Education, Faculty of
Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Dadashzadeh, Rojia
Master of Arts - MA
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.
A Turn to Domestic Objects by Rojia Dadashzadeh BFA Honours, University of Waterloo, 2002 B.Ed., UBC, 2012 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Art Education) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2023 © Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2023 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: A Turn to Domestic Objects submitted by Rojia Dadashzadeh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art Education Examining Committee: Dónal O’Donoghue, Professor, Curriculum and Pedagogy, UBC Co-Supervisor Marie-France Berard, Lecturer, Curriculum and Pedagogy, UBC Co-Supervisor Rita Irwin, Professor, Curriculum and Pedagogy, UBC Additional Examiner iii Abstract 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. iv Lay Summary When the Covid-19 pandemic happened, as an art educator, teaching from home became a necessity. I became intrigued by domestic space and objects. Thinking about the potential of these objects in my art and teaching practices; I used texts, photographs and art to study these everyday objects beyond what they are known as and used for. A sewing needle became more than a stitching tool because my attentiveness to it brought into visibility complex social practices such as gender role, discrimination, and sexism. A bar of soap taught me about the life and the power that these objects have beyond our human experience. This thesis opens with considerations about my fascination with objects and the act of collecting them, it moves into lines of thought and new exploration in my artistic practice and concludes with two curriculum projects for secondary students inspired by my encounters with objects. v Preface This thesis is comprised of original and independent work that is written by Rojia Dadashzadeh and has not previously been published. vi Table of Contents Abstract................................................................................................................. iii Lay Summary......................................................................................................... iv Preface.................................................................................................................. v Table of Contents................................................................................................. vi List of Figures...................................................................................................... viii Acknowledgments................................................................................................ ix Dedication............................................................................................................. x Introduction: A turn to Domestic Objects............................................................. 1 Conceptual premises for this study................................................................................ 3 An Account of Art-Based Research: Weak Theory & A Turn Towards Domestic Objects...................................................... 6 Research questions....................................................................................................... 11 Outline of the Study....................................................................................................... 12 Summary........................................................................................................................ 14 Chapter 1: Thinking with a Turn to Domestic Objects: Collection and Collecting. 17 On Concepts.................................................................................................................. 18 Collection and Natural Science...................................................................................... 22 Collection and Economics, Psychology, Cultural Studies, and Art................................ 25 Collection and Museum Studies, Muñoz and Bennett................................................... 34 Collecting and Materiality............................................................................................... 41 Chapter 2: Thinking with A Turn to Domestic Objects: Subjectivity and Materiality, Affects and Practices........................................................................... 45 Chapter 3: My Artistic Practice: Engaging with Materiality and Subjectivity.......... 60 Turn to Soap.................................................................................................................. 60 Turn to a Textbook......................................................................................................... 67 Turn to Bamboo Blinds and Shadows........................................................................... 80 Chapter 4: The Pedagogical Turn: Prompted by the domestic space—new assemblages.......................................................................................................... 87 vii The Pedagogical Turn: Returning to the school and new pedagogical possibilities..... 96 Unit Plan I: A Turn to Domestic Objects......................................................................... 97 Unit Plan II: An Encounter with Clay—Materiality and Correspondences, Uses and Functions, Concepts and Scholarships.......................................................................... 103 Closing Thoughts................................................................................................. 118 References............................................................................................................ 129 viii List of Figures Figure 1. Sea Glass (Dadashzadeh, 2019)............................................................ 25 Figure 2. Brick Island (Dadashzadeh 2015)........................................................... 27 Figure 3. Campsite Assemblage (Dadashzadeh, 2021)......................................... 51 Figure 4. Needle (Dadashzadeh, 2020)................................................................. 58 Figure 5. Zan (Dadashzadeh, 2020)...................................................................... 59 Figure 6. Soap Series, Daily Ritual (Dadashzadeh, 2020)..................................... 62 Figure 7. Soap Series, Daily Ritual (Dadashzadeh, 2020)..................................... 66 Figure 8. Soap Series, Hygienic Strawberry Custard (Dadashzadeh, 2020)......... 66 Figure 9. Woman At Rest Series (Dadashzadeh, 2021)........................................ 71 Figure 10. Woman At Rest Series (Dadashzadeh, 2021)........................................ 72 Figure 11. Woman At Rest Series (Dadashzadeh, 2021)........................................ 73 Figure 12. Woman At Rest Series (Dadashzadeh, 2021)........................................ 74 Figure 13. Woman At Rest Series (Dadashzadeh, 2021)........................................ 75 Figure 14. Woman At Rest Series (Dadashzadeh, 2021)........................................ 76 Figure 15. Woman At Rest Series (Dadashzadeh, 2021)........................................ 77 Figure 16. Bamboo Series, Shapes, Forms, and Shadows (Dadashzadeh, 2021).. 82 Figure 17. Bamboo Series, Shapes, Forms, and Shadows (Dadashzadeh, 2021).. 83 Figure 18. Bamboo Series, Shapes, Forms, and Shadows (Dadashzadeh, 2021).. 84 Figure 19. Bamboo Series, Shapes, Forms, and Shadows (Dadashzadeh, 2021).. 85 Figure 20. The Five C’s (Dadashzadeh, 2019)........................................................ 88 Figure 21. Mini Photo Booth (Dadashzadeh, 2019)................................................. 90 Figure 22. Weaving Me to We project (Dadashzadeh, 2019).................................. 95 Figure 23. An Encounter with Clay (Dadashzadeh, 2022)...................................... 107 Figure 24. GRASPS for unit An Encounter with Clay (Dadashzadeh, 2019).......... 113 ix Acknowledgements I would like to thank the faculty, staff, and my fellow students at UBC, who have inspired me to continue my work in this field. I thank Dr. Dónal O'Donoghue for his engaging and thought-provoking classes and for the many intellectual discussions and the genuine commitment he has sparked on the discourse of art education. As well his generative list of scholars who have contributed to the thinking and the scholarship in the field of art education has inspired and shaped my thinking and orientation to my research. I owe a particular and heartfelt thank you to Dr. Marie-France Berard, whose consistent guidance and contributions in my research has expanded my thinking and deepened my work throughout this learning journey. I also would like to thank Dr. Rita Irwin for her insightful feedback as committee member. Lastly I am grateful for my dearest family: my partner Matthew, my daughter Scarlette, my dogs Meeko and Aspen, and my beloved parents Maryam and Mohammad, for their continuous support and encouragement throughout this process. x Dedication I dedicate this research to all forms of life that have been marginalized, oppressed, harmed, and forgotten. May we continue to act on hope! 1 Introduction Over two years ago in March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic began, our daily lives were unexpectedly interrupted. We went into lockdown and our lives of domesticity, working, teaching and learning and the space in which we performed these daily practices drastically became different. Despite my initial resistance to remote learning and online teaching, as an artist/art educator/researcher in both my art practice and my teaching practice in the field of art education, the pandemic revealed to me the potentiality of turning to domestic objects and spaces (I will elaborate on these terms further down in this chapter) for teaching and learning. I realized there is often a learning potential imminent, yet not actualized, in the quotidian and when something unexpectedly disrupts its flow and banality, our attention to its particularities, familiarities, flaws and beauties come into appearance. Drawing from Dónal O’Donoghue (2020) who states that “we are no longer guided by a single overarching version of art education” and that we must consider the “pluralities of the field” (p. 297), I intend to turn to domestic objects and domestic spaces as a potential to explore these pluralities—anchored in my own domestic experience and committed to art-based research and to the spaces of learning differently. Something has become activated in me—a turn to domestic objects: a commitment to bringing domestic objects into our awareness, visibility, and being, while revealing how entangled they are in the lives that we lead and the spaces that we inhabit. This disruption to the everyday presented me as an artist and as an art educator with a turn to attend to the unattended; one which is not only conceptual but truly 2 anchored in thinking and in practice—a commitment. As I will explore in this thesis, this turn has been deeply personal, artistic, and a commitment in my pedagogical practices. By the concept of turn I draw from the work of Irit Rogoff (2008) for whom “learning is a series of turns” (p. 8) and in a turn we shift away from something and towards something else1. For Rogoff engaging in a turn is a deep commitment that entails several processes, ways of thinking, and doing and in these processes some things become activated and actualized in us. It is this turn that I will be unpacking and examining in this thesis. As a scholar and artist this turn sparked a weekly practice with seven other Iranian women scholars with a common disciplinary focus in art and art education. We chose a domestic object and turned our attention to it in the kind of thinking, making, and writing that it evoked. This collective was also an important factor in my turn to domestic objects along with pandemic and the transition to online teaching and learning. Over the course of three months, we met on the digital conference platform Zoom to engage in conversation. Drawing from O’Donoghue (2020), we came to realize that these weekly conversations afforded us with “the promise of finding something that has not yet been discovered, of recognizing something that is present but has gone unnoticed and to say something that has not previously been said” (p. 294) and in doing so it extended our thinking. 1 Sara Ahmed in her book Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006) mentions this idea of turning and disorientation. Ahmed states that society has imposed on bodies certain ways of being in the world and normativity— bodies change as they move towards or away from other bodies/objects. Queering for Ahmed is about becoming disoriented and rejecting and disrupting these spatial, bodily, and social relations. 3 There has always been a reciprocal relation between my art and teaching practice, but this turn has created a particular intersection between my art practice and my teaching practice where, in part, one has become an extension of the other. This turn to the domestic has urged me to critically engage with these objects: in following their history, uses and practices; in following my own history, uses, and practices with them; and in following their materiality and affective qualities. There is an aspect of my art practice which is changing and has become more political2 and directed toward the public sphere, one that has extended into my teaching practice. With my students and through the domestic objects and spaces, I invite my students to critically engage with ideas, to notice power relations and to unsettle this power relation in their thinking, and their art practice. This intersection where my art and teaching are intertwined has been generative in both practices and I will expand on these generative turns in the following chapters of this study. Conceptual premises for this study Before proposing the structure of this thesis there are two premises that I would like to establish and think about as I take this artistic, pedagogical, and conceptual turn towards domestic objects. The first one is to state that a turn is a generative moment which emerges at an event; a space-event. Drawing from Jane Bennett (2010), a turn’s 2 Jacques Rancière in Aesthetics Equals Politics: New Discourses Across Art, Architecture, And Philosophy alludes to the fact that art is always inherently political as it aspires to draw attention to distribution of power and the sensible (Gage, 2019). Ai Wei Wei (2009) would also argue that art is political as it “stretches our understanding of morality, leaving a philosophical impact on our minds” (paras. 6-7), even the ones that seemingly appear to be not deep are political as they are expressing a state of mind and representing an aspect of the world. I would argue that in the context of high school art education, this inherent aspect of art is not overtly obvious for my students, and it requires careful teaching and scaffolding. In Chapter 4 I engage my students with the political in my unit on A Turn to Domestic Objects. 4 generative moment would signify “pay[ing] close aesthetic attention” (p. 15) to the “qualitative moment” (Adorno, 1990/1966, p. 43). This qualitative moment could be seen also as imbued with many lines of potential for what has yet to be actualized. The turn towards domestic objects considers these objects as objects of everyday use that are within the home and are forming home and at times spill in and out of home between public and private spaces, for instance a soap, a textbook. By home I am referring to a lively space that contributes to the notion of what home is and how home is lived and inhabited—a notion of home that is within and beyond our subjectivity, where materiality and things continuously becoming and transforming, are taking place. The second premise is to state that this turn is taking place in a performative, fluid, and emergent assemblage that I will refer to as domestic space. The concept of assemblage that I use is drawn from Bennett (2010) who interprets Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's definition of assemblage3 as ‘ad hoc’ confederations of all sorts of lively elements whose property is emergent in that their efficacy can make something happen. Moreover, drawing from Sydney Walker (2015) I consider the practices and processes of research as “creation of assemblages” which enable me as a researcher to “think relationally in ways that can shelter the coexistence of heterogeneous elements without 3 Jane Bennett (2010) interprets Deleuze and Guattari's definition of assemblage as: “Assemblages are ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living. throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within. They have uneven topographies, because some of the points at which the various affects and bodies cross paths are more heavily trafficked than others, and so power is not distributed equally across its surface. Assemblages are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or impact of the group. The effects generated by an assemblage are rather emergent properties, emergent in that their ability to make something happen (a newly inflected materialism, a blackout, a hurricane. a war on terror) is distinct from the sum of the vital force of each materiality considered alone” (pp. 23-24). 