Re-composition of an experience

The experience of Taking Position, the Political and Place – Experimental Course in Performance Studies brought about the relevance and the urgency of the debate and experimentation around the issue of education in general (schooling / unschooling / deschooling), and of artistic education in particular, in a country where artistic education has been mentioned in a decree-law only in the 1990s, and at a time when much of the work that has been undertaken in this field since April 25 1974 is being dismantled. But it was around the very notion of ‘study’, and especially of ‘study practices’, that the course took shape, throughout the four axes that constituted it (Continuous workshop in Performance Studies; Situated Urban Practices; Language Incorporations; The Archive as Gesture – Digital Crossings).

Starting from this experience, the reason for this gathering is the desire to take on a work of collective remembrance (re-composition). Digging in the various records produced along the course, as well as in our individual memories, we will carry on an internal recollection of what constituted its practices, in order to reflect with and through them, as we question more or less experimental study practices and forms of teaching. A work of re-approaching and re-articulation that seems necessary to the preparation – to the collective imagination – of the future lives of the experience in case, whether they occur in a situation of conversation and critical reflection among peers, or in an upcoming edition of the Course.