Pedagogie per disimparare

From 21 March to 25 May 2024, Fondazione Morra Greco hosted Pedagogie per disimparare (Pedagogies for unlearning), a series of meetings and workshops curated by Giulia Grechi, anthropologist and professor of anthropology of art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, as part of the renewed collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples itself and within the educational programming linked to Progetto XXI.

The various seminars, meetings and workshops examined some contemporary educational and artistic practices that do not align with canons of normativity and are inserted in the research horizon related to the concept of un-learning, based on the paradox of having to learn to “unlearn” before being able to engage in educational professions. This translates into working on experience, improvisation, and the transformative possibility of educational practice, understood as an exercise in the shared construction of a space of freedom and self-determination.

In particular, the analysis of the concept of un-learning moved from four experiences that are very different from each other but connected with the adoption of the unlearning method and perspective: from the presentation of a volume on anti-racist educational practices in second-grade schools, edited by Annalisa Frisina, to the didactic experimentation between pedagogy and science fiction by Alessandro Tollari; from the experience of artist Valerio Rocco Orlando‘s Scuola dei Sassi in Matera, to the presentation of Cristiano Berti‘s artist’s book on the routes of transatlantic slavery connecting Italy to Cuba. The program was conceived as a landscape of practices and counter-narratives, in which spontaneity, experimentation, improvisation and drift take shape in dialogues, experiences and conversations that draw inspiration from the Dadaist and Situationist matrix practice of Polish artist Cezary Bodzianowski, to whom Project XXI 2024 is dedicated.

All activities were held at Fondazione Morra Greco’s headquarters located at Largo Proprio di Avellino, 17 – 80138 Naples.

Participation in each appointment was free of charge after registering on Eventbrite.

As part of the agreement between the Foundation and the Academy of Fine Arts, students who correctly attended the events Se la città fosse una scuola and Mudness. Learning from the underneath were awarded CFAs.

The Pedagogie per disimparare program fell under Programming 2023 within the framework of the project “Rilancio e sostegno della Fondazione Donnaregina – Sez. Progetto XXI” – POR FESR Campania 2014/2020

Thursday 21 March 2024 | 5:00 – 7:00 pm

Memorie controverse della schiavitù: la Storia e le storie
Presentation of the book Eredi Boggiano and screening of the video Pero está por ahí, ¿no? by Cristiano Berti

Presentation of the artist’s book Eredi Boggiano, published by Quodlibet and winner of the Italian Council (10th edition, 2021), part of the project Cicli futili Boggiano, conceived by Cristiano Berti and composed of three works that, in addition to this original artist’s book, include an art installation and a video.
During the meeting, the author will talk about how the five-year research project, which features themes such as slavery and freedom, came to life.
The work revolves around the figure of Antonio Boggiano, a merchant from Savona, who landed on the island of Cuba at the end of the 18th century and in time became the owner of slaves, who according to the law of the time were automatically given the master’s surname. The book, after reconstructing the biography of this ancient emigrant, turns its attention to his many slaves and their descendants, who have come numerous to the present day. The title of the volume alludes precisely to these Cuban citizens whose Italian surname is a sign of a distant past of oppression and, at the same time, of identity and family unity. With Eredi Boggiano, Berti offre the reader a curious literary experiment, attentive to the facets of language and at the same time rigorously grounded in documents found in various Cuban, Italian, and Spanish historical archives. By drawing the events of the Boggiano family from complete oblivion, he also offre, indirectly, the cue for a reflection on history, on what is handed down and what is destined to be lost, on what can never be told.

