Richard Finlay Fletcher creates Temporary Sites of Unlearning
by richard finlay fletcher, associate professor
Back in February 2020, in those uncertain days before the devastating COVID-19 pandemic changed our lives forever, I drove to Akron with three AAEP graduate students (Anna Freeman, Alice Cheng, De’Avin Mitchell) for a film screening called Mask-Faced Media. Curated for Rubicon Cinema, Mask-Faced Media was a collaboration with artist sair goetz and Assistant Curator of Film/Video at the Wex and former AAEP master’s student Layla Muchnik-Benali. The collaboration expanded my blog, platform and persona Minus Plato (2012-2022) into a selection of short films, including works by Cameron Granger, Sky Hopinka, Caroline Monnet, Mark Salvatus and Rheim Alkadhi. The films explore the politics of representation and disguise, embodied experiences of travel and belonging, and Indigenous knowledge and its mediation, as part of an unfinished curriculum and ongoing process of unlearning.
On our way to Akron, we made a detour to Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) specifically to see the exhibition Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom, curated by LaTanya S. Autry. Some of us had been inspired by Autry’s earlier visit to AAEP, organized by Dr. Dana Carlisle Kletchka, and wanted to see how her ideas about museums as institutions were enacted through the medium of the exhibition at a museum.
At the time, and since moving from the Department of Classics to AAEP in 2018, I had been trying to understand ways in which temporary exhibitions and their learning tools can be incorporated into arts education curriculum as an intentional mechanism to unlearn entrenched and oppressive institutional structures of the museum and university from within. This started with my inclusion of the aneducation program at documenta 14 (d14) into my classes, expanding to other exhibitions, especially the Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA) and their Tools for
Learning and Mobile Arts Curriculum. The work curator Candice Hopkins and educator Clare Butcher, both part of the d14 and TBA teams, have been inspirations, especially in combining embodied modes of learning, Indigenous artistic practices, and deep listening. While I carried out this work in the first five iterations of my ARTEDUC 7701 Contemporary Theory and Art Education class and the participatory curriculum design class ARTEDUC 5795: Global Indigenous Arts: Education for Settlers (Autumn 2021), it occurred in May 2022 with the hybrid class ARTEDUC 7795: Listening and Learning at the Toronto Biennial of Art, which you can learn more about in Anna Freeman’s and Tamryn McDermott’s accounts in this issue.
Back to Autry’s exhibition, in centering Black and Indigenous solidarities grounded by a conversation by Leanne Betsamasoke Simpson and Dionne Brand, Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom offered a prime example of an exhibition that directly intervened in an institution that challenged its working structures in the process. Unlearning is a decolonial practice that registers the way institutions (e.g. museums, universities, states) deploy entrenched and oppressive structures that are intrinsically connected to settler colonialism. Within arts educational practices, centering the work of Indigenous artists offers one way to explicitly push back against these structures and form more liberatory modes of learning in their place. In spite of calls to decolonize (the museum or university or some other space), the first step is to acknowledge how we who work within these institutions are complicit in ways that are deeply uncomfortable and challenging. Before these institutions can be permanently changed, spaces must be made for iterative, vulnerable work to be done to process and reflect, as well as create moments of release and resistance from within institutional walls. One such space was Our Unlearning Hour, a weekly informal gathering that I started as part of the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme project K’acha Willaykuna: Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Arts and Humanities Collaboration alongside our lead-PI, Dr. Michelle Wibbelsman (Ohio State Department of Spanish and Portuguese). It started as a reading group (under the name This Decoloniality?), but in Spring 2020 became Our Unlearning Hour, meeting online during the pandemic as Our Distance Unlearning Hour. Each week we shared exercises of unlearning grounded in decolonial approaches, interdisciplinary methodologies and Indigenous meaning-making practices. These grounding experiences have had far-reaching effects, as can be seen in Tamryn McDermott’s account of her collaborations with the exhibition Dancing with Devils (for which we created Our Unlearning Hour: Mask Dialogues series) in this issue.
But to circle back again to Autry’s exhibition, one of the most important components was a collection of books (included as a bibliography in the gallery guide) that informed the selection of works and made explicit the significance of Black and Indigenous centered learning for everyone. As Anna Freeman describes in this issue, the model of the reading room in an exhibition space was vital for the collaborative exhibition in Whisper into a Hole in April 2022, that brought Potu faitaitusi (“Reading Room” in Samoan) that had been at Columbus Printed Arts Center for the past two years, a gathering of books selected by global Indigenous artists (including Dr Léuli Eshrāghi [Sāmoan], Sebastián Calfuqueo Aliste ([Mapuche], Sarah Biscarra Dilley [yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini], Ke´y Rusú Katupyry & Verá Poty Resakã [Guarani-Nhandewá], and Indigo Gonzales Miller [Southern Ute – non-enrolled]) into Hopkins Hall Gallery. In addition to ’zine making, slide shows and a listening station, all connected through a collaboratively created score, there were three pedestals, one of which included the gallery guide of Autry’s exhibition as well as Simpson and Brand’s original essay. In the title of this essay, I have changed the word “spaces” to “sites” to acknowledge how, in spite of the efforts of a class, a discussion group, an exhibition or a film-screening, the settler colonial and white supremacist histories and structures of the university, as an institution founded on the seed money gained from expropriated land of tribal nations, is yet to embrace decolonial methodologies within its operations. The university remains a contested site for this kind of work, yet at the same time, if we keep doing it here, repeatedly and together, centering Black and Indigenous solidarities on the very sites of past violence, erasure and exclusion, we can create permanent, equitable educational spaces built on an inclusive joy and freedom.
