inviting feedback through academic and corporate environments, often missing the true conceptual vulnerability of being very, very open to changing shape, shifting the entire concept of work. I came in with a project in the School of Commons that was ready for some collaborative aspect, but has already had a decade plus of work on it. I wasn't truly expecting it to radically shift, but it did in some really wonderful ways! I think we were all – starting at the kickoff, but especially in the intensive – we were all arriving with such intense capacity to be moved. We were on the verge of tears, and it was really incredible. By consistently committing trustfully to each other, we are able to move each other. There's this idea of creativity as requiring the capacity to grieve. And this is something that we've experienced, you know, in the last couple of days, in a metaphorical sense – where in order to write something, you have to tear apart and destroy lots of things that seem all connected — and you have to have faith in their capacity to be put together in a way that is honoring the concept. Here I think we also cultivate this capacity to grieve, through our practices, and that is enormously essential and very different from other contexts. Somebody and kickoff said, “I feel so alive,” and started crying, and I felt that in my bones. That was a really pivotal moment for me.
RESULTS & GIFTS
– We cheated a little bit: I asked – which question she would love. So here's my question for you. Why is it that in society and in academic contexts, everybody's so focused on results, and not on the process, not on the connections between people, or environment and people that are formed during the process? And how did you experience that in the School of Commons?
– I also have to confess that up until the last lecture, I didn't have a straightforward answer to that. Or maybe I felt I was not in a position to talk like an academic, because I'm not academic by any means, or a scholar. Of course, I can only talk about my own experience of being a student in academia. Especially with design, you're forced to come up with a solution.The academic is not actually like the structure that gives you, as Kameelah was mentioning, agility for ideas. And there is a Western obsession with arriving at conclusions. And at the same time, I was also thinking that maybe that's also because, in academics, usually when we work, we are so focused on ourselves and on our individual work! We see the work as our personality, which also happens when we get criticism about the work. I feel like it's not about the cause, usually, it's about the personality and a lot of egos. And that's quite the opposite of the School of Commons experience, and because here, it's more about people and connections and interactions. And commoning, which is something that you don't experience in academia, because there are only individuals but here, I never saw myself as an individual. I always saw myself in relation with others. I also never left in a way, as – said, because it was beyond just learning, it was also about creating friendships.
– Results and looking for a conclusion is important in a way. When you arrive at the conclusion, you're out there; then you realize that you can have other conditions afterwards! The result is a push in order to arrive and say something. The strict and rigid structure of academies everywhere leads us to feel the need to go out there. I would not be here without the academy. And we also need structures in how we think about things. How we perceive the world around us is made by structures, made by categorization and definitions.
– I have had to justify what we do many times, and the biggest worry of everyone is always: what do you do if you do not get results? I have to admit I was a bit nervous in the first couple of years, but I saw that if you trust in the group to do the process, the result will come anyway, that always I mean, look at what we did the last three days, no one was pushed, no one was told: “hey, sorry, but you have a deadline tomorrow,” no one was told how to do, no one was told to deliver at a certain time, it was also free to participate in the end of year or not. But we have so many beautiful results, including yours! For me, that's the amazing thing, because in the beginning, it makes you really nervous. If I have discussions about, for example, the profession of medicine, being a doctor– I am at the hospital, like five times a week, and I'm very glad that those people know that my toes are my toes, and my head is my head, and my stomach is where they need to cut if they want to do something on my colon. I'm super happy! But beyond that in a profession like medicine, how do you learn how to treat people? How do you learn how to treat a body as something that is also a human being, and a soul, and an identity, and not just flesh? I think it depends on where you put the thing that should be a result on the process line. In the School of Commons, we are really trying to let you define where you want to say, “that's my result.” If your result is in the middle of the line, you can still be here after two years and be part of the School of Commons, and still working on it. That's beautiful. That's just what I think.
– But we also looked for it, for the result. I mean, we had the end of the gathering. So we have presented the result to some people. Yesterday, we did something because we needed to arrive at a result.
– I will also underline the word obsession and result. Producing something, it's more about just focusing on getting something done on a specific timeframe, which also means that you stop enjoying the process. Here people have a more process oriented association.
