On teaching and setting a space in motion
Facilitating experimentation in and through arts practices, is also creative and political opportunities. I have approached teaching in the arts as an encounter with multiple and different others, which renders tension both, perceptible and generative.
Scores, in dance improvisation or in music, are prompts for action and experimentation. In sculpture, ‘scoring’ refers to the preparation of a surface for its contact with another. Inspired by scholars who position performance, relationality, and embodied practice as fundamental for enacting critical education and research in the arts and humanities, I have been using scores as a setting of a space to activate different—or ‘Oblique’—ways to encounter each other: for unsettling the smoothness of our subjectivity, acknowledging and embracing tensions and difficulties emerged from difference, while resisting falling into othering.
Learn more about “Art Matterings”, the space emerged in collaboration with graduate students in Art Education during my special topics course, during the spring of 2023, at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Performative walking for the course Introduction to Art at the University of Illinois, April 2019. —— In collaboration with Ahu Yolaç
Page of booklet orienting the session at Krannert Art Museum
Photos above are student work responding to the walking activity
