South of Aesthetics

Abstract

The paper focuses on how artists are challenging the educational system by de-modernizing and de-colonizing learning through an interpersonal horizon and transformative process of mutual learning that are reconfiguring social life.
How to imagine and cultivate a self-reflexive education capable of generating knowledge, equity, solidarity outside the neoliberalist sphere? 'The Southern Question' by Antonio Gramsci and the 'Epistemologies of the South' by Boaventura de Sousa Santos are the socio-cultural, aesthetic, and theoretical perspectives motivating artist Valerio Rocco Orlando to found a new school in Matera, in southern Italy. By involving the multidisciplinary independent communities established by Adrian Paci in Albania (Art House, Shkodër), Wael Shawky in Egypt (MASS, Alexandria), Yto Barrada in Morocco (Cinémathèque de Tanger and Atelier Kissaria, Tangier), the artist arranges a series of itinerant workshops inviting local communities to mobilize and deploy their own socio-cultural resources to imagine together an educational action and a pedagogical pathway drawing on the unconventional knowledge of the southern demo–diversities. The archives of knowledge generated by these workshops and itinerant encounters are the educational resources and map of the new school in Matera.
Following the path of sociological imagination, such a case study offers the chance to analyze how the approaches of the artist are formulating an alternative discourse within and outside modernity, rethinking the educational practices, challenging the borders of education, reinventing the sociocultural imaginations by promoting self-reflexivity, inclusion, solidarity, mutual understanding.