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Interpolations: Working With and Against the Archive of the Creative Child

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Workshop
Art Theory and Cultural Studies

The lecture on Friday is open for all, the workshop on Saturday has a limited amount of spaces. If possible, please attend the lecture The Century of the Child & the Scattering of the Timeline on 25.11. if you wish to participate in the workshop. Register for the workshop by sending a short mail to simon.nagy@student.akbild.ac.at

Master in Critical Studies: Workshop with Cat Martins and Tiago Assis.

This workshop intends to work through some selected sources of what we call ‘the archive of the creative child’. This archive is mainly constituted by published materials in Europe and the United States, from the end of the 18th century to the Post Second World War. Within this web of discursivities, a certain kind of child is being produced and coopted by arts education hegemonical practices until the present.

Our work with and against the archive aims to unpack this figure of the child paying attention to the colonialities that it enacts and the patterns of violence that are reproduced when this child is put on the stage without any kind of questioning.
This workshop starts from a critical and decolonial work towards arts education practices. From this positionality, we will question these materials, trying to identify their problems and also to think and act strategies for (un)learning them. We call this action, the interpolation of the archive. Our aim is to work within and against the archive, to break the structures of power, opression, and violence enacted in it as the possibility of other practices in arts education.

Cat Martins (they/them) and Tiago Assis (he/him) are art educators and researchers at the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Institute for Research in Arts, Design and Society, University of Porto. Their research work together started with the critique of how creativity is being mobilized in the present as a technology of government. Currently they are working in the project The Historicization of the Creative Child in Education.