5 submitting them to totalizing” (p. 195) and the acknowledgement that research is indeed rhizomatic in nature with many potentialities. By emergent, I am referring to the concept of domestic space (the word domestic is rooted in the Latin word domus which means house) and its lively and performative capacity to hold things as bodies “enmeshed in a dense network of relations” (Bennett, 2010, p. 13). Bennett (2010) refers to these human and non-human bodies as actant/vibrant matter with the capacity to affect and be affected; bodies that are not “lifeless stuff but [lively] matter on the go, entering and leaving assemblages” (p. 18). Through everyday use and practices, we tend to build certain assemblages with domestic objects as mere commodities used for certain purposes, but there is so much more to these objects. In his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Muñoz (2009) invites us to turn to the quotidian as blueprints to think reflectively towards the future: he exclaims that “utopia exists in the quotidian” (p. 9) in that what appears to be a dead commodity for many becomes a sight and a resource to imagine the future and the not-yet, that which is imminent yet not realized in the present. For Muñoz this forward thinking inspired by the past is what Ernest Bloch calls an “educated hope” (p. 3). For me an attentiveness towards the objects, within the performative assemblage of the domestic space, is a blueprint to follow their partial biography which enables me to attend to their unattended, dismissed, forgotten, and not easily revealed aspects. As an artist/art educator/scholar the naming of the objects is part of this blueprint. Yet for Bennett (2010) the naming of mundane objects themselves is problematic as it shifts us away from studying them as objects of lively matter and forecloses how they might be 6 thought about 4. In this thesis I am precisely examining this turn where mundane objects shift away from being simply book, pen, soap, mug, and into thing-ness with the potential to become something else and to animate other thoughts and things: where they have been and where they move towards, and how in the process, some things host them and others resist them—”an actant never acts alone. Its efficacy…depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces” (Bennett, 2010, p. 21). An Account of Art-Based Research and Art as Scholarship: Weak Theory & A Turn Towards Domestic Objects In this study I will be straddling both art-based research, and art as scholarship as my methodologies because I see them as overlapping and I will be adopting weak theory as my stance to approach my research (I will expand on these shortly). Drawing from Elliot Eisner and Rita Irwin (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2007) art-based research will allow me to think with and through the art making processes to generate data and extend my scholarly, pedagogical, and artistic thinking. I intend to approach my research by working with art works such as poetry, collage, photography, videography, and sculpture, as well as autobiographical narrative accounts and through the pedagogical engagements with my students, as art practice. The art-based research methodology, similar to the framework of an art practice, is used as research material— 4 I would like to address that though I do not deeply engage with John Dewey and Maxine Greene in this study, these scholars’ work also explore the phenomenological nature of objects of art in how they become activated and alive through our engagement, perception, and experience. Please see Art as Experience (1934) by John Dewey and Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education by Maxine Greene (2018) 7 a framework that entails making, conceptualizing, researching, exploring, creating, writing, and reflecting and has the potential to reimagine, reconfigure, re-present, and reframe aspects of the world differently. In Toward an Aesthetic of Unfolding In/Sights through Curriculum, Rita Irwin (2003) explains her process of painting as “an aesthetic of unfolding” where she “worked through the surprises that might have seemed to be errors, only to discover a richer and more complex resolution” (p. 70). For Irwin an aesthetic of unfolding is an inquiry that is about surrendering to the processes of art making (sensing, feeling, and thinking) and how lingering in these dynamic and uncertain aesthetic spaces can surprise us with new in/sight; bringing to visibility what has been left out of sight. Starting research by suspension of pre-existing assumptions is generative as it could potentially reveal significant inquiries and lead to unexpected trajectories. This requires immersion of the researcher/individual within the ordinary everyday world (Yanow 2014). My art-based approach to research will allow me the possibility to follow the trajectories and surprises this type of research will afford and consequently will grant me a chance to uncover some curiosities, and insights the art making will present. Furthermore, drawing from O’Donoghue (2015), my research will also employ art as scholarship for art is “inherently experimental, unpredictable, unknowable and elusive, and can rarely, if ever, be pinned down, to mean one thing” (p. 347). I wanted my research to have a similar unruly and untamable quality that I honor about art so it can take me to unexpected places and potential insights in my artistic, scholarly, and pedagogical practice and thinking. In addition, art as scholarship uses art and art 8 expressions and can extend understanding, provoke thoughts, and even challenge human experiences by engaging with art. In his chapter Art, Scholarship and Research: A Backward Glance, Dónal O'Donoghue (2015) makes a case for studio work as a form of research: To think of art’s scholarly potential is, I suggest, to restore it to what it does well: provokes thought, incites reaction, and extends understanding through engagement. As a force that is forever committed to moving outside the realm of the already signified and supposedly known, art and its scholarly potential has the potential to suggest change in ways equally compelling as change brought about by evidence-based data and argumentation. (p. 357) For me as an artist and as an art educator this potential of art to continuously provoke thought and extend understanding through engagement is important. To come to this realization of art’s potential, I think students ought to be taught how to engage with art slowly, personally, and attentively. As an art educator I intend to create opportunities and experiences for my students where engagement with art through slow attentiveness and attunement are cultivated through the lessons that I carry out with them. In Chapter 4 of this study, I will explain in detail how this engagement with art and art making is scaffolded and taught using two of my units of inquiries that have been inspired and transformed by my turn towards domestic objects and spaces. Furthermore, I am interested in “weak theory” as a stance towards my art-based research. Kathleen Stewart (2007), Kate Zambreno (2017) and edouard louis’s (2018) 9 work exemplify how weak theory can be incorporated into narrative inquiry to generate other ways of understanding the world. In her article Weak Theory in an Unfinished World, Kathleen Stewart (2008) expands on Eve K. Sedgwick's notion of “weak theory” (p.72) as an alternative to strong theory. She presents us with the potentiality of weak theory to approach scholarship whose objects are “textures and rhythms, trajectories, and modes of attunement, attachment, and composition”; a theory “that comes unstuck from its line of thought to follow the objects it encounters” (Stewart, 2008, p. 72). Contrary to what can be called a strong theory, weak theory is not about defining, defending, fixing, resolving, evaluating, representing, or accessing the truth, but a kind of scholarship that is attuned to the textures, rhythms, intensities, impacts. Weak theory escapes and punctures its “not simple and self contained” (p. 71) objects as they come in and out of circulations, or something. As such, ‘weak theory’ is a disposition or a way of being as well as a way of committing to a practice and scholarship—one that is not reductive or concerned with representation, but rather generates new ideas, practices and ways of thinking through entangled, messy, and animated scenes. In this study I intend to approach my art-based research using weak theory as a stance when working with art forms such as collages, sculptures, poetries, narratives, videos, and photographs to conduct my research. Simon O’Sullivan (2001) states that “art outruns any discourse on it”; it “involves, as its animating force, a desire for meaning” and “the object frustrates this desire” (p. 115) as it can be interpreted and continues to signify different things. Bennett (2010) describes this frustration as a “discomfiting sense of the inadequacy of representation 10 [which] remains no matter how refined or analytically precise one's concepts become” (p. 14). In writing (as a form of art production) on domestic objects I do not tend to capture them through meaning making and conceptualization but to expand my thinking and realization through careful and slow attentiveness to their singularities, biographies, affects, and materialities, in time and space. O’Sullivan (2001) argues that writing about art is “silly” (p. 115). He then proposes “a kind of writing that does not seek to colonize, but instead parallels in some way the ‘work’ of art objects. A kind of writing – or intervention – which does not reduce or seek to limit the art experience, but rather opens it up to further adventures'' (p. 115). To me O’Sullivan’s thinking on writing corresponds well with Sedgwick's notion of weak theory on scholarly writing. As I mentioned before, I will be weaving art forms such as narrative, and poetry, collage, photography, videography and sculpture, using weak theory as a stance to carry out my research with the potential to open and expand my thinking about my artistic and pedagogical practices in a turn towards domestic objects and spaces. In this turn, and through writing, making and teaching, I intend to engage in the practice of thinking and slow attentiveness, to the event-space relations, correspondences, and encounters that attending to these objects will activate. In this study, the narratives on domestic objects, similar to the ones proposed here, do not tend to represent or illustrate something but rather expand our understanding of them by how Stewart (2008) describes as attending the object they encounter; tracing their worlds, imagining their trajectories, and following their tendencies to enter new scenes. My gaze and thinking with and through domestic objects will not be that of the 11 microscope, or the X-ray, but rather about experiencing the diffractive light bouncing through the prism. In this, I draw from O’Donoghue (2015) who explains Mark Tuner’s notion of ‘backward glance’; […] as an act in a moment, not planned in advance, but rather aroused by a curiosity piqued in passing, or by the thought of impending loss, the backward glance, we might say, does not know what precisely it might activate, but nonetheless opens the possibility for something to happen, as it reconfigures the object of curiosity that triggered it in the first place” (p. 345). My curiosity is in what happens when we live closely with these objects through spending time with them, studying them, writing about them, and reflecting on what they are calling our attention to and how they are affecting— to the possibilities of these objects as objects of potential and in what is present but not noticed. This turn then can be viewed as an account of my artist/teacher/scholar’s life based on the pandemic and what it presented to me, in the kinds of circumstances and conditions I was forced into and was operating from. Research Questions The potential and curiosity in objects/forms has had a long history in the art discourse. For centuries, as artists and art makers we have been fascinated about the potentiality that is embedded in materials, processes and in the forms that are possible and emerging because of the nature of certain materials when worked with in particular ways. And for decades in the field of art education there has been a great deal of 12 interest in the making of art objects and the processes that end in the making of art objects, yet in the classroom the process tends to end with the completion of these objects, for instance these objects can perhaps be reintroduced into the curriculum later on so they can be lively objects of a different kind beyond their seemingly finished line. Muñoz (2009), Bennett (2010), Ingold (2013), and Ahmed (2019) have all written about this potential embedded in the object that can unfold in cooperation with other things. A turn to domestic objects is then a turn that studies ordinary objects as lively objects with potential by following them and releasing their potential in collaboration beyond what they have come to be known as and used for. It is also a turn that studies these objects by following their biography to reveal and glance at the kind of social practices they have been entangled in to critically engage and reveal the no-longer conscious aspect of their lives and the lives that they have encountered. Accordingly, my research questions will be focused on: 1. What artistic, scholarly and pedagogical thinking will be animated in the turn towards domestic objects as non-spectacular-everyday objects with potential to function beyond what they have been known to function as? 2. In reflecting on how my process of studying these objects enlarges my language around art education, what kind of contributions might this turn make to the art education discourse? Outline of the Study In this section I will briefly explain how I will bring the reader into thinking about 13 these questions in the following chapters. In each chapter, I will be weaving a series of poetry, autobiographical narrative accounts, videos, photographs, collages and sculptures as art-based accounts of my turn to domestic objects and spaces, drawing from my realization on how the domestic space and my relation to objects has changed and has been generative for me in my art practice, in my teaching practice and in my thinking about non-spectacular object as objects with educative potentials. In this study and inspired by Kathleen Stewart’s writing in Ordinary Affects (2007), I do not directly refer to my autobiographical narrative accounts5 with the hope to draw the reader’s attention to certain concepts and ideas but to keep the reader engaged and wondrous with the concepts proposed, where new ideas and thoughts can also be germinated. I have chosen to put these narrative accounts in a different font to differentiate them from the rest of the content of this study. I do this to immerse the reader in a space where, drawing from O’Donoghue’s (2015) understanding of art-based scholarship, thoughts, reactions and understanding are provoked, incited, and extended. I use weak theory as a stance to create these narratives and artworks with the hope to engage the reader with the concepts of this study without drawing fixed and definitive conclusions, but with a hope to create a space for the reader for different thoughts, ideas, and understandings to emerge. As a researcher these narratives and art-based accounts will be based on my turn towards a few chosen domestic objects and will work as research materials with the potential to enlarge my thinking about the concepts that I will encounter along the way and incite particular directions. In the coming chapters I will be unpacking some of the theoretical concepts I will be thinking about such as collection 5 Matthew Isherwood (2020) has an exquisite term “asides” to describe these narrative accounts. 14 and collecting, domestic objects, and an account of my life as an artist/educator/scholar in a turn towards domestic objects. I will share my approach to think through these concepts and to think with scholars such as Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, José Muñoz, Tim Ingold, and Kathleen Stewart. In Chapter 1, I bring the reader into thinking about collecting and collection. Collecting has been an important part of my artistic and domestic life over the years and because of Covid-19 collecting things came to be a daily practice both artistically and pedagogically for me along with a framework for my students to learn with. In Chapter 2, I bring the reader into thinking about the potential of domestic and non-spectacular objects in terms of their uses, history, political potential and their materiality and how these new understandings have become generative in my artistic and pedagogical practices. In Chapter 3, I will be looking at some of the works that I have been doing as an artist prompted by my turn to domestic objects and spaces because of the closely intertwined and relational nature of my artistic and pedagogical practices. And finally, in Chapter 4, I will share with the reader some of the units of inquiries that were both improved as well as inspired by my turn to the domestic objects and spaces and the learning potential they have offered both during Covid-19 lockdown and upon my return to the school. Summary In summary, in this study I will use arts-based research, art as scholarship, and weak theory, concepts and research approaches that I will return to in the theoretical 15 and methodology section of this study, in a turn towards domestic objects within the lively and emergent assemblage of domestic space to extend my thinking in my artistic and pedagogical practices. I will be thinking with Jane Bennett, Sara Ahmed, José Muñoz, Tim Ingold, and Kathleen Stewart, in a turn that studies ordinary objects as non-spectacular-everyday objects with the potential to function beyond what they have been known to function as, and I will reflect on how my process of studying these objects might enlarge my language around my own artistic and pedagogical practices and the kind of contributions it might make to the art education discourse. Similar to the importance of a turn, I hear O'Donoghue’s invitation, in the field of art education, to consider conversation as an artistic and pedagogical practice where ideas are shared and thought about. O'Donoghue (2020) states: In conversation, we work to make ourselves understood to both ourselves and others as we organize our thoughts and convey them in ways we believe are suited to the situation in which we find ourselves. And in conversation, we also work to make ourselves understood as we seek to understand the contributions of others and the implications of what they say. (p. 294) I propose that the readers of this study consider this study as a conversation which is prompted by my turn towards domestic objects and spaces; as a conversation that is guided by the scholars that I will think with, as a conversation that will help me organize my research reflective of its many processes of thinking, conceptualizing, researching, writing, collaborating, making, reflecting, and doing. And finally, as a conversation that 16 would potentially help the readers of this study to understand my thinking, to cultivate new understandings, and to inspire future studies. 17 Chapter 1 Thinking with a Turn to Domestic Objects: Collection and Collecting Collecting has been part of my artistic practice for a long time, but when the pandemic lockdown changed my daily life and routines, it also afforded me the opportunity to include collecting in my new daily ventures. Collecting things from the beach became a notable daily family ritual when we collected things like bricks, sea glass, pieces of old wrecked boats and peculiar pieces of trash. This daily ritual along with my attention and turn to domestic spaces and objects directed me to consider collecting as a framework to teach with and granted my students the opportunity to learn with6. Though I’ve been collecting since I was a child, this daily routine and a turn to domestic objects pushed my thinking and research towards the concepts of collecting and collection in both human and what we perceive as non-human worlds to inform and extend my thinking about these concepts within my artistic and educational spheres. A turn to domestic objects drew my attention to the collection of objects that I live with at home and incited me to think about collection and the act of collecting in relation to my own collecting practices as an artist. In this chapter I will be examining these two concepts to expand my understanding and my tendency to collect and to expand my understanding of the educational potential of collecting and of bringing objects together as a collection7. 