Another Roadmap for Arts Education Africa Cluster (ARAC) will convene for a symposium in the framework of research on the history of arts education undertaken within a network of educators, artists and researchers working in 4 continents around the world, initiated at the Institute for Art Education at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). The symposium is composed of internal working sessions alongside public workshops, exhibition, evening programmes, live music, performance, site visits, film screenings and coinciding with Lephephe Print Gatherings 4.

At the level of the African continent, the working groups of Another Roadmap include members of Keleketla! Library, Keep the Dream Arts, Wits School of Arts (University of the Witwatersrand) and independent cultural workers who compose the Johannesburg Working Group; the Kampala Working Group in Uganda, operating at Nagenda International Academy of Art & Design (NIAAD); The Lubumbashi Working Group, operating at Centre d’art Waza; the Nyanza Working Group in Rwanda, working from the former Nile Source Polytechnic of Applied Arts (NSPA); the Maseru Working Group in Lesotho, at Ba re e ne re Literary Trust; and the Cairo Working Group in Egypt, hosted by the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC).

ARAC’s symposium, which takes place in conjunction with Arts Research Africa (Wits School of Arts), aims to reflect on the cluster’s localised and collective researches since 2015 and the present, share outcomes, and to pave a way forward by hosting internal and public workshops that aim to transfer, to publish and to expand the histories, conditions, concerns, processes and methods that are particular to each of the working groups that compose the ARAC.

Timelines, learning units, and exhibition kits are some of the interfaces through which these research outcomes are rendered, and this symposium aims to make these outcomes available in Johannesburg, through the medium of zines that can be easily reproduced within limited resources.

The symposium will also host keynote lectures by guests including Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez, one of the founding members of Another Roadmap, whose work with indigenous communities in Toronto, Canada, has informed the concerns of Another Roadmap. The symposium will also host visiting colleagues such as Sofia Olascoaga working in Mexico City and Oluwasegun Quadri from Lagos. It will also facilitate exchanges between the working groups and community members working in the arts in South Africa at various locations in Johannesburg.

The overall programme of the symposium highlights the urgency of the historical knowledge of art education, the antecedents of oppositional, anti-imperial and decolonial impulses practiced by art collectives, the spiritual merit and pedagogical value of dance, forms, images, language, movements and sounds located across the Africas and their diasporas, and the solidarities between alternative pedagogies emerging through South to South alliances among the Africas, Latin Americas and First Nation North Americas. With this approach, the symposium aims to make relevant the intertwined histories that inform the inhospitable conditions of the present and to intervene by rethinking how to convene, to gather and to assemble beyond the spaces and the times that are officially sanctioned as learning environments.