Campos de Preposições Sesc Ipiranga

Project Proposal

This contribution to Campos de Preposições will extend research into experimental and left libertarian education already underway at Central Saint Martins and drawing on staff and student initiatives from the 1960’s and 1970’s. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 and in direct response to the threat posed to many archives associated with social history, staff and students began the process of recovering CSM’s past as a means to engage and inform the present. From little known student-led initiatives challenging the role of the artist in local communities (The Bell Lane School Project, 1973) right through to attempts to redefine the University in terms of communitarian and socialist principles (RCA Redefined, 1971) – the aim has been to restore a sense of the continuity of struggle, challenging institutional orthodoxy etc.

A key question has been the extent to which a cross generational dialogue and transfer of knowledge can be encouraged which doesn’t privilege one generational set of experiences over any other - where common interests can be reconvened and historical patterns revealed, rather than generations pitched against each other, as if their struggles are mutually exclusive. In projects like MayDay Rooms in London, there has been a concerted attempt to position the archive as a living resource, speaking in and through the present. This approach relies heavily on ‘history from below’, foregrounding the voices of those routinely placed outside the purview of officially sanctioned history and challenging the elite interests of historical discourses rooted in the academy.

The policies of austerity that have come to dominate everyday life have directly attacked public resources and infrastructures as if they represented a luxury, an excess. But should their destruction necessarily also entail the disappearance of alternative histories and sites of resistance or does the ongoing state of crisis also create new proximities, new opportunities, for the development of social resources? The global ascendance of interest in notions such as the commons, or social reproduction, would suggest precisely this; and so this project seeks to compare and connect distinct experiences between London and Sao Paulo.



Anthony Davies, professor de Artes Plásticas na faculdade Central Saint Martins. Ele é também fundador (ex) membro da MayDay Rooms, uma instituição filantrópica educacional em Londres criada em 2011 com o intuito de ser um abrigo seguro para materiais históricos associados a movimentos sociais e à cultura experimental.