– Something from the notes that I took during the lecture, which is I can be a dancer, but to sustain it requires repetition, discipline, and routine. And then shoot you'd like and then I had a little comment here about choosing to sustain undoneness and cultivating discipline. I think that was said so beautifully! There's a sense of thinking of discipline as something that has to be forced, and I really enjoyed the lecture's counter position, that discipline isn’t forced, but something that sustains our practice
– We who are sitting in this room, and those of you who have been present online, are only a small representation of the School of Commons; there are other years, and we didn't all contribute to the end of year gathering project. Only some of us consented to even initiate that project, which was already a decision that some of us made. The people that are not in this room have produced an immense amount of work in their own context and in their own spaces and with their own communities. I also think it's really dependent on practices, because I was talking to – earlier that what happens live in these moments where we come together or online, where we're doing workshops online, is that we are some many of us have practices where audiences needed, or teaching positions, or game leaders in which players or participants are also required. That’s not all practices! It's also based on what is visible in only a certain section of practice. Probably when it comes to the bodies that qualify and quantify the product of School of Commons, because actually there are so many participants of School Commons that are creating work within their communities that necessarily, because of the form of the work, don't require the institution School of Commons. And that's also fine.
– Maybe the School of Commons is kind of complementary in a way that different practices need different structures and different points. So I also hear R., when he says sometimes I like deadlines, because it makes me do things. Yeah. And I am not sure if I remember, but I think it was here in the room, you were on the screen, asking us: “do we want to do some end of year thing?” I think it was important that this happened. You laid the ground that allowed us to say, “yes, we want.” You said in the beginning, a structure that is generous and gives safety can be built.
– I want to throw in one last comment the line about the result or conclusion. It’s in academia but also in artistic practices, and it depends on the type of practice, because sometimes the conclusion is not at the end of the line. Sometimes it's just a point that you arrive at, and when you arrive there you're like, “Okay, what now?” and decide to continue or move on. Especially also with those practices that are much more cumulative. We need to learn to play the instruments yesterday; it takes years and years of practice.
– I was also totally not arguing against results. R., as you said, you wouldn't be here if you did not feel this this urge to try doing something differently. I think that's super, super nice. And in your practice, in your process, you decided: “I want results. At the end, I want my result to feel like this. And I wanted to look like this” and that's totally amazing. And for other people, it might look different. Other people maybe say, “hey, I'm going to take a course now. I'm going to finish the School of Commons and then work on my process, and maybe I'll be done in a year.” Or they may just say, “Hi, I want to show you something!”
– Exactly, you're not defining for him what he's doing or not. It's not necessary in one field.
– Our group had a very special case, because even when we applied with comments, we came in with the results! Should we even apply? Because we already have results! We really wanted to bring that in and to have this process of constantly reviewing everything, because we really asked the question at the beginning: should we apply or not?
– We also have a different mission. We realized that a lot of artists create interesting knowledge, and then it sits somewhere on a website and no one visits, it's like a dead archive. And for us, the community of the School of Commons was also important to say that we want that this lives, we want to share it and give it as a gift to everyone, then that can use that in their practices, be it in private life or in professional lives. I think there is not a one size fits all thing. Every practice needs something different.
– You said something about entering the project with something that you've already prepared before. My question was how the School of Commons way of learning affected that? How did it change your perspective?
– I think it's something which is very specific to the launch of this project. At the very beginning we had this conversation, how much interference we can group, especially when you have the work of others in your hands, how much can we tell a person, “look, we need to change this and this and that?” At one moment, one of the authors, as someone who was part of the project, was asking me whether it would be okay to change. That opened up questions about ownership, flux projects, how they allow change and how much change is socially acceptable. Sometimes when we ask someone to change things too much, especially in design work, it just consumes the energy of a person who thought the work was done?
– Thinking about something that Kameelah talked about in the talk- I felt free of the pressure to accumulate a series of results. Because when I look at some of your guys’ work, and I look at my work, and maybe like you say it's impossible to get a result, maybe that’s the structure of the thing: it is impossible to arrive at the result.
__: In contrast, I feel like our group had a sustained time when we had no result, and we started wondering, what keeps us together, if not the result? It's just super beautiful. The question was never, “Okay, now we need a result.” But like we were wondering, “what can be the form that we can share, that we can come in contact with over this form?” What is the intention or the motivation to create a result? For us it was to get in touch or to speak about something. And for others, it might be a different motivation.
