the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive began as what Stanley (2017, p. 35) calls “the archive of the other archive”. This second archive comprises all different kinds of writings of historical work, such as notes, transcriptions, articles, conference presentations and so forth. In my case, as I am employing arts-based methodologies and offering arts educational workshops, my emerging archive contained next to all the mentioned different writings also pictures, drawings, ripped cardboard papers, video recordings, educational strategies, and video essays.
Turning what began as the archive of the other archive into a “usable” archive was the next step. Driven by the idea of unlearning as a transformative pedagogical practice, I began to think about whether and how an archive could become a site for critical knowledge production in arts education and in the history of education, rather than just documenting my research process.
There is a slight irony, seemingly a paradox in the name of this archive: the archive that I imagine to unlearn the archive. Unlearning while practising it? The idea is not repetition, unless it is always considered repetition in variance and in motion, never settled, never fixed. Leaning on Rogoff’s notion of criticality, I commit to inhabiting my problem, and I have made my problem the archive and the images and imaginaries it produces (Rogoff, 2003, 2006). I cannot step outside of history, and my hands are always deeply sunk into the matter, my fingers entangled in the net spun, ready to push and pull, nevertheless embroiled.
The title also crucially speaks to my attempt to unlearn and provide pedagogical encounters that foster unlearning in the fields of arts education and history of education, what archiving and archival research might mean, and to interrogate the archives that we as arts educators inherit.
Sternfeld defines learning as not only a discursive practice, such as the acquiring of skills and knowledge, but it also implies, to some extent, performing existing power relations (Sternfeld, 2016, p. 4). It is by studying those power relations and the canon that it becomes possible to use those knowledges to question them and turn power relations around (Sternfeld, 2016, p. 4). What is implied here is that power relations are learned. Sternfeld invokes Gramsci and his crucial analysis that every relationship of hegemony is necessarily always an educational relationship (Mayo, 2010). We learn that knowledge equals power and that some knowledges are less powerful than others. We learn what we should learn and what not. Learning entails a corporal dimension, since we learn to move through this world “as women” and “as men”, “as adults” and “as children”, we learn who “we” and “the others” are (Sternfeld, 2016, p. 5).
There is also a lot that we do not learn, and not all of that ignorance is considered problematic in mainstream education. Post-colonial pedagogy problematizes the learned or “sanctioned ignorance” and the complicity with imperialist and nationalist projects implicit in most educational programs. Sanctioned ignorance is a type of ignorance that stabilises one’s position of power and is often performed through objectivity and distance in scientific discourse (Dhawan & do Mar Castro Varela, 2009). Dhawan and do Mar Castro Varela state that “learning can only be understood as the dialectics of learning and unlearning, a painstaking, never-ending process that remains contingent upon the disposition of the learner to ‘give-and-take.’” (Dhawan & do Mar Castro Varela, 2009).
Seeing is a learned cultural practice that produces knowledge, and its performances distribute power. Learning to see was a core motto of modern reform education and crucial to the subject formation of the ideal child in the long 19th century across Imperial Europe, which manifested in and simultaneously was reproduced through the object lesson method and its teaching materials. Interrogating the visual discourse, the performances of seeing and the power relations that the picture books called into being is part of a post-colonial pedagogy and visual culture approach in the history of education and arts education. Unlearning the stories we tell about the past, questioning their self-evidence and grasping the manifold ways and forms in which they shape our present is one of the core premises of the archive that imagine to unlearn the archive.
The past is not “done with” once a history is written (Stanley, 2017, p. 39). Understandings of events, their meaning and significance change according to the prevailing ways of thinking and concerns in the present. Terms like now/past and pastpresent recognise the inescapability of this relation because it is living people who are writing histories, and people are always products of their time (Stanley, 2017, pp. 39–40). This stance has an important implication because it stresses the instability and the imaginative forces at play in the making of histories. Briefly put: „The past existed; histories are made.“ (Twells et al., 2023, p. 153).
Paying attention to the often-silenced nitty-gritty, mundane actions of archival research aids in demystifying archival research and accounts better for the knowledge that we as practitioners of history produce, which is why I have given some thought and space to my methodology that I have come to perceive as performative-archival practice.
Furthermore, I aim to make this archive a situated archive. That means that rather than presenting the object lesson picture books, the archival materials, as a priori, I emphasise the situatedness, constructedness and limitedness of the archive, its intention and the way it was made. This also means articulating the place of speech that I inhabit in relation to how power and privilege are distributed due to gender, race, age, class, and so forth, in the societies and geographic locations I move through.
…seeks to promote hegemony critical knowledge production in arts education and the history of education.
…departs from two series of object lesson picture books from the long 19th century that circulated across Imperial Europe as performative scores.
… is invested in the study of images of modern/colonial Nature and the construction of the subject of the Child as an Imperial Child through the images and the performances of seeing elicited by the picture books.
… is directed towards researchers, students, teachers, educators and artists who are interested in the visual representations of Nature and childhood, in the history of visual pedagogies and in how reform education was involved in producing the imperial citizen “at home”.
… is a digital platform that contains concepts through which the picture books were approached, the educational and research strategies through which they were studied, as well as information on the workshops and similar moments in which the archive was activated and produced.
… has been promoted amongst researchers, students and professional communities in Portugal by me as a researcher and educator. I identify as a white, cis-woman, adult, born in Germany and currently researching in Portugal, with a working-class background, invested in promoting critical thinking and research in visual culture and arts education.
What the archive is not
As much as it is important to state what this archive is, it is also important to delimit it and articulate what it is not or does not try to do.
The more I engaged with the thoughts and works by decolonial and postcolonial writers, artists and activists on the archive, the more I doubted the idea of building an archive of the object lesson picture books as a methodology for critical history and critical education. It seemed like all my ways of thinking and re-thinking the archive would end up once again sucked up into the hegemonic and colonial logic of the archive. Thinking together with Taylor, for example, makes this archive a colonial archive in the sense that it works with and through the archival episteme.
Azoulay states powerfully: “Unlearning the archive as a place is instrumental in joining others who resisted against it in claiming that not everything should be archivable and that not all forms of relationship should be mediated by the archive” (Azoulay, 2019, p. 59). I value the account by Chuchu in a conversation with the title Imagining an archive for decolonial knowledge (2023), organised by the Talking Objects Lab, which runs along the same lines as that of thought and in which he denies the archive as a point of reference for his own work and life, as the archive will always be a Eurocentric and enforced logic. He raises the question of whether making a decolonial archive can ever be a truly decolonial urge. I recognise this denial as a powerful acknowledgement of knowledges that exceed and resist that archival mechanism.
That is to say that this archive does not attempt to be decolonial or promote decolonial knowledges. It does, however, aim to promote critical interrogation of hegemonic representations, narratives and practices in the European history of education that is foundationally enmeshed in modern/colonial logics and imperialism.