6 I will further discuss this pedagogical framework in Chapter 4. 7 By educative potential of objects, I am referring to our encounters with objects as moments that are imbued with the potential to bring to our visibility complex social relations, histories, uses, and practices that are associated with domestic objects as well as their materiality and vibrancy. When objects are 18 I collected things when I was a child. I collected erasers, greeting cards, letters, ants and rose pedals. My brother collected pens— Bic pens. We used to trade and in trading we developed our own interpretation of what gave them merit. In doing so we unconsciously formed entanglements with the things we collected; the things that already were in motion with other things. These entanglements gave meaning and sentimental (an embodied mentality) value to our trading and collection. 1988 was the year my father went to Seoul to participate in the Asian Summer Olympics. He brought back home a gold medal, a small brown Atari video game, a doll, and a few other objects whose memories and intensities have faded over time, while the discomfort of describing or recalling them in words or images has intensified. My brother traded his 1985 Japanese Atari video game with a pack of eight-colour pens with a boy in the old neighborhood. We imbue things with significance. On Concepts Inspired by Mieke Bal’s (2009) notion of “travelling concepts” (p. 14), which I will expand on shortly, I took on an interdisciplinary approach in my scholarship and research practices by engaging with scholars of various disciplines who have thought and worked with concepts of collection and collecting in order to enlarge my own understanding in how these concepts have been operating and circulating within my own artistic and pedagogical practices. For Mieke Bal (2009) concepts are different than words. Concepts are not “labels easily replaced by more common words” (p. 18). They can be described as words that people outside a discipline might consider jargon. Concepts take different forms as they brought together and are attended to, they have the potential to evoke curiosity and to create a discursive space where thinking and conversation could lead to novel ideas and new understandings. I will further expand on this in Chapter 1 under Collection and Museum Studies, in Chapter 3 when writing about my practice of collecting bricks, and in Chapter 4 in the units I created for my students. 19 move across various disciplines, contexts, scholars, and traditions of making and inquiries, proposing the notion of ‘traveling concepts’. Bal states: Concepts are the tools of intersubjectivity: They facilitate discussion on the basis of a common language. But concepts are not fixed. They travel – between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods and between geographically dispersed academic communities. Between disciplines, their meaning, reach and operational value differ. (p. 13) Bal explains that concepts have the potential to provoke discussions and generate new understandings within disciplinary or interdisciplinary grounds if they are explicitly defined within or in between disciplines, situations, and time periods. Bal (2009) invites us to think of concepts as tools for our scholarly analysis— they can be used as “methodology” (p. 13) because their “extendibility” and “elasticity” (p. 18) allows scholars to stretch them across disciplines. For Bal concepts are also inter-subjective in nature in the scholar and their life experience is part of the scholarly analysis. This intersubjective nature of concepts is what for Bal differentiates a concept from a word. They do not mean the same thing to everyone; they are dynamic and enable self-reflection and criticality. In this research I intend to follow not only collecting and collections as words that we use in a mundane way but also what collecting, and collection can represent as concepts that are performative, and are part of various disciplines, discourses, practices, and histories. 20 Bal’s (2009) notion of ‘traveling concepts’ merits close consideration as I start my journey to think about objects and collection. I was fascinated by this theoretical framework to travel with concepts of collection and collecting across disciplines, times, and contexts and in relation to my own experience of collecting and collection practices as an artist and educator for new understandings and connections to emerge. Similarly, Ahmed in her book What’s The Use? embarked on a journey to follow the word ‘use’. The word use became a concept that she traveled with to unwrap use’s complexity in different context, disciplines and practices while critically reflecting on this scholarly journey. Ahmed’s journey of following use began when she encountered a text written by another author. Ahmed states that “to follow something it first needs to catch your attention” (p. 6): ‘use’ caught Ahmed’s attention when she came across George Elliot’s text about an object that was used to carry water. After this encounter ‘use’ became a concept for Ahmed to think with in various contexts and beyond its utilitarian capacity. For Ahmed as well use became more than a word, it became a concept, a methodology, and a pedagogical tool that animated its capaciousness. For Ahmed, attending to the different uses of a concept (in her case the concept of use) is a commitment to study how various scholars from different disciplines have used this concept to form their argument, extend their thinking, and make new connections. Bal (2009) describes this journey as an armchair traveling with a concept across disciplines, times and places; a ‘pedagogic tool’. As Bal reminds us: 21 …after returning from your travels, the object constructed turns out to no longer be the ‘thing’ that so fascinated you when you chose it. It has become a living creature, embedded in all the questions and considerations that the mud of your travel splattered onto it, and that surrounds it like a ‘field’. (p. 14) Bal is inviting us to travel with an object of interest (a word, a text, a painting, a film) and ‘travel’ with it through various disciplines, methodologies, and life experiences, all participating and becoming something new— a new thought, a new understanding. And so, it is in the travels and the traveling that the unexpected happens. I walked into this journey with the presupposition that perhaps collecting is a way for us to make sense of the world and a way for us to inhabit the world. I also began this journey with a hunch that in collecting we perhaps preserve (take and take care) that which has the potential to help us make sense of the world that we share and that we inhabit. And with a thought that perhaps what we collect and preserve has a value of various strains and a kind that has not yet been realized. Though collecting might at times be simply a pleasurable activity that feeds our aesthetic tendencies and desires, our curiosities, and our melancholies, it might also afford us a learning opportunity; a time to attend to the particularities of the things collected. Perhaps we collect to preserve, to dedicate time, to engage with, and to come to appreciate the value we are not sure of but know that it's there. I think as we collect things like a pile of bricks, resources, shoes, a selection of sentimental objects, garbage, or a selection of dried 22 plants with a residual thought that what we collect is imbued with potentiality. And so, with that in mind my ‘armchair traveling’ began… The concept of collection carries with it an extensive history, meaning, and practices that fall under multiple discourses in natural sciences, humanities, social sciences, mathematics, education, and more. Throughout my research I intended to follow where the concept of collection and collecting took me and to be open to the many trajectories that this performative scholarly journey has presented to me. Sara Ahmed (2019), David Rothenberg (2013), Lydia Yee (2019), Werner Muensterberger (1993), Krysztof Pomian (1994), Boris Groys (1993), and Paul Turnbal (2020) are some of the scholars I turned to enrich my thinking particularly about the concepts of collection and collecting in various disciplines and about the way they are lived and are meaningful in both human and non-human worlds. For the purpose of this study, I will also explore the term collection and collecting by turning to my practice of collecting as a child, as an artist, and as an educator in my pedagogical practices, while closely reading the concept of collecting and collection with others in various disciplines and times for new understandings to emerge. Collection and Natural Sciences In turning to natural sciences, I found it fascinating to learn that collecting behavior is not just a human endeavor. To name a few, lacewing larvae (also known as junk bugs), satin bowerbirds, bone house wasps, magpies, and decorator crabs are 23 among many creatures that exhibit collecting behavior8. As outlined by Lotzof (2021), Lacewing larvae9 are one of the oldest collectors in nature, they have been collecting for 110 million years. Though studies of evolution have progressed from Darwinian works10, to Modern Evolutionary Synthesis and then recently into Extended Evolutionary Synthesis11, studies conducted on the collecting behavior of non-human creatures have been primarily Darwinian and utilitarian focused in that survival and reproduction are the two main aspects to study and think about the collecting behavior in evolution. This has limited our understanding of the collecting behavior of animals (in what they collect, how they collect and what they do with their collection) to seduction and defense. Animals have shown to work with their collection to create, curate, and perform, sharing qualities with aesthetic representations and aesthetic practices that humans engage in. Ethnologist David Rothenberg (2013) in Nature’s Artists points out that perhaps what has been neglected is attending to these behaviors beyond their biological usefulness. Rothenberg explains that even though some aspects of evolution appear to be biologically useful and functional, others exhibit an evolution of aesthetics— beyond 8 For a brief introduction to collecting behavior of animals see Kerry Lotzof (n.d.), Curious Collectors and Hoarders of the Animal World. In natural sciences and the studies of animal world, the boundaries between collecting and hoarding do not seem to be clearly defined in the same way that they are in social sciences, museum studies, and human practices. For me collecting entails decision making, intentionality, and a focus or a theme. On the other hand, hoarding’s intentionality is to accumulate, which often impedes on the hoarder’s life and the lives of others they live with, for instance, in the case of the Turpin family (Kluger & Luscombe, 2018) 9 The larvae selectively collect materials from their environment: a mix of plant fragments and carcasses of their prey and place them on the spiny protrusions on their back. These collections are not random but rather act as camouflage for preying and protection purposes. See Liverwort Mimesis in a Cretaceous Lacewing Larva (Liu et al., 2018) 10 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871) 11 For scientists who sought to challenge Charles Darwin’s 19th century model of evolution see biologist Julian Huxley in Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (Huxley, 2010) which brings genetics into understanding evolution, and for more contemporary dialogue on amending the modern evolutionary synthesis known as Extended Evolutionary Synthesis which considers the concept of plasticity, and environmental adaptation in thinking about evolution see Carl Zimmer’s (2016) Scientists Seek to Update Evolution an article referring to key scientist in evolutionary biology. 24 reproduction and functionality. Bowerbirds have been creating bowers for fifty million years. Nina Amstutz (2021) states that aside from a few, most evolutionary biologists have not considered the creations of bowerbirds an “aesthetically driven form...of expression” (p. 1040). They curate their nest by constructing12 the most elaborate structures made with the collected objects in shades of blue, using their beak to paint; they complete this process by performing an elaborate dance to seduce their mate. Rothenberg (2013) makes a claim that I find interesting, stating that collecting, arranging, and making behavior of creatures such as bowerbirds goes beyond biological usefulness and invites a less human-centered and clinical lens to studying, observing, and interpreting the living and collecting endeavors of non-human world. I was interested in how bowerbirds created something with what they gathered. For me, there is a connection between collection and creation. As an artist, I have been collecting for years and there is an immanent potential for creation in what I collect. I will come back to this concept of ‘immanent potential’ later as I continue to travel with the concepts of collection and collecting across disciplines, specifically my turn to collecting in art and artist. 12 Visit this link to see photograph of satin bowerbirds’ bower structure and their collection of blue objects by photographer Barry Hatton 2008. 25 Figure 1 Sea Glass Note. Sea Glass pieces I collected on my walks from the seashores of Kitsilano Beach during pandemic lockdown. As part of the collecting process, and to explore the potential for ideas to emerge for creating, I tend to arrange my collection in piles and /or in categories to explore the potential of what I have collected. During this process I often eliminate some aspects of the collected to give more direction and intentionality to the potential imminent in these objects. Photo: Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2019. Collection and economics, psychology, cultural studies, and art I continued my journey into the concept of collection by turning to experts in economics, psychology, and cultural studies. In his book Collecting in a Consumer Society, Russell W. Belk (1995) defines collecting as “the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences'' (p. 67). Belk’s definition distinguishes the difference between a stack of identical objects and a collection of objects that share something similar; for Belk a stack of identical stamps does not qualify as a collection. 26 For artists, collecting a stack of both identical and similar objects has the potential to become something: Ai Wei Wei's massive installation titled Bang as part of the 2014 exhibition Unscrolled at the Vancouver Art Gallery, was made up of 886 similar antique hand-crafted three-legged stools from the artist's own collection13. Furthermore, in line with Belk’s account of what constitutes a collection, the objects collected have been taken out of their original circulation and use and have become ‘unused’ and ‘out of use’. Ahmed (2019) explicates that ‘unused’ might refer to something that has not been used yet, but also something can become unused when something is stopped; “unused can be a moment in biography” (p. 45). It's also important to recognize that things in fact do continue to exist “in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, and projects” (Bennett, 2010, p. 4). The biography of use will continue to unwrap, and things will continue to have an affect and be affected by entering and leaving assemblages. Bennett draws from Spinoza’s notion of ‘social bodies’ to explain that “an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces” (p. 21) and that according to Deleuze in this process two kinds of powers are at play: one of action and one of suffering action. In this line of thought, things always continue to affect and be affected. A book that was well used in being read might become unused in that sense, but its biography might take on a different journey as it becomes something else: a material for collaging, a weight to support, or a step for reaching, recycling material for something else, or a material in art making, as well as what it is and continues to be outside of human practices. Ahmed (2019) states that “just because something comes 13 See Vancouver Art Gallery link to watch a video on Ai Wei Wei’s installation Bang. 27 to exist for a purpose, we should not confuse what it was intended for with what it is or can be” (p. 35). For Ahmed what something is used for is just an aspect of what it can be—for it becomes an opening, a potential. For me as an artist, things collected also have the potential to be used in ways that bring attention to the ethical and moral aspects of our ‘use practices’14 in both humans and nonhuman projects. But also, things collected are openings to consider the materiality of things. Objects have imminent potentiality. Figure 2 Brick Island Note. Image on the left shows bricks that I collected from beaches around Vancouver on my daily walks, brought to my studio, washed and arranged on a painted wooden panel and photographed from above. The image on the right shows the impression that had been made by the wet bricks on the painted wooden panel. Photo: Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2015. In child psychology, according to Stacey Menzel Baker and James W. Gentry (1996) children collect because of a variety of reasons: they enjoy the act of collecting and regard it as fun, it affords them an escape from reality; they are curious about the object they collect, and collecting grants them the opportunity to be unique and to relate 14 Sara Ahmed in Chapter 1 of her Book What’s The Use? (2019) writes beautifully in detail about various aspects of use: in use, out of use, used, unused, overused, used up, usable/unusable. 