The School of Unlearning
Part 4 of 6 workshops in Edinburgh, Stirling, Dundee, Glasgow, and the Isle of Lewis in January-March 2020.
Increasingly, it seems more and more difficult to make a living from art, to make artwork around our personal lives and commitments, to strive for change without burning out, and make an artistic practice a viable career choice. The School of Unlearning offers us new tools in our ongoing struggle to maintain a career - over 6 workshops, we will examine aspects of contemporary work in order to establish common values and plan for change that we can all work towards. The workshops will cover a number of work-related issues such as busyness (striving to remain constantly visible in highly competitive conditions), attachment (the need for investment versus detachment from commercial interest), habits (the entwinement of our bodies and minds to environments and practices that have slipped our rational analysis), professionalism (the idea that the workplace is no space for emotion), and failure (fear of fallibility in art, organising and activism). The practice of unlearning will be presented as a new skill that can be developed to increase our capacity to think clearly about and challenge the conditions we are working in.
Part 4, Glasgow
BODY IN THOUGHT
Saturday 8 February 2020
10am-4pm
Venue: Tramway
Movement artist Claricia Parinussa will faciliate a School of Unlearning workshop, inviting her long time mentoring artist Lucy Suggate to co-facilitate the day. Sharing observations from a movement practice, we’ll work with and through our moving bodies to enter into an expanded state of perception- tapping into the rich resource of the imagination. We will open dialogue through guided movement scores and reflection to connect with our thinking-bodies in attempting to reimagine:
- Practice and habitual patterns
- Ways we inhabit spaces
- Disconnections between our bodies and minds
- Navigating complexity, pressures of busyness and failure; and
- Labour and value systems.
Finding ways of turning scarcity of resource into the abundance we have in our moving bodies, rethinking sustainability through movement. Unfixing to cultivate new ground to apply to all aspects of work.
Image: Claricia Parinussa, such tender bodies cannot bear so much pressure, Rhubaba 2018
Claricia Parinussa is an Indonesian-Netherlands movement researcher, artist, producer and curator. Her current research project the sky was pink explores the diasporic body through the notion of a body-schema; an ecology of living and sedimented movement languages, embodied experience, trauma and physical memory. Claricia is currently Associate Artist with Dance Base, Edinburgh and Project X Dance, Glasgow. Recent/current projects include the sky was pink: triptych UK tour, Imprints (Close Your Eyes and-) collaboration with Mark Bleakley, Basic Mountain, Into the Mountain with Simone Kenyon and There is Movement with Corin Sworn as part of Work House, Glasgow International 2018. Parinussa is resident at Dance Base, Edinburgh in January 2020. 
Image: Claricia Parinussa, such tender bodies cannot bear so much pressure, Rhubaba 2018
Lucy Suggate is a dance artist and choreographer based in the UK. Making working since 2003 she is recognised for her articulate and engaging solo performances as well as choreographic installations and public scores inspired by aspects of synchronicity and cooperation. Her movement practice is an ongoing inquiry into the perceptual and physical expansion that occurs when engaged in longterm moving and thinking. A lot of her current focus is around occupying spaces to practice in, investigating artistic extinction as feasible response to sustainability and revisioning future dance spaces as dynamic and flexible operations.
Image: Lucy Suggate, 'Human Furniture', presented at The National Gallery, London; Mac Val, Paris; Nottingham Castle, Nottingham; and Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Supported By Dancing Museums, Siobhan Davies Dance, Dance4, and Nottingham Castle.
FAQS
Who is this for?
Open and suitable to all of our members (Graduate, Artist and Associate) who are fed up with an unequal and exploitative art world who don’t want to give up on art completely and want to get involved in union organising and work-based activism. Artists who are making political and/or socially engaged artworks. Artists who are worried about how their creative practice will survive the future and want to develop strategies and alternatives.
Why should I come?
To meet new people to work with and collaborate with, to replenish creative energy, to get new ideas, to tell the union and your fellow members about what you are already doing and how we could help. Lastly, to eat delicious food and enjoy great conversation.
Why is it called the School of Unlearning?
The term "Unlearning" takes cues from Gayatri Spivak's "unlearning one's privileges," where the process of unlearning denotes an active critical investigation of normative structures and practices in order to become aware and get rid of taken-for-granted "truths" of theory and practice in order to tackle inequalities in everyday life.
Sounds great, how do I sign up?
RSVP via the event page here or email us at learning@artistsunion.scot.
Spaces are limited and places will be allocated on a first-come-first-serve basis.
