Open Collections

Dadashzadeh, Rojia

University of British Columbia

This study is an artistic and pedagogical turn towards the educational potentiality of domestic spaces and the objects that inhabit these spaces. This turn was prompted by Covid-19 pandemic and a necessity for remote teaching and learning from my own domestic space. I began to rethink such objects and to consider them otherwise, which prompted me to examine my artistic and pedagogical practices. Forced to rethink my pedagogical spaces and approach, I was incited to think about non-spectacular-everyday objects with the potential to function beyond what they have come to be known as and used for. This study explores concepts of materiality and reciprocity; collections and collecting; and the political potentiality, uses, and practices surrounding seemingly ordinary objects. It does so through text, photographs, and artworks informed by art-based research and scholarship. Drawing from the work of Ahmed (2019) and Muñoz (2009), this study turns to these objects by following their partial biography while being entangled with my own autobiography, glancing at the kind of social practices they have been intertwined with, and critically engaging and revealing the no-longer conscious aspects of these objects' lives and the lives that they have encountered. Informed by the work of Ahmed (2019), Bennett (2010), Stewart (2008) and Ingold (2013), this study is attuned to the liveliness and independence of things/objects of life beyond human experience and agency to follow them as materials in formation with their affective power and materiality to be noticed beyond our agency. This study attends to these objects as objects of potential whose form, materiality, and entanglement with human practices touch on issues of racism, sexism, and inequality, reveal the reciprocal, corresponding, and ecological relationship between human and non-human things of life. This reflection on objects in my own space generated an expansion in my artistic and teaching practices. When returned to school, this study generated for me new pedagogical ideas, new ways of engaging with my students to reflect on objects in their social practices, in relation to inequality in humans, and in their materiality, and related to reciprocal relationship between human and non-human bodies/things.

Text

2023-04-18

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/84229

Art Education & Theory

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/