28 to others. Similar to Baker and Gentry, Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein’s (2011) study on collecting among children concluded that there is a correlation between collecting and learning through play. Their study explains that children are naturally collectors and regards children’s collecting behavior as free choice collecting; a kind of play that results in something to play with where the focus is not on what children collect but rather, on what they do with their collection. And this resonated with me. To me the free-choice-collecting behavior in children resembles the collecting behavior of artists as collectors and their desire to collect. Artists collect because they see a potential in the object they collect. The object has a free choice play quality in that, according to Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein (2011) it has no overt goal other than the intrinsic satisfactions of the thing in itself. I think that the intrinsic satisfaction is the curiosity that is ignited by the desire to learn – what artists and children potentially share. Reflecting on my own collecting and creating practices, I think that there is an immanent potential for creation in what is collected. I was fascinated to see how collecting and creating was actualized in the practices of artists who collect: how artists think with their collection, are influenced by their collection, and make with their collection. In Magnificent Obsession, The Artist as Collector, Lydia Yee (2015) investigates the meaning and the influence of artists' collections on the work they make. Through 29 interviewing15 fifteen contemporary artists and an accompanying exhibition, Yee delved into what artists collect, how they live and work with their collection and the connection that develops between their collection and the work they make. The artists interviewed collect(ed) objects from a wide range of high and low categories: Arman’s collection of African art and Japanese armor; Edmund de Waal’s collection of archaeological fragments, coins, shells and bones; Damien Hirst’s discarded objects he found from an abandoned home; and Dr. Lakra’s inexpensive collection of toys, magazines, records and scrapbooks from Mexico’s flea markets. For Jim Shaw, collecting reflects “the strange and dark side of society” (p. 11). For some artists their collections have influenced their style as well as the theme they explore, for others the collection becomes the material the artist uses and thinks with in their work, for example, Ai Wei Wei’s 2014’s Bang installation16 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, part of Unscrolled Reframing Tradition in Chinese Contemporary Art curated by Diana Freundl17. In this installation, Ai Wei Wei had decided to use his collection of Chinese antique stools from the Qing Dynasty to reference the loss of this Chinese tradition. Freundl (2015), Vancouver Art Gallery Interim Chief Curator, draws our attention to how there is no entrance or exit point in the installation. The stools appear to be repetitive and are built together in a way that are detachable and replaceable alluding to the replaceability of these objects and the loss of this traditional craftmanship due to the 1960s industrialization and postmodern era. For these artists, their collections have played a significant role in their creative practices as it has for me. As an artist, educator, and 15 See Magnificent Obsession The Artist As Collector (2015) for the full list of artists she has worked with. 16 Visit this link from Georgia Straight website on November 19, 2014 to view a photograph of Ai Weiwei’s installation Bang at the Vancouver Art Gallery. 17 Here is the link to a short video. 30 scholar my collection of objects both within my home during the pandemic and what I have collected over time at my studio, have also played a significant role in my scholarly, artistic, and pedagogical practices. Research and study are other reasons why artists collect. Yee (2015) writes that “the common term for an artist’s workplace, the studio, derives from the Latin studium, meaning study, pursuit or zeal. It is also related to the studiolo, Italian for small studio, a private room furnished with objects and books for study” (p. 14). Yee concludes that “artists often exceed or disregard the parameters of conventional collecting practice” (p. 15) as for them collecting is an extension of their practice: as research, inspiration, experiment, and material. Yee concludes that ‘creative collecting’ differentiates how contemporary artists approach and use their collections from other collectors. Another artist of interest is Mark Dion18 who is often invited to work with institutions and museums’ collections to critique and unsettle the institutions’ collecting practices, ideologies, and knowledge production methodologies. Dion is interested in what happens to objects/objects and the discursive space they evoke when objects are placed within certain categorizations, structures, and ideologies. Universal Collection: A Mark Dion Project, 2016, is a site-specific installation that Dion created during his residency at Vassar College. To create his monument inspired by his interest in the 16th century cabinet of curiosity19 known as Wunderkabinetts whose aesthetics invoke 18 Thank you to my supervisor Dr. Dónal O’Donoghue for pointing out this artist. 19 Etymologically speaking the word museum is derived from private and elite practices. Originating in Greek language, the word museum is derived from the word museon, meaning seat of the muses. In 31 viewers to engage, wonder and be the co-producer of knowledge and understanding, Dion gathered hundreds of objects from various corners of the campus, archives, basements and histories and juxtaposed them20 in ways that would “address the politics of display and upend traditional museum classification as well as visitor expectations” (Lehman, 2016, para. 4). To me, Dion works with a collection and its arrangement to create a discursive space and to examine what certain collection and collecting practices does to the object and ultimately to the way knowledge is co-created and produced. This is important to me because when I engage with collection and collecting in my own art practice and with my students, I gather things/objects together to create an encounter; a discursive space for us to bring to visibility objects’ materiality, and to bring to visibility how entangled these objects are in our live: in our social practices, uses, and histories. I’ve been collecting for years since I was a child. As an artist in my adulthood my interest has mostly been in objects that have been taken out of one circulation and enter a different one. For instance, I have been collecting sea glass that mostly used to be beer bottles for drinking beer and broken bricks on the shores of Vancouver that used to be for building homes. For Peter Blake, living with his eccentric grandmother as a young child made an impression on his art practice for his grandmother collected mincing Roman times the word was referred to places of philosophical discussion. It was revised in 15th century to reference the collection of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s private collection of art, science, and texts. Subsequently in the 17th century the word collection was referred to as a collection of curiosities known as cabinets of curiosities. Curiosity and status have played a significant role in the formation of museums and collections from a Eurocentric perspective. As predecessors of modern Western museums and originating in the 16th century, cabinets of curiosities, Wunderkammer, served both as ascertaining their private collectors’ socioeconomic and intellectual place in the world and reflecting their curiosity about the world. Though Western museums are a public domain, their original objects descend from private collections (McClellan, 2008). 20 For example, a worn-down hockey stick hanging beside a painting of Picasso. 32 machines and cocktail cabinets and Blake as an adult started collecting objects from junk yards (Yee, 2015). My grandmother's house used to have a small shed with broken glass windows that housed many empty bottles and I used to get lost in my imagination while scavenging through the space. Her garden, like most gardens in Iran, was enclosed with brick walls. She had a collection of tin containers where she kept her jewelry, empty wooden spools and broken ceramics. These experiences made an impression on me, and ultimately, on the things I collect as an artist. Bottle یرطب She’s been collecting beach glass on her daily walk to the beach. It started way before the pandemic. It withered for a while. She made a pact with her family to visit the beach every day. Rubbing her fingers along the edges, she is irritated with the sharp ones. They need more time to soften. She starts imagining how they all got there? They’ve been collecting for three weeks now. Some have letters and numbers on them and others have made acquaintances with barnacles. They used to belong to something whole, and now they are fragments, ghosts of the time when they were in the company of others. Why is the collection she has now not enough? At what point does collecting something become a collection? Is it quantity? Is it a commitment? But a Commitment to what? Assemble Obsess Attend Present Bend Preserve Break Relate Connect Select Curate Sort Drag Stack Find Think 33 Lift Toss Look Walk Make Wash A pile of glass pieces is forming at the corner of the room, How many days? How many pieces? How big or small? Should one be for everyone that died from COVID? A collection of... Ai Wei Wei’s sunflower seeds installation had one million bits. My child began collecting dog stuffies at age seven right after our family dog passed away. She enacted and embodied dogs in her daily imaginative play, she still does. Her daily to-do list would read ‘play I am a dog’. In his book Collecting: An Unruly Passion, Werner Muensterberger (2014) defines collecting as "the selection, gathering, and keeping of objects of subjective value” (p. 4) and that collecting is a self-soothing mechanism to cope with traumatic events of a person's past. Drawing from Sigmund Freud, and Donald Winnicott, Anna Fodorova (2007) explicates that our attachment to objects is our defense mechanism against the anxiety that is provoked by various losses in our lives; “the objects we use and our attachment to them fend off anxiety about the transience of our lives” (p. 109). In some ways, one could think of the creation of material culture and our collection of it as both human’s passion and expression of life as well as coping with our ultimate grief, its loss. 34 Collection and Museum Studies, Muñoz and Bennett At last, in my interdisciplinary journey to examine the concepts of collection and collecting across various discourses and disciplines, I turned to museum studies21 to think about what happens to objects which have been part of the social, cultural, political, and domestic spaces, when they enter the museum collection. In addition, I was curious about the kinds of concepts museum studies would provide for me as an artist to think about the objects that I have been collecting and those objects that I have been inviting my students to collect through various kinds of projects (I will expand on these projects in Chapter 3). I was interested to think about how collections and bringing of objects together can be generative as a pedagogical concept for me and my students, and as a situation. According to André Desvallées and François Mairesse (2015) a collection is a grouping of material or intangible objects such as works, artifacts, mentefacts, specimens, archive documents, testimonies that a person or an institution has “assembled, classified, selected, and preserved” (para. 1) and displays to an audience. But what happens to the object when it enters this construction that we call a collection? 21 At this moment in the scope of this thesis, I am focusing on the notion of collection and what happens when you bring objects together. The notion of museum and collecting practices is something Eurocentric in terms of the many discourses around it; however, it is not exclusive to western cultures and has been part of many geographical domains across a diverse range of cultures. I also recognize that there is much dissensus around this concept. As a public institution with educational responsibility, it's important to examine museums collecting practices in how the objects enter/ed the museum, who has access to museums, what kind of content is accessible, and how these contents are represented? For example, In Collecting and Colonial Violence, Paul Turnbal (2020) critiques the long lasting effects of museum collecting practices and discloses its deep power imbalance within a colonial project which contributed to the “racialisation of indigeneity within the European imaginary” (p. 452). Arguably many indigenous cultures criticized the transformation that was imposed on objects displayed in museums, for these belongings were and still are part of their culture and the practices that surround them. 35 I turned to Krzysztof Pomian, George Ellis Burcaw, Boris Groys and José Muñoz to think about this question. Krzysztof Pomian (1994) defines museum collection as “a set of natural or artificial objects, kept temporarily or permanently out of the economic circuit, afforded special protection in enclosed places adapted specifically for that purpose and put on display” (p. 162). For Pomian the objects displayed act as the link between the onlookers and the invisible worlds: power, status, gods, immortal realms, past events; myths; stories, and accounts. In some ways as these objects come together, something is being projected on them: the visible objects become imbued with meaning: they take on different kinds of characters and narratives and the space they occupy becomes a discursive space. George Ellis Burcaw (1997) in his book Introduction to Museum Work states that objects are collected in professional museums because of their educational potential. He defines collection as “the collected objects of a museum, acquired and preserved because of their potential value as examples, as reference material, or as objects of aesthetic or educational importance” (p. 14). Burcaw continues to explain that since their inception in the last century, “the educational, public museum has been devoted to research” and museums use their collection for “edification of humankind” (p. 121). In some ways museums bring collected objects to create a meaning, a narrative and a discursive space for what O'Donoghue (2020) regards as conversation, for what has not yet-been realized; understood; or brought to visibility. To me, the collected objects within the domestic space, classroom space, studio space and the grouping of the 36 objects have a different kind of narrative and the potential to generate a discursive and educative space. To me this educative potentially of the space that the bringing of these collected objects create, is what José Muñoz (2009) calls a ‘queer futurity’. I will expand on Muñoz’s notion of queer futurity later in this chapter. Boris Groys in The Logic of the Collection (1993) argues that the modern art production could be thought of as a result of ‘collecting strategies’ of modern museums (such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). For Groys what he refers to as “serious and autonomous art in the modern sense of the world” (p. 73) is produced to be collected. Groys explains that historically museums produced art by displaying them inside the museum, thus outside of their original cultural contexts (sacred, political, ritual, decorative, etc.). Moreover, the historical museum collected the already established cultural values and at the same time 'devaluated' them from the highest religious or 'life' values into art. On the other hand, modern art museums take something devalued from “the everyday life or of the socially deviant practices'' (p. 74), and 'revaluates' them into art and from consumer goods to collectors’ goods, for example in Duchamp’s ready-made. Groys calls this re-evaluating the value of ‘profane’ objects innovation. He states that “certain profane objects can be chosen by a specific artistic strategy and placed as innovation in the context of the museum collection” (p. 78). One then can argue that artists, influenced by modern museum collecting practices, tend to collect unspectacular objects with the intention to transform their already exhausted economic/useful value to that of discursive and educational value and perhaps queer value; what José Muñoz (2009) 37 refers to as ‘queer futurity’— one that considers a different understanding of the world. For Muñoz queerness is a potential and it does not yet exist, it is a potential that is not-yet conscious or not-yet imagined for the future and an ‘opening’ made possible by glancing critically at the past. The queer futurity is not an end but an opening or a horizon. It is a state of rejecting the now, a form of ‘disidentification’; Muñoz’s (2009) concept in his first book Disidentifications where he weaves Ernst Bloch’s idea of the “no longer conscious” from the past to “the not-yet here” of the future (p. xii). José Muñoz in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) refers to the work of queer cultural workers, Warhol and O’Hara, who state that though a quotidian object might appear to many people as “a locked-down dead commodity”, they carry an “opening and indeterminacy” (p. 9) to what has not yet been realized. He invites us to “see the past and the potentiality imbued within an object, the ways it might represent a mode of being and feeling that was then not quite there but nonetheless an opening” (p. 9). I am particularly thinking with Muñoz’s queer potentiality in the turn to the quotidian and profane object: in domestic, artistic and pedagogical practices; in the history, memory, and subjective practices and experiences that surround quotidian objects; and in the potential to realize what has not yet been realized. For me seeing and working with the potentiality of objects beyond their economic value is a kind of queering. Artists perhaps are interested in collecting objects because of their queer potentiality and value. 38 Collecting Bricks She22 misses him so much, the smell of his silky white fur dampened by morning mist. They took their daily walks by the shore behind the crescent between Balsam and Trafalgar Street in Kitsilano. She had been curious about these copper looking brick masses deeply embedded in the sand. How did they come to be? How did they make it to this shore? Some are so rounded. They must have been here for a while! She started to collect them. It became a daily and labour-intensive practice: practices of collecting, dragging, aching, carrying, resting, washing, bleeding, drying, assembling, photographing, thinking, priming, spillage, painting, waste, excitement, blockage, accidents, insights, pause, making… Some of the bricks were made from clay excavated from the grounds of Port Haney brickyard by the Chinese and Indian immigrants who manufactured them, and she found it interesting that she found them on the shores of Kitsilano beach. What were they doing there? She took them from that space. They are now scattered across the school yard in North Vancouver where she works. They have circulated through many small hands since they were exhibited in her exhibition, The Garden, in downtown Vancouver in 2017. As an artist, when I collect, I think about the object’s queer potentiality and value, and with the hope that its educative potentiality might find its place in the public art institution or a museum collection. Scattered around the beaches of Vancouver there lies many eroded and rounded pieces of bricks softened by the repeated movement of the tides. It draws my attention like a child that notices its playability to do something 22 In the narrative and poetic extracts in this thesis I refer to myself as ‘she’ to separate my writer self from the one that is immersed and attuned to a particular scene to create a reflective space for something that has yet to be realized. 