17.11.26, 09:00, Assembly Day 'Pedagogies of the Orchard'

The assembly invites students and staff from KASK & Conservatorium to converse about teaching-learning, from experimental, experiential and embodied perspectives. In times when educational and research spaces are facing increasing constraints in many parts of the world, this Assembly offers a space to reflect collectively on how relational practices might support for academic and artistic freedom, cross-disciplinary exchanges, and alternative ways of knowing, learning, and working in concert. At the end of the day artist and educator Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez will give and open lecture exploring what we can learn from mycelial networks about collaboration, thinking through metaphors, and our relationships with the more-than-human world.

The Assembly Day: Pedagogies of the orchard for educational master students is the final chapter of the educational development research project Glass-House and Soft Stones; Explorations on grafting and pruning as epistemological tools for pedagogical transformation by Laura Palau and Jana Haeckel.

Morning lecture by Daniela Vicherat Mattar, for educational master students
The need for a feeling-thinking turn in education

Current enthusiasm about critical pedagogies (feminist, decolonial) and interdisciplinarity dialogues have as a common underpinning the idea that knowledge is not only logical and scientific, it is also affective and aesthetic. That might not be a big discovery for artists themselves, but it is a major turn in education – from curatorial studies to social sciences – following the so called “affective turn”. In this opening talk I connect those ideas to the notion of sentirpensar (feel-thinking), coined by the Colombian scholar Orlando Fals Borda in the 1970s. The lecture is an interactive provocation aimed at reflecting about what we miss in a teaching/learning relationship. After all, if knowledge is necessarily always partial and incomplete, what is the importance of what we miss in how we teach & learn? And what do we need to see differently in order to teach & learn otherwise? Engaging deeply with critical and affective approaches implies a feel-thinking relation to what we learn, with whom we do so, when & where, and very importantly, what for. The talk is an invitation to engage with these questions together.

Before the session please consider the following questions: 

•  What do your studies prevent you from seeing?
• How would you like to do it differently?
• Why do you think this can change your relationship to knowledge (teaching & learning)?

Daniela Vicherat Mattar

Daniela Vicherat Mattar is a Chilean sociologist. She works as Associate Professor In the Global Challenges Programme of Leiden University College in The Hague. Her teaching and research focuses on 3 C's: cities, citizenship and care, from inter- and trans-disciplinary perspectives. Her interest in exploring the limits of disciplinary knowledge, and alternative pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning, respond to the urgent need to engage with the world in more attentive and less extractive ways.

Evening lecture by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez, for everybody
Mycelium as a Model for Relational Research

The lecture will draw from the different chapters of Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez’s latest book, Mycelium Teachings in the Arts, as well as concepts from her current research and forthcoming book on relational practices. The discussion will raise questions about the need of addressing decay and decomposition, potentially connecting these notions to the former hospital site and its history of bodies and burials. It will also explore ideas of body-territory, alignment with agricultural time, and relational well-being; in this case approached through a critical reflection on collective practices instead of the productivity of self mind fullness work that proliferates in the capitalist systems.

Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez

Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez is interested in exploring the application of a mycological lens in defining fair models of collaboration and (self) organization. Her book, Let's Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts, shares twelve teachings of the world of fungi. She is the founder of the Green Art Lab Alliance; a decentralized and non-monetary network of mutual exchange between eighty art organizations across Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean and Asia. The mission of the alliance is to foster relationships that contribute to social and environmental justice, akin to the interconnected nature of mycelium. She is currently working on a new book on relational well-being.