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Art Experimenting with a Critical Pedagogy of Place

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Artists Experimenting with a Critical Pedagogy of Place

Navjot Altaf, still from Lacuna in Testimony (2003), presented as a three-channel projection made in the aftermath of the pogrom initiated by Hindu-majoritarian forces in Gujarat in 2002, which left thousands of Muslims dead or homeless.

Art that experiments with the possibilities suggested by a Critical Pedagogy of Place can be found in the diverse practices of Indian artist Navjot Altaf. Over the past three decades she has produced sculpture and video installations addressing social issues; these have been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. More recently, she has expanded her practice to include a series of interactive, collaborative projects in Indian villages, revolving around the design and creation of water pump sites and children’s temples.

Images of water pump projects from http://3r2n.cfa.cmu.edu/groundworks/statements/navjot.pdf

Altaf (2005) explicitly links her collaborative, placemaking work with new paradigms for knowledge and inquiry that are both restorative and transformative. She writes of the children’s’ temples: “The [temples] emerged from the realization that village children had no space of their own where they could go to play or engage in other activities outside school hours. [They] are designed as meeting spaces in which young people could interact with each other and with community members with a knowledge of oral and artistic traditions in their village” as well as visiting and invited artists from throughout India. “Such interactions,” Altaf continues, can “encourage the young to think about different ways of knowing and modes of working, enabling them to draw nourishment and sustenance from difference and similarities.” The idea is to “encourage young minds to be able to question and take decisions, rather than merely receive. This will also help the artists engaged with the activities to free themselves from taking a stereotypical position of a teacher.”

This placemaking work seeks to resituate art and artist. In contrast to modern and postmodern prescriptions for an avant-garde pedagogy directed at awakening, shocking, insulting and thereby teaching the audience, the work create sites for critical creativity and collaborative art that deeply – and reciprocally – pedagogical.

Pilla Gudi (children’s Temple) at Kusma. designed by Rajkumar and built collectively of wood, mirrors, mud and terracotta tiles, 2000. http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mag/2003/02/16/stories/2003021600030200.htm

M'Gonigle and Starke (2006) speak of reinventing education, so that those involved can act as collective producers of community and place, rather than fragmented, individual consumers of knowledge-power (p. 150). Altaf and her collaborators indicate ways in which this work may be begun on a small scale, through community art projects that both restore and transform local ecologies and cultures.

A very different approach to a critical pedagogy of place can be found in the work of Canadian artist Teresa Marshall. Doreen Jensen describes one of Marshall’s projects:

“Teresa Marshall's Land Escapes … addresses the dialectic between people and place with a humorous spoof of Canadian culture. She has transformed the 'landscape' — that empty icon of national identity — into drums by which the creatures of the land can be heard again…. Marshall urges us towards the metamorphosis of spirit and culture that would come if we embraced our intimate connection with all life. Such transformation emerges from living in a particular place and functioning inside its urgencies, at home in the complex network of life and death that each site imposes. The 'primeval wilderness' devoid of human influence is an imaginary construct; it never existed. All over the world, indigenous people live as part of functioning ecosystems. Chief Leonard George comments, 'We are all indigenous somewhere.' And this land is our culture. Our culture is this land.”