ACTIVATING ARCHIVES THROUGH RADICAL METHODS: INTERGENERATIONAL CONVERSATIONS

This Learning Unit is concerned with decolonising art educations, unlearning histories that replicate the colonial gaze, re-formatting our own art educations and a re-positioning of this canon by centring artists and cultural producers of colour. We are focused on histories of 1980s ‘Black Arts Movement’ in the United Kingdom and its impact on artists of colour and arts education in Britain.

We have developed this Learning Unit by negotiating institutional and hegemonic space using radical and  collective methods to produce knowledge and practical resources such as toolkits / learning units for others to use. We have worked with historical archives relating to black British artists in history which we  have ‘queeryed’ and ‘unarchived’ through intergenerational conversation in roundtables and workshops.

Our ongoing research centers on the legacies and archives of black British art in the UK through a queer, feminist and anti-colonial lens using archives and intergenerational dialogue in Collective Creativity closed and public events, creating a middle ground between lived experience, radical practice and theory