Speakers
Cristiano Berti, artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Macerata
Giulia Grechi, anthropologist and professor of anthropology of art at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples
Pasquale Napoletano, film maker and professor of communication methodologies and techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples

Tuesday 9 April 2024 | 3:00 – 6:00 pm | online

Fruday 12 April 2024 | 12:00 – 6:30 pm | at Fondazione

Se la città fosse una scuola
Online seminar and in-person workshop with Valerio Rocco Orlando

The seminar and workshop that made up this appointment revolved around the relationship between artistic practice, pedagogy and urban studies, an interdisciplinary approach that constitutes the heart of Valerio Rocco Orlando’s work. After an initial presentation of the artist’s methodology, preparatory to clarifying the theoretical framework of the research, a workshop followed in which a group of people had the opportunity to co-design together with Valerio Rocco Orlando a syllabus proposal for the Scuola dei Sassi in Matera, an independent, long-term initiative aimed at bringing new strength the school-university axis in the South. Vernacular knowledge, personal experiences and biographies became tools to activate intergenerational and intercultural mapping based on care, solidarity and social justice.

The event included the awarding of 2 CFAs to the students of the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples who correctly registered and attended both moments.

Speakers
Giulia Grechi, anthropologist and professor of anthropology of art at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples
Valerio Rocco Orlando, artist and researcher

Tuesday 21 May 2024 | 5:00 – 7:00 pm

Antirazzismo e scuole
Presentation of the book Antirazzismo e scuole vol. II curated by Annalisa Frisina

How is it possible to study racism as a system of power in which violence is ordinary and constantly invisibilized? The publication shares some proposals that try to deconstruct colonial-based ideologies. While Volume I was mainly dedicated to elementary school, Volume II is mainly aimed at those who teach in secondary schools, to create and experiment with educational paths that can contrast different forms of racism.
The book published in Open Access with Padua University Press shares the results of action-research work carried out in secondary schools in the Veneto region (Italy) and shows how to use original working materials to cultivate collective reflexivity and engage together for greater social justice.

The meeting was designed as an assembly, in which various associations working on education and anti-racism in the Naples area were involved, in dialogue with students from the Academy of Fine Arts.

Speakers
Marina Brancato, anthropologist, Academy of Fine Arts of Naples
Roberta D’Andrea, teacher and social worker, Traparentesi APS
AnnalisaFrisina, associate professor of sociology at the FISPPA Department of the University of Padua
Giulia Grechi, anthropologist and professor of anthropology of art at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples

The event is part of the Yekatit Network 12-19 February on the history of Italian colonialism and its difficult legacies.

23, 24 e 25 May 2024 | 10:30 am – 6:00 pm

Mudness. Learning from the underneath
Theoretical and practical workshop by Alessandro Tollari, Ph.D. candidate, Iuav University of Venice

Mudness. Learning from the underneath is an experimental workshop that interrogates the ways in which knowledge is constructed, its forms of educational transmission, and the role that the visual and performing arts can play in these processes.
In a vocation to transgress, to follow diagonal and queer lines against scholastic orthopedics, the workshop tried to use classical rhetoric as a methodological set for the production of knowledge and the educational process tout court, activating its subversion from within.
Created in the form of a lecture-performance in the island-psychiatric hospital-academic center of San Servolo in the Venice lagoon, Mudness. Learning from the underneath re-emerged as a site-specific workshop for Fondazione Morra Greco, as a rhabdomantic investigation to search for a common discourse between an educating community – with its artistic, didactic, communicative skills, and still its knowledge, ignorances, fallacies – and the palace of the Princes Caracciolo di Avellino of Naples, the surfacing of its heritage, the agency of the square in front and the surroundings, the crossings of human and non-human presences, the sedimentations of temporality. To bring to the surface the possibility of a knowledge and education that, in Verlaine’s words, unites the imprecise with the precise, and through art, moves from the paradigm of truth to that, perturbing and utopian, of desire and imagination of possible alternatives.

Program
Thursday 23 May: Inventio and Dispositio – 1 hour theory and 6 practice
Friday 24 May: Elocutio and Memoria – 1 hour theory and 6 practice
Saturday 25 May: Actio and Feedback – 1 hour theory and 6 practice

The Saturday appointment was open to the public in the morning from 11:00 am to 1:30 pm.

Speakers
Giulia Grechi, anthropologist and professor of anthropology of art at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples
Alessandro Tollari, education and culture researcher

The event included the awarding of 3 CFAs to the students of the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples who correctly registered and attended all three days of workshop.

Photo by Maurizio Esposito