39 with. It's there but it's not obvious. I pick it up and continue to collect for days and months. I do research and play with its materiality. The bricks make their way into an exhibition at the Pendulum Gallery23. The bricks didn't make it to the museum of contemporary art or any permanent collection24, but they nonetheless remained a collection as a discursive space for me to think about these mundane discarded objects, in the social practices that surrounded them and in their materiality. And for the time that it was on display it was given a chance to be re-evaluated in all sorts of ways. With Jane Bennett’s notion of materiality, I began to think about the concept of collection and collecting in domestic spaces and as an artist who collects things. Following Bennett (2010), there is a case to be made on how things work with us; how they are affective and thus get our attention. For some, the process of collecting starts from early on. Or perhaps we enter the ongoing process from early on as we turn our attention towards the particularities of life. Perhaps it's not that we collect but maybe other forces come together to create the right conditions to attend to something, and in collecting we become entangled in a promise for what has not yet been realized25. And to think alongside Sara Ahmed, what is the use in collecting? Ahmed (2019) states that “an object has been shaped by the requirements of use” (p. 26). What if we think about 23 Pendulum Gallery, Vancouver, exhibition title: Garden, 2017. 24 Please see Carl Andre’s (Folland, 2023) 1966’s minimalist sculpture, Lever, where the artist arranged 137 prefabricated firebricks in a horizontal line on the floor of the museum with one side adjacent to the wall. For me Andre was queering with notions of what sculpture could be. For Muñoz (2009) queering is “that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing” (p. 1)and that queerness exists for us as an ideology that can be inspired by the past to imagine a future (p. 1). Andre’s practice tended to disrupt the historical and normative practices of Western sculpture and contributed to the art discourses of his time and as such created discursive spaces for us to consider other ways of understanding what constitutes sculpture, for example horizontality, removal of composition, removal of meaning. 25 I will expand on Jane Bennett’s materiality in the Domestic Objects section of this chapter. 40 collecting something as a thing that is defined by its use? In this frame what is the use in what is collected? Some things are collected with the intention and the consideration of its use, some things are collected with a promise of a use and sometimes the unwanted comes together to form an unwanted collection and in all these modalities and scenes all sorts of things are happening, leaving a remainder that exceeds our thinking. It is never a clean process. At last, I return to Mieke Bal’s (2009) notion of traveling concepts in how concepts are operative and performative and enable us to think with them. In this expedition, I turned to other scholars of various discourses and disciplines to think with and about the concept of collection and collecting. For me, the word collection has come to be a rich concept that I think with, play with, create with, write with, teach with and live with. It is more than an assemblage of things gathered over time as it might appear at first glance. As an artist collecting for me is in the curiosity and playfulness of the quest that leads to accumulation of the object over time. But it is also beyond just a collection. It is also about collecting: the act of looking for the object that I like, the repetition and variation of movements, the becoming familiar with the space in which I look for these objects and the attentiveness to the subtleties that exist in the place where I collect these objects. Is there a difference between an assemblage of things and a collection? A collection is something more; it entails not only collecting the object of interest but is in the invisible, the embodiment, the process, the playfulness of bringing things together, and in the possibility of creating something. 41 Collecting and Materiality In the preliminary stages of my research, my interest was on collection and the act of collecting. I was curious about what a collection is and what it means to collect. Bennett (2010) explicates Adorno’s26 materialism to introduce her concept of vital materiality where all bodies are thought of as things with the potentiality to act upon other bodies and in doing so become vulnerable and “suffer action”. Tim Ingold (2013) refers to this as correspondence. Ingold invokes Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective on “following the material” (p. 94) to discern the body as a thing in which we no longer can speak of the relationship of bodies to things. He uses artisan’s and dancer’s correspondence with material to conclude that a body can be regarded as a thing and therefore its relationship with the world becomes a reciprocal correspondence between things. As an artisan follows and corresponds with material in making of a thing, a dancer, as body, moves within the “dance of animacy” (p. 101) where bodies correspond with one another, therefore the body can then be regarded as a thing―a thing that corresponds with other things. And just like things are brought into being through processes, bodies are brought into being, becoming and carrying on by processes. In this view, a collection can be viewed as a continuously coming together of thing power[s] (Bennett, 2010) that form differing intensities and forces; forces that act upon somethings and consequently, suffer actions. Within the assemblage of domestic space, things like clumps of hair, 26 In Negative Dialectics, Adorno (1973) regards ‘qualitative moment’ as the object’s excess which cannot be fully captured by conceptualization. He states that, ”[…] objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder” (p. 5). 42 trash, pantry moth, mice dropping, spillage, rotten food, misunderstandings, resistance, and disagreements are perhaps part of these entanglements and the coming together of thing powers. This turn has the potential to unfold assemblages of relations and bodies that can extend our understanding of the world we live in. These potential circumstances to extend our understanding reside among us in the turn towards domestic space. In this light I propose an art education that turns to domestic space as a living and performative collection. As an artist, I have been collecting with a promise of something that has yet to be realized—the not-yet. In its undertaking I have become attuned with the processes that are already entangled with other bodies, assemblages. In one instance, this entailed a daily practice of walking, scanning, gathering, sifting through, carrying, and organizing sea glass pieces by colours and shapes from the shores of Vancouver. Through the repeated practice of collecting, I have come to know the place through a particular lens, for example the relation between particular light and glass colour: during overcast, the sea glass pieces appear to be more visible. During low tide most glass pieces are found where the seashells have been mainly crushed up over time. I have also become different by the practice of collecting—my gaze and body posture have been transformed by it. I have developed a soft gaze where my eyes are not focused but are attuned to certain colour patches, sizes and shapes. My body bends slightly forward in coordination with my gaze. In the extract below and the following section I will take the reader on a journey 43 that considers both materiality and subjectivity27 (specifically the political potential) of objects in the assemblages of life lived experience). It was a beautiful sunny morning in Tsawwassen. She had a corky sign on the door to her house, though I can’t remember what it read. She welcomed us in. It looked just like her old office at UBC, only on a much larger scale. There were collections of all sorts of things she and her husband had gathered over the years. Things from a long time ago, things with wheels, things in similar colours or similar shapes, things from different places, all kinds of times, and all sorts of spaces. She made us coffee and took us to her baskets. “This one is my favorite”, she said, holding it tight to her chest. We selected a dozen baskets and headed to the beach. We started collecting a variety of natural and synthetic things. We brought them back to the studio and organized them into some sort of a collection for our workshop at the 2019 International Society of Education in Art (INSEA) conference at UBC. After the INSEA conference ended, we returned the excess to the studio, this time in a jumbled-up mess. Shortly after, something else was animated: Displacement—an exhibition meant as a commentary on the displacement of Vancouver artists from their creative spaces which transformed into a sixty plus inanimate puppets and two publications This year I used two publications in teaching one of my grade 9 units titled Art and Politics. The first publication was titled A City Without Art? No Net Loss, Plus! (2019) is a detailed survey and a political act by the Eastside Culture Crawl Society in 27 By subjectivity I am referring to practices, uses, relationalities, history, memory, and hope in thinking with Sara Ahmed and José Muñoz. 44 2019 about the shortage and displacement of artist production spaces in the city. The publication cited my understanding of dis-place-ment as “a removal of something(s) from its place. Displacement entails both displacing and being displaced; an entanglement that inherits visible and invisible qualities, thus demanding personal, socio-economic, cultural, political and environmental considerations as well as critical observations” (Eastside Culture Crawl Society et al., 2019, p. 4). This political gesture led to another publication, a comprehensive artist interview by the Georgia Straight about the experience of displacement by artists in Vancouver. Now the East Vancouver industrial area where many artist studios exist is being considered for Artist District zoning. We used printmaking as an art form to explore the potentiality of art to evoke conversations: conversations that invited questions and animated thought. As suggested by O'Donoghue (2020) these questions and thoughts were possible by the “participation of many”, since the “established ways of seeing, relating, interpreting, and representing” was interrupted, allowing insight and extension of “what one already knows” (p. 297). We collects things for all sorts of reasons: a purpose or a potential, and sometimes the unwanted comes together to form a collection and in all these scenarios things do in fact exceed our experiences and our intended use for them. 45 Chapter 2 Thinking with A Turn to Domestic Objects: Subjectivity and Materiality, Affects and Practices Thinking with Sara Ahmed (2019), Jane Bennett (2010), Tim Ingold (2013), and José Muñoz (2009) has guided my turn to domestic space as assemblages of materiality, subjectivity, and potentiality/queerness. In relation to my practice as a researcher, artist and educator, the modes of being and thinking they generate alongside each other and independently can never be separated. Seemingly neutral, domestic objects appear to be inanimate and quiet occupants of domestic life, yet they are powerful, loud, and animated “enmeshed in a dense network of relations” (Bennett, 2010, p. 13), materiality, uses, practices and hope. Thinking about objects in these lights, examining the works of these scholars in this chapter seems especially important. Pencil دادم Wood, graphite, paint and rubber, factory, and human come together to create you, an object that is seemingly simple, yet in its persistence to change, it creates something—responsible for all sorts of imminent and unexpected affects. You occupy a space between accessibility and mystery. Your graphite comes from carbon, something you share incipiently with diamond, yet your different structural formation makes one of you the strongest material known and the other accessible to daily use. And in use all sorts of things are happening: Populating an empty page, a white canvas, or an exam booklet... In one moment, when someone's freedom/life is being signed away—just or unjust... 46 Ideas getting pushed, pulled, underlined, or struck through... A making session at the studio shifting gear by an unwanted stroke or by a stroke of luck... a letter that ends up mending or ending a long-lasting relationship... In your what Jane Bennett (2010) calls “material recalcitrance” (p. 1) to being sharpened and being used... making a difference... All sorts of things are happening as your three-sided covalent carbons form what Bennett calls a “contingent tableau” (Bennett, 2010, p. 5); where the unexpected jolts one out of the elusive flow of a seemingly ordinary day. Ontologically objects are materials in formation. Even though objects seemingly appear to us as fixed, they are made of assemblage of matters/materials that are continuously corresponding with other matters/bodies and are continuously changing. A new kitchen sink might appear brand new. Over time traces of use appear on areas where water, scrub marks and traces of dishes; food scraps and dish soaps have changed its appearance. A newspaper article is placed on a fridge door and appears to be unused, but over time its paper starts to change colour and the corners would curl up. Ahmed (2019) explains that even though unused can refer for something that has not been used yet, it can also refer to something that has been stopped from being used. The once important newspaper article on the fridge stops being important in time or might gain a different kind of use: a reminder, a starting point for a conversation, new information useful in different situations. 47 Though, things continue to form and change even when they become ‘unused’ by us. Ahmed (2019) uses an example of a child’s favorite book, one that has the history of its use all over it like the kitchen sink. She explains that the book becomes unused when the child grows older and moves to a higher shelf to open room for other books. Or that the book becomes a support for other books in the bookshelf, or ‘a helping hand’ in stacking it with other books to reach something. But the book also collects dust; creates fingerprints in cooperation with dust, air, and fingers; or perhaps makes its way to thrift stores, recycling bins, or elsewhere. Chair یلدنص Its body has three parts: back, seat, and legs. Some have broken backs while others have broken legs. They come in different forms. Some can even rock and others can swing. All are welcomed in our house. How many legs? How old? How tall or short? My mind goes to the very old one at my grandmother’s house with the velvety green cushion— the one I fell off of and got some stitches. The scar is still there. It had almost four legs as one of them was half broken. Was I too rambunctious for her delicateness? What about the ones in grade one? I couldn’t sit on just one. I wanted to sit on all of them. Ms. Akbari never liked my choice, so were my mother’s words. The consequence was to stand in the corner of the room facing the wall with one leg up. I chose to stand on my right leg. There is the tall skinny tiniest one on the mantle with my grandmother’s picture resting on it. Here is the one I am sitting on. This one is a creative one and borrowed all her parts from others. The seat is from a mattress in the bedroom, the back is from a Danish cushion in the living room and the legs are from the bed platform— hand made by a local 48 carpenter just like the ones that we sat on in the evenings at my grandmother's porch while sipping sweetened black tea in 28 ناجنف Epistemologically, we make objects, use them, and come to know them and make sense of them in our interactions with them, and in the social practices they are entangled in29 —our human subjectivities. We come to ‘know’ a bar of soap by receiving it as a gift from a dear friend, the memories its fragments might evoke upon entering the bathroom, the lessons we learned in school, its ability to potentially remove most hazardous germs, the way it might hydrate or dehydrate our skin, and its carving and malleable capacity for making sculptures. Soaps and masks took on whole new level of significance and importance during the pandemic. Objects also occupy spaces and some of the objects operate as witnesses and ghosts of the past practices, the kinds of social practices that have not yet been conscious or have been lost. I think that turning and attending to these objects is a modality with learning and educative potentials, what José Muñoz (2009) calls a “queer utopia” (p. 91). Muñoz states that “queer utopia is a modality of critique that speaks to quotidian gestures as laden with potentiality” (p. 91). He discusses the potentiality for thinking differently and critically about the present in attending to the quotidian; a kind of “stepping out of the linearity of straight time” (p. 25) to question and contemplate the present moment. I was drawn to this quote by Muñoz in my turn to domestic objects and practice and in thinking about my own artistic and pedagogical practice and strategies. In Chapter 4 on ‘The Pedagogical Turn, prompted 28 Tiny Persian teacups. 29 For example, sewing needles have come to be used to stitch, mend, and repair garments, bags, cushions, quilts, and human bodies and how these practices have developed particular history of uses and practices, gender roles, expectations and biases around them. 49 by the Domestic Space’, I will further explain the pedagogical potential of this political turn. Muñoz is interested in the object and how the objects carry with them a history even if the history is not necessarily disclosed on first encounter. He believes that the past has a performative nature rather than being fixed and static. He states: It is important to call on the past, to animate it, understanding that the past has a performative nature, which is to say that rather than being static and fixed, the past does things. It is in this very way that the past is performative. (pp. 27-28) Some of these objects don’t reveal themselves easily30. Muñoz believes in the object and the role the object plays. Muñoz is asking us to work with objects to understand their past and histories as there are more to these objects than their appearance and temporal usefulness. Joshua Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyong’o, and Ann Pellegrini in the Foreword section of the new addition of Muñoz’s book Cruising Utopia (2019) write: Throughout Cruising Utopia, Muñoz mines the past for glimmers of utopian potential that are rich with the possibility of a past that “could have happened differently from the way that it actually did.” He invites us to put these glimmers to work, both as we cast a negative or critical picture of the insufficiencies of the present, but also as we undertake the work of hoping for, rehearsing, dreaming, 30 The idea that objects are there and have their names, but they need to be perceived, has been examined by other scholars such as Maxine Greene and John Dewey. See The Art of being Present: Educating for Aesthetic Encounters (Greene, 1984). 50 and charting new paths toward different and queerer futures. (p. xi) This aspect of Muñoz’s project spoke to me as I was interested in the educative potential of this kind of critical, and political turn to domestic objects and practices. I was interested in the kind of slow and critical attentiveness to these objects' history and biography and in the kind of educative potential this attentiveness can afford for myself as an artist and for my students. I was interested in these objects, in the spaces they have occupied, and in what they can reveal to us that have been forgotten or have not yet been realized— in the kind of social practices that surround racism, sexism, justice and use. Sara Ahmed (2019) is also interested in the history and biography of objects. She uses the example of an old table. Ahmed states that “the scratches on the table might tell us something about what the table was used for. We might think of the scratches left behind from use…as testimony. The table might testify to its own history” (p. 37). Objects testify their history of use and exploitation. My research, artistic and pedagogical practices inhabit this kind of attentiveness to the subjectivities and the political potential of objects. I am interested in the political nature of Muñoz’s project. Muñoz (2009) talks about, political in that “the present is not enough…for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging” (p. 27). There is also the materiality of these objects. Jane Bennett (2010) points out “the strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own 51 experience” (p. xvi). Bennett names the independence of objects or bodies from subjectivity a “thing power” or an “actant” (p. 3) — a moment that is possessed by things because in actuality things do affect bodies and in doing so, they decrease and increase their power. Figure 3 Campsite Assemblage Note. Taken from a campsite in Tofino, B.C. It shows the moment of independence possessed by things— as actants rather than objects used by humans. Despite packing things up and organizing, after the human occupants have left the site for a day, the wind, the crews, the objects, the garbage continue in the assemblage of becoming and correspondence between bodies and things. Photo: Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021. Tim Ingold refers to this as correspondence. Ingold (2013) invites us to examine the paradoxical proposition of objects and subjects where the former is material/object and the latter is body. In this view, the world appears to come together into fixed and 52 packaged entities (subjects and objects) that interact with one another. Bennett (2010) seeks “why speak of the agency of assemblages, and not, more modestly, of their capacity to form a “culture” or to “self-organize”, or to ‘participate’ in effects?” (p. 34). The bar of soap continues to affect and be affected beyond our human experience in becoming soggy, in dripping onto the counter, in joining other bodies in sewage and in contamination of ocean waters31. In this way, domestic objects exceed totalization and representation. They grow weak and strong in their sentimentality, materiality and relationality with other bodies. As such, they are not fixed and have a performative dimension. In this light, each household can also be viewed as what Bennett (2010), following Deleuze and Guattari, calls an assemblage32—an assemblage of collected objects that over time accumulates various intensities, textures, and forces “with a particular degree and duration of power” (p. 23). A Trailer called a Cricket: Home away from home Bags and Containers Garbage bag Ziploc bag Spice bag Beach bag Toiletry bag Towel bag Toys bag Rope bag Putty bag Dirty laundry bag Empty bags bag My bag His bag Her bag New bags… 31 Further see work on soap in Chapter 3 for an exploration of soap’s materiality. 32 On the notion of assemblage see footnote in Introduction Chapter. 53 Life on the road is a series of bagging encounters, bags of all sorts of categories, functions (and dysfunctions), things leaking and spilling in and out of something; some slowly and some fast, some brief and some last, some hidden and some exposed. Things that make sense and things that don’t make sense. And all along, efforts are in place to reorganize the leakage and make sense of it: sweeping, disposing, bagging, reconfiguring and on and on and on... Bags to organize things like the toiletry bag or the bag of ropes and bags to protect the inside from outside like hair clips, sunglasses and nuts and bags to protect the outside from inside: like the bag with the olive oil, the shampoo bag, and the honey bag and bags to keep out the mess like the garbage bag, the putty bag and the dirty laundry bag. Bag as a form of containment, control, order and meaning in the abyss of living and appear to be both a mental and literal human endeavor. We bag and compose to contain the dreamy image of a perfect getaway, one with clever rigs and functions. Bagging is a constant endeavor, She used her magic wand and stretched her tiny body upwards as far as it could to reach the apples. She was told to pick no more than five apples. She picked twelve and put them in a pink paper bag camouflaged. She withdrew from a Ziploc bag she had brought along with a leash and some putty bag—things she used before her dog passed away. In life on the road, there are both times of clear distinctions and blurry boundaries between comfort, needs, disposals, domesticity, and private and public practices. She has heard and participated in many forms and intensities of domestic disputes, garbage and bathroom disposals, private and public spaces in campgrounds. They are lively bodies in the assemblage of domestic practices and so they afford one to examine their relation with other bodies and recognize their 54 liveliness. I have been drawing from the work of Bennett and Muñoz to speak about objects’ materiality and performativity. Although I realize that both scholars come from different intellectual projects, traditions, and positions, and have different relations to objects, they both enlarge my thinking about objects in generative and different ways. In some respects, Bennett and Muñoz both don't believe in fixed identification and totalization of these objects, and even though they treat the study of objects very differently, they see them as objects of potential. Regarding objects, both scholars work with different sets of processes and genealogies33 of ideas, though to me their work is both political in different ways. Muñoz’s project is more embedded in subjectivities and human experiences while Bennett is more interested in the politics of how vibrant matters in cooperation with one another make something happen. For Bennett the ‘thing power’ and its vibrancy of forming alliances with other thing-matters to create an affect is a political endeavor. Bennett doesn't believe in the subject/object, I think for her our memories are what hold these objects and it might prohibit us to think imaginatively about them and release them into the future. For Muñoz queerness is a state of turning to the past not to reinstate history but to awaken the ‘no-longer-conscious’ and the ‘not- 33 Muñoz’s work is politically oriented and situated in Marxist ideologies. For Muñoz, attending to certain cultural production and aesthetic processes from the past is crucial in disrupting the hegemonic normative of now and re-imagining the future, what he conceptualizes as queer utopianism; a backward glance and an educated hope drawn from the critical utopianism of Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. He explicates this concept by attending to the particularities of certain gestures performed within art objects/productions (an example is a play by Amiri Baraka in 1967 called The Toilet). The play contains the intersectionality and performativity of identity and the complexity that this intersectionality brings about when thinking about sexual and racial differences. Muñoz’ turn to this production is a conceptual gesture that tends to criticize and disrupts the heterosexual and White dominated discourse of queer theory and subsequently invites one to attend to these productions through a queer and utopian lens. 55 yet-here’. I think Muñoz is interested in the object in how the objects carry with them a history even if the history is not necessarily disclosed on first encounter. Muñoz does not forget this history and use of objects and places in how these objects were used to enable, grant permission, or oppress. Muñoz is invoking us to glance back to reveal what has been missed and lost and Bennett is inviting us to glance along in correspondence to know differently, but both scholars are interested in the not-yet and reject easy categorization. Both scholars' projects speak to me. The way Muñoz thinks about quotidian is political and queer in nature as it criticizes the heteronormative and straight present by turning to aesthetic and cultural productions of the past not to reinstate the history but to read it differently and by invoking the future based in critical hope. The way Bennett thinks about quotidian is in its vibrancy and ‘thing power’ which criticizes human agency and invites us to expand our human actions that have resulted in issues such as climate change and resource deficiency. These scholars come from different intellectual traditions and positions and as such I like to bring them together in thinking about the potential of turning to domestic objects as objects of potential in art education and in thinking about my own artistic practices. Embarking in this research was enlightening for me while acknowledging that as a researcher no matter what my position is I also will have my own blind spots— as I orient myself towards something I will inevitably turn away from something else. I also realized that bringing scholars that come from very different positions and ways of thinking does not have to replace one’s thought over the other, it has the potential to create space to consider them differently and come to new realizations and 56 understandings. I think there is something to be considered when we place these scholarly works in relation to one another by not eradicating one way of thinking and replacing it with another way of thinking. Let’s use an example of a mug: a mug comes about through a whole design process: its consideration for size and scale so it can hold a certain amount of liquid that one can hold in their hand. There is also a whole lot of ceramic knowledge on how to keep the liquid from sipping through it. There is a whole lot of knowledge that we don't want to discount when we think about materiality as well, though it is helpful to think about knowledge as the collaboration of humans and non-human matters and not as something fixed/totalized. In Vibrant Matter, Bennett (2010) is asking us to surrender our us-ness to the experience of encountering and experiencing things. Maybe our own separateness is the problem that Bennett is trying to dismantle— we are not separate from these objects. In a way Bennett is talking about how all things come together including ourselves for something to happen. In some respect, we work with something and in working with something we dissolve into it, and something happens. Going back to the explanation of a bar of soap, we rub it against our skin, and it turns into liquid, and it turns into foam. The soap is not working upon us because in a way the heat of our skin and water all contribute to the transformation of the bar of soap, it's a collaboration of things/bodies. Bennett is not the only one who is talking about how things work upon us. Tim Ingold evokes a way of thinking through making in which the maker and materials continually ‘correspond’ with one another in the creation of form. For Ingold this is a reciprocal relationship as well. Ingold talks about how in time objects grow in us and we grow aside them and through them. Tim Ingold (2007) states: 57 As they swim in this ocean of materials, human beings do of course play a part in their transformations. So, too, do creatures of every other kind. Very often, humans take over from where non-humans have left off, as when they extract the wax secreted by bees to make the cell walls of the honeycomb for further use in the manufacture of candles, as an ingredient of paint (alongside linseed oil, egg yolk and a host of other concoctions), as a means of waterproofing and as a hardener in leatherwork. (p. 7) Though I have been talking about a turn to domestic objects as objects of potential in art education, I also want to acknowledge that the fascination with everyday objects has been of interest for decades within the context of modern art34. But in my experience, in the context of high school art education, the focus of teaching and learning practices have primarily been on making objects and using found objects and not necessarily attending to the domestic spaces and objects as objects of potential for thinking with, making with and learning with. In the current state of the world where climate change, environmental disasters, and human impact have become highlights of educational curriculum, along with idea of diversity, inclusivity, equity and justice, where schools as institutions have begun to think about developing Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity and Justice (DEIJ) committees, policies, and professional development, I propose an art 34 Usage of objects is evident in the history of collage beginning in the modernist period by cubist artists Braque and Picasso (Richman-Abdou, 2017) and continuing in the contemporary world from Marcel Duchamp's back then controversial work Fountain and the beginning of ready-mades (Moma Learning, n.d.) to works by Doris Salcedo (Tate Modern, n.d.) Liz Magor (Art21, 2016), Louise Nevelson (The MET, 2022) Mona Hatoum (White Cube, 2017) and many more. 58 education that reflectively inhabits materiality and subjectivity, and understands its political nature as a catalyst for thinking differently and for change. A kind of a curriculum that inhabits these spaces through a turn to domestic spaces and objects as these are the spaces and objects that students inhabit and interact with and their personal experience with these objects and within these spaces are what makes attending to them generative for learning. Needle (نزوس suzan) Figure 4 Needle Note. From left to right in the first column the text is written in Farsi alphabet. In the second column the text is written in Farsi using the English alphabet. ‘Suzan’ means needle in Farsi and ‘zan’ means woman. In the second column the word zan has been highlighted. In the third column only the yellow highlight box appears. In the last column the poem has been translated from Farsi to English. Photo Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2020. 59 Figure 5 Zan Note. Video configuration of the poem I have written on needle. Video Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2020. YouTube https://youtu.be/B1dySyJqdOM 60 Chapter 3 My Artistic Practice: Engaging with Materiality and Subjectivity As an artist, the turn to domestic objects has been a generative turn for me in encountering these objects in their materiality and our subjectivity35. This turn has led me to produce multiple bodies of work; with some I have lingered and with others, a swift encounter. Some inspired a narrative response and others evoked an idea to make. As an artist, for me art as research36 is a powerful phenomenon—my practice informs my thoughts, and my thoughts often prod me to a particular practice. For years my pedagogical practice has been informed by my art practice and vice versa. A turn to certain domestic objects has guided my art practice and consequently found their way into my teaching practice. In this chapter I will discuss three accounts of my art practice in the turn to domestic objects: soap, textbook, and bamboo blinds. Turn to Soap The turn to soap began with an idea to follow a bar of soap for a week. To pay attention to the kinds of things that emerged in my attentiveness to its materiality, potentiality, use and practices. Sara Ahmed (2019) explains that “thinking about the use 35 By subjectivity I am referring to practices, uses, relationalities, history, memory, and hope in thinking with Sara Ahmed and José Muñoz. 36 I draw from Dónal O'Donoghue (2009) when thinking about and using art as my research in the field of art education. Art-based research’s aesthetic qualities can generate space of encounter during and after art making where researcher can linger long enough for new thoughts and ideas to immerge. In other words, art-based research uses art and art making practices to create space for engagement and to create conditions for engagement. It can allow what is often unseen to come to visibility. Art and art making becomes a site and an encounter for critical engagement, reflection, and advancing ideas. 61 of words is to ask about where they go, how they acquire associations, and in what or whom they are found” (p. 3). I started with a new bar of soap. I paid close attention to the way in which I use the soap to wash my hands, especially the way in which I was washing my hands due to Covid-19 and the health suggestions and protocols that were advised by the World Health Organization (WHO). I also paid close attention to how hand washing as a practice and hand washing using soap was changing me. Kathleen Stewart (2007) in her book Ordinary Affects describes the body with the tendency to “mold itself to every new techno-gadget that comes along” (p. 75). I think maybe Stewart was referring to how perhaps iPads and iPhones have affected our postures, social behaviors, and practices. The body indeed molds itself to new practices that come along. In a way, a disruption in the ways of ordinary life can become an encounter that can have an affective quality for some and does something. Some are short-lived and others stick around for a while. 62 Figure 6 Soap Series, Daily Ritual Note. Video still taken from above about washing hands rituals due to Covid-19. Video by Rojia Dadaszadeh, 2020. YouTube https://youtu.be/8OJaOtWHlA4 Covid-19 has evoked, adjusted, and molded our bodies into certain kinds of practices and processes. The turn to soap was brimming with many learning potentials. It took me to various trajectories in going back to my own personal memories; to soap’s biography, history, and symbolic associations; and to its uses and practices and in doing so my thinking was enlarged beyond the daily handwashing encounter I had with it previously. Back in the day when my father would take us camping in Iran, we used to mix ashes from the night's campfire with the leftover fat from the dirty dishes and some hot water to wash them—a simplified version of a process called saponification which leads to making soap. What drew me to attend to soap’s other particularities was indeed its typical and apparent hygienic use and quality which was heightened by another 63 particular force, a thing power, in the assemblage of ordinary life. Covid-19 was indeed that force, a disruption that jolted something or someone. Using soap also took me back to the time when I first noticed spiked Punk hair on teenagers in Frankfurt in the 1980s. My father was working in Germany and sometimes he would take us with him. Shaved soap was the best and cheapest method to spike the hair. But the Punk style hair wasn’t just a fashion statement, indeed it was an anti-fashion, anti-authoritarianism, anti-establishment movement that began in the mid 1970s in London and New York by youth, “a response to the deleterious socio-economic conditions of the time and, for some, a reaction to the ‘boredom’ of everyday life” (Brauer, 2012, p. 77). In fact, other artists have already worked with soap’s materiality and political potential to create provocative and evocative works of art. Emmanuel Tussore’s 2017 installation Study of a Soap is made with Aleppo soap carved to resemble the war zone ruins in Syria. In an interview with Talking About Art, Tussore speaks about his daily hygiene use of this Syrian Aleppo soap as “something that had a direct physical link to a place where millions of other bodies were suffering and dying, a place that was no more for the millions of refugees massively escaping to Europe” and that the Western perspective of the war over there is always “far away'' and “abstract” (Saheb, 2017, para. 3). Tussore (2017) explains that soap as a material becomes a “link”. [these] ruins suggest the characters of a mysterious alphabet telling of absence, loss, exile, thus questioning the fundamental notions of humanism. Highlighting the remains of an intimate story as part of 64 the collective memory, they allow all hopes for a possible reconstruction. (para. 1) To me this domestic object becomes a link between the personal and the political, between the individual and the collective, between the present that is here and the present that is there, between now and then; a link that places the dis-placed and the out-of-sight under scrutiny, study, and a potential realization, a hope. Mona Hatoum’s (Wallis, 2013, para. 2) 1996 installation of Present Tense consisted of 2,200 square blocks of Nablus soap from Nablus Palestine, with red beads pressed in them. The pressed red beads created an abstract map of the Middle East reflecting the political climate of the area. The work is inspired by the artist's personal history of exile due to the civil war outbreak in the area. The title Present Tense draws attention to the notion of present time and the tenseness that continues to prevail in that area (Wallis, 2013, para. 2). For Hatoum, soap’s materiality and translucency “highlights the ephemeral state of recent territorial re-mapping, while on the other hand reflecting the persistent and lasting history of the Palestinian people” (Wallis, 2013, para.1). To me both artists work with soap’s materiality, history and biography and therefore its symbolic associations to create provocative and politically charged works of art. Soap as anti-authoritarian! A political soap! Soap for hope! Soap نوباص She kept running her wrinkly soft hands against her laundry washboard. 65 Sheeeh sheeh sheeh! Sheeeh sheeh sheeh! Sheeeh sheeh sheeh! Sheeeh sheeh sheeh! Sheeeh sheeh sheeh! I miss the scent, that raw and unconcealed smell of lye and fat forming a bond together. The bluish veins in her overly paled hands from the wash held their form at the last twist of a wring out. I don't know if it was the way she washed or if it was the soap itself that made the clean bed sheets so inviting for us kids to dive into. So endearing, so hopeful, so lively! She3 recently followed a bar of soap in ways that were not familiar to her. She used her partner’s wood carving tools to carve it into something. She promised him that she would take very good care of them. She immersed it in a jar of water and placed it in the small balcony right outside of the bathroom door overnight. It had become soft and malleable. She had been following this artist for a while who made video clips of frozen acrylic paints turned into recognizable objects; objects that were layered in hidden magical colours, chopped up with a palette knife, and gradually turning into a vibrant and luscious paint colour. What now? She cut up the soap into small pieces on a cutting board and stirred it until it transformed into a liquid substance. Then passed it through a sieve. She added food colouring and watched it change colours. She poured it into a bottle and used it to wash her hands. She reserved the water from the washes and in between each wash and took photographs. 66 Figure 7 Soap Series, Daily Ritual Note. Photo Rojia Dadazhzadeh, 2020 Figure 8 Soap Series, Hygienic Strawberry Custard Note. Video still. Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2020. YouTube https://youtube.com/shorts/KM7u2aQHjxY?feature=share 67 Overall, my turn to soap was versatile in the kind of artistic gestures and the kind of pedagogical undertaking (which I will explain in detail in Chapter 4 in a unit called A Turn to Domestic Objects) it animated. Turn to a Textbook There are certain objects that find themselves inhabiting the space we inhabit; objects that carry with them a history of certain social practices. Objects like textbooks are often suggestive of the kind of education one undertakes. Sitting on a bookshelf in our living room there are a few heavy and dense art history textbooks that I have read and engaged with from the time of my undergraduate education in visual arts. The history of art had been presented to me through these books. The textbooks become an object that I engage with by rethinking it based on my own lived experience. Flipping through the pages I come across the Bauhaus movement in arts and architecture. Though the Bauhaus is understood as one of the most influential avant-garde art schools that sought to change the way art was taught and its role in society, its story has often been down to a few famous men and even after a century the centrality of its women figures both as students and as teachers is still significantly misrepresented (Otto & Rössler, 2019, p. 6). In her famous essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Linda Nochlin (1971) contributes the absence of great women artists and their presence in art history to the impossibility of achieving artistic excellence due to the scarcity of opportunities and training. In her argument Nochlin points out that this is NOT an Individual or private dilemma but rather an institutional and public one and she invites scholars to engage in the historical analysis of the field. Correspondingly, 68 Otto and Rössler, point out that the Bauhaus policy had a “hidden agenda” to keep the number of female students low, despite their claim that gender does not play a role within the institution, women only occupied one third of the institution and were only allowed to register in women courses37 or what was known as “soft” areas (p. 9). Otto and Rössler (2019) explicate, drawing from Anja Baumhof’s The Gendered World of the Bauhaus (2001), that the Bauhaus’s pedagogical environment did not show progressiveness in term of gender equality as it continued to protect and preserve the conventional social values and the patriarchal hierarchy and power within the institution. The biographical work of Otto and Rössler on particular female artists sheds a new light on understanding the roles of women in the Bauhaus as it reveals the lives of forty-five Bauhaus women who were forgotten by most history books. My own education in art goes back to 1997 when I first got into the Fine Arts program at University of Waterloo. We had two women and eight men as faculty members. My courses in art history were textbook based and the textbooks were primarily Eurocentric and male dominated. This was my education and after I graduated, I became quite familiar with the names and stories of a few figures in art history, in museum exhibitions and in conversations. Twenty years later, while I have become an art educator, I was noticing that the same figures are being taught in elementary and secondary art classrooms. 37 Visit this link to view a photograph by Theodore Lux Feininger, taken in 1927 titled The Weavers on the Bauhaus Staircase. It shows some of the Bauhaus women in master of weaving workshop taught by Gunta Stölzl (left), with students Ljuba Monastirskaja (right), Grete Reichardt (left), Otti Berger, (right), Elisabeth Müller (light patterned sweater), Rosa Berger (dark sweater), Lis Beyer-Volger (center, white collar), Lena Meyer-Bergner (left), Ruth Hollós (far right) and Elisabeth Oestreicher (Loho, 2019) 69 It was September and she was back at work. There is always a week of professional development before kids come back from the summer holidays. In one of the sessions, they asked everyone some questions. She scans her head to find the answers and writes them on a piece of paper. At the end, the workshop facilitator asks everyone what they notice about their responses. All names were males! artists, politicians, architects, musicians, scientists, engineers, inventors, and on and on and on… That was a turning point for her to glance back at her own education in art and the kind of education she wanted to teach. For her it's not so much about gender equality as it is about diversity, about inclusivity and equity. Where are the females, the Black, the Indigenous, the people of colour in the curriculum? There is so much to unlearn, so much to learn differently, and to teach differently… Coral Woodbury is a contemporary artist whose work draws a critical attention to the omission of women’s contribution to art and their absence from art history that shape our understanding of avant-garde art and thereafter. Woodbury’s recent work Revised Edition (2021) is a series of ink portraits of women artists superimposed over the pages of Janson‘s History of Art. The book, first published in 1962, has been an influential art history book and was used as an art history reference book for educational 70 purposes and for generations shaped our understanding of western art but many women’s artistic contributions and voices were omitted from it until 1986, although the new editions are still heavily male dominated as are the presence of women in museum collections and representations. Woodbury (2022) in her biography describes herself as: a historian, gazing backward, and as an artist, creating anew” while her art is “a way to heal the injustices and omissions of art history”. Recognising that women were vital contributors to art history and yet excluded from it both in their own and subsequent times. (para. 3) Woman at Rest She is so tired and deserves to recuperate from work, her multiple roles in life, from the weight of history She was purging and cleaning out her classroom once again. She does that quite often; it helps her refocus and create a space for new ideas and possibilities to emerge. She shares a bookshelf with another art teacher. Her gaze catches a book she’s been seeing and crunching her teeth at for years. She finally decides to snatch the book and starts cutting into it. 71 Figure 9 Woman at Rest Series Note. Collage, on black matte Stonehenge paper, 9 x 11 inch, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021. 72 Figure 10 Woman at Rest Series Note. Collage, on black matte Stonehenge paper, 9 x 11 inch, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021. 73 Figure 11 Woman at Rest Series- Note. Collage, on black matte Stonehenge paper, 9 x 11 inch, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021. 74 Figure 12 Woman at Rest Series Note. Collage, on black matte Stonehenge paper, 9 x 11 inch, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021. 75 Figure 13 Woman at Rest Series Note. Collage, on black matte Stonehenge paper, 9 x 11 inch, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021. 76 Figure 14 Woman at Rest Series Note. Collage, on black matte Stonehenge paper, 9 x 11 inch, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021. 77 Figure 15 Woman at Rest Series Note. Collage, on black matte Stonehenge paper, 9 x 11 inch, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021. 78 When the pandemic happened, we were forced to make our private spaces public. I was told to teach from my own home, and it wasn’t by choice. I didn’t have access to my resources and my students didn’t have access to theirs either. I began to question my own environment and to look at objects that I lived with in a different way. When I think back to the books on my bookshelf at home, there were books that have come to have meanings for me. They were books that I have read and engaged with during my own art education, and they were books that through them the history of art had been presented to me. They became objects of encounter that I thought with38. This encounter led me to think about ideas of representation and responsibility in art education. The conditions of the pandemic had heightened my curiosities and attention to the idea of equal forms of representation in art education, in particular representation of gender and race. The pandemic has heightened how these social categories are lived differently. My books and my art education lacked fair representation of women and people of colour. I thought about the kind of responsibility I should strive for as an art educator. When I think about my relationship with my art history textbooks, perhaps I was in a compliant relationship with them. I had accepted what it was in them as a whole and a true account of art and art history, though a part of me had always felt eerie. In thinking about representation and responsibility in art education, I came to realize that one can develop a different kind of relationship with books other than compliance. One can even engage in their materiality and art making practice (my 38 I also engaged with the materiality of the books by reorganizing and reworking the content of the books which became another account and an opportunity to think about things that are important for me and for my practice as an art teacher. 79 example of cutting into them to create a series of collages). But I think that we must be taught to develop such critical engagement39 with books, because young people may not have reached a place of critical interrogation with the resources that are available to them and that are presented to them. In this thesis, and because of the generative encounter that I had with my textbooks at home during the pandemic, I have come to realize that perhaps fostering critical engagement with resources/materials that students are exposed to (texts, images, artworks, objects and materials) should be the responsibility of us teachers in the educational systems, specially at this transitional time in education where educators and institutions are actively engaging with ideas of equity, inclusivity, diversity and justice. This brings me to the practice of teaching and what it means to be a teacher. In my experience I have come to realize that as teachers we must not become whole consumers but rather critical consumers of resources. As teachers we should create things, manipulate things, and see the potential in things. We might not have access to the historical archives of some things, we might have plenty of well documented Eurocentric male dominated archive of things that have been valued more, but there are many other types of resources available that we educators can access, draw upon and engage with. As teachers we have the subjective capacity to be critical, to make ethical and appropriate decisions, and to be responsive to the students that we teach, to the 39 An example of fostering critical engagement would be to provide students with a piece of text and/or an image and ask students to read and figure out its content, and to ask students to question the claims made or ideas portrayed, to ask students to pay attention to who is included and who is not, to draw their attention to any predominance for certain styles, certain ways of representing the world or certain ways of respecting one group of people over another. 80 context and moments in which we teach from, and to our own practices. In this light for me teaching becomes about building the resources, noticing the resources at hand, and working with the resources. It's important for me to end this section by stating that I do not wish to reduce or formulate the figure of a teacher but rather to shed light on the complexity of teaching practice and the teaching life and how teaching art and the practice of art, and engagement with objects with aesthetic potentials is indeed a very entangled and multilayered process; entangled in many different traditions of art making, teaching, reading, writing, and keeping a home and how this entanglement and complexity can contribute to the texture of a teaching life. Turn to Bamboo Blinds and Shadows Most mornings she pulls down her blinds to soften the room atmosphere. She must use the rope. It’s a task she can do without as the cotton-based ropes get annoyingly knotted. It's a sacrifice she pays for the way they remind her of her grandmother's house. She came across them in Chinatown back when she just moved into her new place. She has been pulling the ropes for over a decade and has been watching shadows of different bodies casted through them. There is an entire world to observe and be curious about in the shadows of things, things in motion. Shadows are mysterious and fleeting. Their quality depends on the multiple correspondences; correspondences within the assemblage of things40. 