Grounded in empirical research,
Alternative Pedagogical Spaces: From Utopia to Institutionalization is a critical inquiry into the establishment, development, and transformation of alternative
pedagogical and social spaces.
Written by Anna Colin, a former director and co-founder of Open School East, an independent art school and community space founded in London in 2013, this essay-length book explores the instituting factors, organizational life cycles, and alignments and misalignments between values and practices that permeate such a project. The essay delves into the qualities and prerequisites for what Colin calls "multi-public educational organizations." It also scrutinizes the hurdles associated with the effort to remain alternative, including processes of habituation, temptation or pressure to scale up, ethos-bending fundraising exercises, and long tenure, as well as the plain desire for stability and sustainability.
Alternative Pedagogical Spaces proposes where to look for a reconceptualization of waiting, slowness, and longevity, and asks how these ideas may benefit cultural practice and the design of future institutions (or the redesign of existing ones). Overriding the common assumption that success equals longevity, the author searches for institutional models that resist chrononormativity, drawing from social movements, psychotherapy, biology, and permaculture.
The Scratching the Surface collection offers self-reflexive accounts by pedagogues working with and in art schools, university departments of creative writing and of visual arts, and the educational spaces of art centers and museums—institutions often presumed to be progressive. The series interrogate the transformative possibilities and constraints of emancipatory pedagogies in the fields of visual art, performance, literature, art history, research, and art criticism.The series is particularly interested in artistic pedagogies in contexts of coloniality. Taken from a poem by Audre Lorde, the title underlines the determination to undo and question certainties, bias, norms, and the fabric of pedagogical models. Co-published with the
Villa Arson in Nice, Scratching the Surface is edited by
Sophie Orlando (scientific editor) and
Alice Dusapin.
Anna Colin is programme director of the MFA Curating and co-director of the Centre for Art and Ecology, Goldsmiths, London. Besides Open School East, Anna worked as associate curator at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2014–20), associate director at Bétonsalon, Paris (2011–12), and curator at Gasworks, London (2007–10). She co-curated Chaleur Humaine, the 2nd Dunkirk Art & Industry Triennale (2023–24) on the relationship between energy and the arts since 1973. She holds a PhD in cultural geography and has a training in arboriculture.
