Melina Scheuermann

Portugal (residence), Germany (citizenship) °1992
research interests: archive, decolonizing, arts education, post-colonial, performance as research, VISUAL CULTURE
affiliation: i2ADS - Institute of Investigation, Arts, Design and Society
en

I am a PhD candidate in Arts Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto and  a member of i2ADS - Research Institute of Art, Design and Society. I hold a Master's degree in Cinema Studies from Stockholm University, Sweden, and a Bachelor degree in Cultural Studies (Major) and Arts-Media-Aesthetic Education (Minor) from the University of Bremen, Germany. 

My artistic as well as research interests evolve around arts education, history of education, visual culture, ecology as well as postcolonial and feminist theory. My profile is rounded off by diverse professional experiences in arts education, political education, social work and documentary film production.

research

research expositions

  • the archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive (last edited: 2024) author(s): Melina Scheuermann This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
    This exhibition emerged from my artistic research residency Performing/Archiving ‘Object Lesson’ which I realized in January and February of 2024 in Porto. I departed from the proposal to take up archival documents of my study within the history of education as performative scores and triggers for artistic engagement. In particular, I studied two picture book series of the pedagogical object lesson method (Pt. lições de coisas, Germ. Anschauungsunterricht) that circulated across Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The picture books are traversed by several intersecting discriminations based, amongst others, on gender, race, sex and class. Through the artistic engagement I reflected on the epistemological, political and ethical implications of archiving and the writing of history and developed an artistic-archival methodology that includes performative, visual, visual-material and textual modes of research. This methodology aims to promote situated, embodied and affective knowledges and is inscribed into feminist and decolonial struggles. The archive that i imagine to unlearn the archive is an exhibition of the artistic interventions produced as much as the structure of an archive. The exhibition/archive serves as a platform for upcoming workshops that I will promote to practice the artistic-archival methodology that I developed in a collective setting. I borrow the concept of unlearning from decolonial and postcolonial theory where it is discussed as a practice that challenges the value-based, hegemonic apparatus of knowledge production from the inside. There is a slight irony, seemingly a paradox in name of this archive: The archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive. Unlearning something while repeating, practicing, constructing it? The idea is not repetition, unless it is always considered repetition in variance and in motion, never settled, never fixed. Its name speaks to my attempt to unlearn archiving and archival research while being implied and meshed within.
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