– I want to share that I have found it recurrently difficult to describe to people what School of Commons is… [a chorus of agreement] …and why I'm so busy with it if there are no results? I had experienced a lot of anxiety, and honestly a lot of negative feelings, especially in the summer, around the School of Commons in relation to this context, because I wanted to share with people about what school promises, it's very was very hard for me to define what school promise is, especially if I couldn't say what am I working on? And that's always that's always a really annoying question for me as an artist, when people are like at an opening or at some kind of event where they ask, “what are your working right now?” It feels real good when you can say I'm working on, say, performance, whatever. I find this is maybe coming from my expectations, I don't think it's from within School of Commons, but I do want to put on the table, maybe if you have some responses about how to define School of Commons to people of it, because a lot of my work turned into, like – said, a gift for specifically for the School of Commons.
5 WORDS (OR MAYBE MORE)
– A quick exercise, which is also somewhat based on __ game from yesterday, we can go around, everybody says in their own words a definition, five words or less!
– Oh and I can invite people in the chat room to put in their inputs, five words. Next, your experience and school comments or experience in this room right now? I'm hearing that stuff was picked up?
– Not to cheat, but I think there are some key terms that appear. One is process, and the other is friendship. I think we need a story to protect that space, that black box in which we can trust. And I think two things we have already on the table, so I'm saying that we don't need to repeat it. As in Documenta: they arrive, make friends not art. And the process is there. It still exists. Still, we need to practice it, but I wonder what else is there?
– it's actually the first question I was getting, “why are you doing this? I mean, what do you expect us to say?” I put in the conversation agreement the purpose of the conversation, also seeing them experiencing that seemed like a practical form of resistance. I think that we're kind of practicing that, something that the outside does not understand immediately.
– Based on what you said about peer learning, we were talking the other day about the idea of kindergarten, child's play. I know it is hard. It has been difficult for our process also, after facing this question of “what are we going to do? How are we going to do it?” to not have a structure, but just having the opportunity to use the funding you give us to, for example, produce an event in Costa Rica. We had a workshop to learn things we didn't know how to deal with regarding technical issues. The opportunity to learn from each other. I think we, somehow, in life, have naturalized that we have been losing our freedom to do things in different ways. If we don't have results, somehow we feel like this is not correct. And I think the School of Commons provides space that is so special and difficult.
– I think for the School of Commons, it's super important that it doesn't grow from the center, that it doesn't grow consistently, it's not a big machine that has to grow like. It's more like a seed, and then it can grow satellites, that's my vision. My wish would be that we, at some point, have enough resources to maybe help kick-start those satellites, and that we have enough resources – which will actually happen from next year! – to start looking at the massive amount of material that was produced in the last 10 years, and to find out how to formulate examples like one could do it. To formulate it in a way that it's very easily accessible and reproducible, and that we are always here to help people if they want to start something. We constantly did better and better over time, so that should continue. So I would really wish to have School of Commons satellites, they do not even have to name themselves that, really, it's just we are here to support with the amount of energy we have. And for the School of Commons that we are running here, now, I would love to have to be able to have it a little bit bigger, to be able to allow maybe 20 to 30 MAPP projects per year, but I would never ever grow the school here, up to like 50-200 projects, because it's not the same. It has to have a care team, it has to have a core. And the team needs to pay rent, the team probably has kids, the team has health issues or whatever, and needs to pay for that. And I do not want to exploit people; the money that the projects get is symbolic, but they are getting so much labor in this project. I'm very strict. I know how much unpaid labor is happening in the arts field, and it's just not right.
– I have to say that I would never have applied for this if there wasn't money involved, because I just don't apply for things. As an artist, that's something that's important to me. Even if it is a gestural amount of money, it makes a lot of big difference, especially the way R. was talking about goals. I think just the existence of money, and the way that money controls my concept of time and energy. It really does. I was sad to say that I can see that. I really wouldn't ever be here if it wasn't for that. [A chorus of agreements]
– Some things are not possible without money. I mean, for example, everything that we did yesterday could not have been possible without some money to travel. The project funding from the School of Commons, yes, it was symbolic, but it helped us to reach some other funds from another institution. [Another chorus of agreements] It helped us to build something, and supported us. So in my opinion School of Commons is a way-to. We could also define what a result is; not having a result is also the result.
Marea has been directing the project since its beginnings in late 2016. With an established background in arts education, she earned a BA in Art Education and an MA in Transdisciplinary Studies, from Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK).