Forget About It.

Within art and design institutions, there has long existed a debate about what are the important subject areas, skills, competencies, and curriculum of the day. What things are to be pursued, and what are to be discarded?

Correspondingly, a struggle can ensue about the perceived prominence and mixes of criteria, whether that of leadership, pedagogy, location, personnel, or ideas and attitudes, for example. Is the important bit, industry-oriented or vocational teaching, learning core-skills and techniques, questioning the status quo, developing progressive mindsets, dedicated staffing, place of study, or other?

But another, more complex and contentious scenario, could be even if ‘teaching,’ as we currently understand it, is required at all; if grand-gesture places of learning are relevant anymore; or if institutional stewardship should be determined at grass-roots level, rather than by those few atop hierarchical pyramids?

But, where bureaucracy may not be comfortable with conditions of dissension or discord, creativity is necessarily a messy and confused business. As the saying goes, eggs must be broken to make omelettes.

So, let’s consider a shift of focus away from anxieties of order, regulation, and a need to marshal states of knowing, towards creating new, multiple frameworks that harness the potency of turmoil. This may allow organisations and institutions to become creatively ‘amnestic,’ or in other words to act as ‘agencies of disappearance.’

Empowered, rather than impoverished, through a collective loss of memory and practice, places may learn to forget who they were. In turn, this can allow them the necessary liberty and agility to discover themselves and their futures anew or differently.