We, People Coming from NowHere, are a collective of artists and amateurs of art from different disciplines, meeting regularly and irregularly since 2007, who have been observing the subject of education through an exchange of experiences and contributions of texts, films, interviews, performances within a variety of artistic forms, embodying the process of learning in schools, universities and other institutions, as well as in the non- institutional spaces... with an intention that anyplace and everyplace becomes a space for egalitarian sharing of knowledge. An important source of our inspiration is the poetic of knowledge of Jacques Rancière, conceptual stage with no boundaries between the disciplines, where the creative potentiality of everyone is taken in consideration beyond the logic of hyper specialisation.
By organising artistic gatherings that we call theatre of learning, we propose a different form of the the choreography of education, where we try to create a shared space-time correlated with the learning process where one can interrupt discuss, think, reflect and possibly re-evaluate proposed topic collectively, contributing to new forms of sharing knowledge through art concepts and creations.
Education, for us, does not only mean school and university, but more precisely the political and social environment/process and its transformation and the way we are conditioned by it in the world we live in. In that way schooling and teaching start to be moved towards old egalitarian dream about an ongoing learning, abolishing the boundaries between manual and intellectual and the borders of mono-specialisations and separated knowledge.
One of our main concerns is to raise questions around the existing processes of obtaining an education, looking closely at the role and value of School in the actual capitalist society.
In the midst of economical crises, the rise of unemployment assigns education to play a role of a saviour. In hope of getting out of the unemployment carousel or encourage the search for a “better life, higher position”, one becomes seduced by the State to invest into classical paths of an institutional education. But the walls of an institution, like the walls of any transitory shelter, create a hiding, provisory place, from the unpredictable war of the job market, giving the education a role of such phantasmatic and mysterious task: “good with a higher pay”, in other words- a ticket to professional life.
We could also observe, that despite the dimensional changes around us, the structure of most official (state) education systems, or what our collective choose to call the choreography of education has remained unchanged through an extensive period of time. The compositional score are created and defined by the needs and life expectations of the pre-globalised internet era: from Bachelor to Master, from Master to Phd, still with a clear division between humanities and science and where theory and praxis are on opposite shores of each other. And where the recommended studies are directly linked with the market dictations, as in the case of the Bologna reform.
Nevertheless, since the actual “c-rising” capitalist society uses the call for long-term and ongoing education as a stroboscope in a global discotheque, displacing light from the horizon of problems. Encouraging the unemployed to educate and reeducate, as well as encouraging the young graduate students to continue their schooling until post- doctorates and further (creating an inflation of degrees), becomes like the promise of the unsinkable Titanic soon to be hitting the iceberg of the global unemployment crises, postponing any possible revolte.
At last, our interest in education remains in its clear correlation with dominant ideology, its ideological apparatus (Althusser) and dominant fiction (Rancière). If Freire, in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) calls the traditional pedagogy the "banking model" because it treats the student as an empty vessel to be filled with knowledge, arguing for pedagogy to treat the learner as a co-creator of knowledge, so does Jacotot, the french pedagogue, in the early 19th century, a figure which inspired Jacques Rancière in his innovative a-pedagogical theorem The Ignorant Schoolmaster.
To conclude, our approach is inspired by various sources, from Rosa Luxemburg and Anatoli Lounatcharski (notes about self-education of workers and proletariat), to various temptation to consider art and aesthetics as an emancipatory tool towards desalienation and important subjectivisation of one’s education. Precisely, in the world where in the most European countries art lessons (music in first place) are erased in almost all( primary and secondary) school programmes (and the same judgement is pronounced for philosophy classes) and where knowledge becomes more and more related to the market/commercial rankings and knowledge transformed into commodity - thinking of the relation of art and knowledge, poetics of knowledge(s) and knowledge as a subjective emancipatory tool, becomes one urgent evidence.
