Changelab 2018 - Freire
Changelab 2018 - Freire, Development Education and Art Practice
Dr Jones Irwin, Associate Professor in Philosophy and Education, was one of the keynote speakers at the Changelab Exhibition at NCAD, Dublin, on Wednesday May 2nd. Changelab is a project collaboration between NCAD and the Ubuntu Development Education Network for the postgraduate qualification (PME) in the teaching of art. This module is led by Fiona King and Tony Murphy of NCAD.
The leading question of the Change Lab project at NCAD is deceptively simple - what does it mean to teach and make art that is of and for our time? This year’s theme, as developed by the students themselves, was ‘How do we mine and trace the past to make sense of now?’ Various exhibition pieces were developed by the students to artistically capture this theme, including a confessional interactive exhibit on social media called ‘Forgive me’ and a project entitled ‘What is your Utopia?’, engaging with questions of emergent community and the alienation of ghost estates in Ireland.
Dr Irwin’s presentation focused on the relation between pedagogy and aesthetics in the student work, employing Freire’s principle ‘no pedagogy is innocent’ as a starting point, which is critical of some of the assumptions of emancipatory education. He also contributed a short essay ‘Education is never neutral’ to the exhibition catalogue.
The Kilkenny artist Seamus Nolan presented the other keynote on his own artistic practice, as a kind of ‘awkward’ set of subversive art engagements which disturb some of the pieties around emancipatory art and education. Some of Nolan’s recent work includes ‘Hotel Ballymun’, which saw a residential tower block on the outskirts of the city transformed into a boutique hotel by a group of local participants and organisations, and 'The Trades Club Revival' which saw the revival of the traditional working man’s club in Sligo.