40 Shadow’s quality is dependent on and in correspondence with factors including light, the source of light and its quality, distance between body/object and light, size of object, shape of object, the angle the light hits the object as well as object’s proximity to other bodies/objects/things with different surfaces. 81 They are participants in our optical perception of life. Shadows can creep into confined spaces and travel across multiple bodies. Shadows can get distorted no matter how ordinary the subject. A tiny hand casting a giant monstrous shadow on the wall. A playful and expressive shadow! Shadows can be subtle or strong, crisp or blurry. Shadows are dark and can create darkness, yet their existence is brought on by light. Each night we are all casted by a large shadow of the moon and each morning we cast shadows brought about by the sun. Shadows are not material yet present, but their presence comes to appearance under certain circumstances. We all have shadows. Shadows of our everyday practices. Although Covid-19 unexpectedly interrupted my daily life of working, teaching, making and learning, the shadow of these practices was not easily revealed to me before. Covid-19 was the light—the circumstance that brought these shadows to my attention. And there is also the orientation of the light which changes the quality of shadows. A turn to domestic spaces and objects was indeed the orientation of the light that allowed me to attend to the particularities of my shadows in my artistic and pedagogical practices and consequently bring about new possibilities in my artistic and pedagogical endeavors. 82 Figure 16 Bamboo Series, Shapes, Forms and Shadows Note. Sculpture, made with bamboo blinds and acrylic paint, photo was taken outside mid-day with natural light against a white paper with object adjacent to it, 4 x 4 x 11 inch, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021. 83 Figure 17 Bamboo Series, Shapes, Forms and Shadows Note. Sculpture, made with bamboo blinds and acrylic paint, photo was taken outside mid-day with natural light against a white paper with object adjacent to it, 4 x 4 x 9 inch, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021 84 Figure 18 Bamboo Series, Shapes, Forms and Shadows Note. Sculpture, made with bamboo blinds and acrylic paint, photo was taken inside mid-day with a projector light against a white textured wall with object adjacent to it, 4 x 4 x 9 inch, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021. . 85 Figure 19 Bamboo Series, Shapes, Forms and Shadows Note. Sculpture, made with bamboo blinds and acrylic paint, photo was taken inside in the evening with indoor light and object is sitting on a white surface and against a white wall and a few inches away from the wall, 8 x 8 x 12 inch, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2021. 86 Each turn has been an explorational journey of these objects’ materiality, performativity, political and educational potentials, uses, and practices. Each turn has been generative in the kind of artistic inspiration they evoked, in guiding the development of new units of inquiries and in enlarging my conceptual understandings and thinking regarding art education and my teaching practice. 87 Chapter 4 The Pedagogical Turn: prompted by the domestic space—new assemblages. She was in the small printer room when the meeting started. Her first Google Meet! They met online! As always, they asked if she and her colleagues had any questions or concerns. She felt the tightness and what felt like an impossible situation on her chest. She raised her hand and expressed her concern about “TEACHING ART ONLINE?” For Heidegger things become so familiar that they become absent in some ways. Sara Ahmed (2019) invokes Heidegger in stating that “when something stops working or cannot be used, it intrudes into consciousness”, yet such breakage can be “revealing of things...heightening our awareness of things” (p. 21). When COVID-19 pandemic jolted us into lockdown and social-distancing practices, my research on collection, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, took a particular turn towards objects in domestic spaces. Consequently, the modes of instructions and the conditions of interaction and exchange altered as classes moved online. In addition, the textures, forms, styles, materials and making practices changed along with it. There were limitations, but there were also possibilities. As an art educator, at first, I was faced with an intrusion and was resistant to move my art education curriculum to an online platform. Despite my initial resistance, the turn to domestic began to present me with a great potential for art education. A week into the break she was asked to take an online course. It was the first time she heard the terms “synchronous” and “asynchronous”. A few days before the end of the break, during another staff meeting, she heard a colleague talking about a C or a D or an L 88 structure. An idea emerged. I was to meet my students online during scheduled classes which were slightly shorter than the in-person schedule we were accustomed to. The plan was to carry on teaching and learning in an online environment through a synchronous/asynchronous framework. With that in mind, I developed the Five Cs, a teaching and learning framework that entailed multiple processes, each with designated synchronous or asynchronous components. I framed Five Cs around activities that enabled students to engage with their domestic space. The Five Cs entailed processes of collecting, curating, creating, collaborating, and communicating. We would use the durations of each class to work on various projects scaffolded to be built upon one another and ultimately encourage more complex engagement with the domestic space. Figure 20 The Five Cs Note. A synchronous/asynchronous framework to guide online teaching and learning, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2019. 89 My students and I would meet on Google Meet41 to review lessons. I would give my students clear guidelines to navigate their inquiry within their domestic space or immediate environment. I would present the lessons using a Google Document which students had editing access to. This allowed them to engage with each other’s work, something they would have had access to if we had been in the classroom together. This format made sharing students’ work with the larger school community possible. We used the school website and the school newsletter to share our domestic space inquiries. This form and style of teaching generated new possibilities for teaching and learning that were not apparent to me before the pandemic. To make the process of sharing students' creation, collaborating and communication in the online environment smoother, I asked my students to create a portable photo stage that they could take with them anywhere in their domestic environment where they can maximize the usage of natural lighting if possible. They were asked to use existing objects and materials that were readily accessible to them to create a three-sided photo booth with things like books, drawers, shoe boxes, etc. I gave them a handful of skills and strategies to capture a snap of their creation/situation while employing some simple aesthetic considerations. Since my students were sharing their domestic space, I had to take into consideration the ethical aspect of this kind of teaching and learning environment in how students would share their work and how they would operate from their private domestic spaces that would have been shared with other members of their home. When we met online during our Zoom meetings, I 41 A real time video conferencing platform by Google 90 gave my students the option of turning off their camera to protect their identity and the identity of the people they lived with. I also invited my students to frame their work using the 3-sided portable photo stage (Figure 24) that they could take to any corner of their home to limit exposure of their private domestic spaces and invited them to solely photograph objects that did not include people. Figure 21 Mini Photo Booth Note. Teacher’s example of a small homemade photo stage made with found objects within the domestic space and portable to take to different locations around the house. Photo Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2019. I started to think about the kinds of projects and activities that would allow my students to engage with their immediate environment and to think about the kinds of 91 things they had access to. I developed a series of projects that would build upon one another, the kinds of projects that would allow them access to materials at hand, connect them to what was happening in the world and ultimately would expand their thinking. The domestic space allowed access to all kinds of objects, from toothbrushes, ear plugs, toilet papers and pills to jewelry, candles, picture frames, and luggage. The potential for exploration was endless: sentimentality, domesticity, fear, privacy, hygiene, connection, isolation, gender identity, boredom, classism, sexism, racism, patriotism, family, environment, human impact and much more42. It was incredible to see how engaging with a simple activity would embark upon infinite possibilities for exploration. A turn to domestic objects afforded us with a multiplicity of encounters for learning and thinking. In some ways, the space of the classroom was a known space: it had recognizable objects, materials, processes, formats, and tools that we had come to anticipate and work with. Being in the domestic space felt different than the school environment and was rife with possibilities that were unexpected and different. In one of the lessons, I invited students to go around the house and collect multiple objects from which they could choose five things to create an assemblage. After they created their assemblages, I invited them to engage in a meaning-making exercise in which they were to write a short passage about the kinds of connections they could make between their assemblage and the current events, and the kinds of meanings that were evoked in the way the objects were assembled together. I was excited by the kinds of creation and exchange of ideas that these lessons were 42 This list of qualifiers is driven from my students' responses in the work that we did together. 92 enabling. One of the works was an assemblage of yellow reusable dishwashing gloves, a paint brush, a 5 strips acrylic mini paint container, a soap dispenser containing liquid soap, and a small bottle of hand sanitizer. They were assembled in such a way that when they casted a shadow it resembled a person. The brush appeared to be pressed inside one of the paint pots and was leaning against the soap dispenser. We ended the class with a few minutes of class discussion on meaning making and associations as one way to engage with the works. The class discussed how that particular assemblage was reflective of the current global pandemic, alluding to how the media could potentially paint a biased and misleading image of the pandemic. In one other instance, the assemblage consisted of a white vinegar plastic container pouring water into a glass cup. There was a dried-up plant inside the glass cup and the assemblage was held together with the support of a small hammer. The class discussion associated the work with the effect of plastic contamination on the environment and the physical property of the hammer associated with the seriousness of this global issue and the importance of attending to it. I was thrilled and excited by the potentiality of the coming together of these objects and the multiplicity of discussions and ideas. As lessons were carried out, I was curious about what other ways students’ domestic explorations can be shared, and what other ways as a school community we can connect with one another during the lockdown. Initially I created a single lesson on dyeing with domestic tools and materials using my 5 Cs structure. It intended to keep students and I connected during remote learning by engaging with each other’s domestic spaces and by sharing it. I used Google Document & Meet to exchange 93 learning and explorations of everyone with each other. I invited my students to gather rags; anything from old kitchen clothes, bedsheets to old pairs of socks, and then look for domestic materials for dyeing; plants from the garden/balcony/neighborhood, condiments, spices, fruits, vegetables, etc., and then add them to a pot with salt, white vinegar, and water. Similar to colour mixing, they could mix things together to see what comes about. Students documented their process using photographs and video and shared their work on a shared Google Document. As their teacher, I went into the project with my own interest and excitement and created a space of encounter for my students, in hopes that they would latch on to it and create lines of possibilities. My students appeared to be excited about working with and working within their domestic spaces as well as playing with alternative art making materials and processes that they were not accustomed to when they were in the art room on campus. Kathleen Stewart (2007) describes ordinary affects as an experiment that is not about revealing the truth about the world, but about the ''curiosity” and “speculation” that prompt us to pay attention to the forces that come about as “resonance or impact” (p. 1). She adds that “something throws itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation; a something both animated and inhabitable” (p. 1). Akin to Jane Bennett's notion of ‘thing power’ and ‘vibrant materiality’ and Tim Ingold’s notion of ‘materiality’ and ‘correspondence’, Stewart believes that there is an imminent potential in things, and in their coming together something happens. Ordinary affects do not come from fixed conditions and do not have to wait for some sort of definition and rationalization (p. 3). Drawing from Roland Barthes, Stewart explains that ordinary affects, as opposed to 94 their symbolic associations in what something might mean or represent, are “immanent, obtuse, and erratic” (p. 3). Their curiosity lies in “where they might travel and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance” (p. 3). Stewart’s idea of following the force and the potential of things coming together and what modes of knowing and relating might be evoked as a result was interesting to me. The lesson on dyeing things with domestic tools and materials was a thrilling and exciting project. During times of isolations, hearing the sounds of simmering mixture in pots from each household was intriguing. Since everyone was in lockdown, family members also became quite curious about this project. There was a buzz of excitement going around. I felt as though there was more to these beautiful fragments of dyed fabrics; a force, a ‘thing power’, a state of ‘potentiality and resonance’. Over a short period of time the project took on a different trajectory and became a much larger school wide initiative— a community-engaged art project. I taught my students to make fabric twine from the dyed fabrics. It was as if traces of the vibrancy of our domestic spaces and ordinary lives were residing in each fabric thread—an event of a thread or events of ordinary lives unwrapping! How can we connect our lives events together? Perhaps they were waiting and hoping to come together; to unite, to connect. I sent a letter out to all members of the community describing the project overview and invited people to participate in the event and to mail their ‘domestic threads’ to school. The project became Weaving Me to We. We were to create a School Tapestry by stitching our fabric twines together, connecting our singular ‘me’ to our collective ‘we’. 95 Figure 22 Weaving Me to We project Note. Top image on the left is a photograph of the dyeing process with balsamic vinegar. Top Image on the right is a photograph of the dyeing process with sea lettuce. Middle row image on the right is a photograph of dyed fabrics with turmeric, beet, blueberry, balsamic vinegar and tea. Middle row image on the right is a photograph of fabric dyed with turmeric, then woven into a fabric twine. Bottom image on the left is a photograph of mails received by the school community and the bottom clip on the right is a video still of me stitching the dyed fabric twines together upon return to campus. Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2019. YouTube https://youtu.be/Eqx5jElT-mc 96 The Pedagogical Turn: Returning to the school and new pedagogical possibilities In this section, I will introduce two units of inquiry. The first unit is called A Turn to Domestic Objects; a unit that was influenced by my working and teaching from home. The second unit of inquiry that I will introduce is a unit about working with clay that was previously titled Functionality and Pottery; I have now renamed it to An Encounter with Clay. Prompted by my thinking with Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, José Muñoz, and Kathleen Stewart, my turn to domestic space has enlarged my thinking and ultimately has altered the way I approach my teaching practice and the content with which I work. Months later, upon return to campus, she was faced with another intrusion: she was given instructions to teach in person along with a possibility of teaching a few designated remote learners. She suddenly missed the open-ended possibility that the turn to domestic objects had afforded her curriculum over the past few months. She was back in her classroom with art materials and equipment that she used to engage her students with. Firstly, resisting this intrusion, she remembered what Irit Rogoff said about how “learning is a series of turns”. She began to turn to her curriculum in art education as she continued to turn to the domestic space and reflected on the kinds of possibilities it animated and the ones it continues to animate. My art curriculum is an International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum that I have written, performed, and reflected-upon over the past decade ranging from grade six to grade twelve. Thinking with Jane Bennett’s (2010) vibrant materialism, José Muñoz’s (2009) ‘backward glance’, and Sara Ahmed’s (2019) concepts of ‘use’ complicated the way I thought about some of my existing units of inquiry as well as evoked creation of new ones. It elicited re-examination of some of the methodologies that I employed in 97 delivering the unit’s concepts. This included revamping the questions that I have asked my students to consider, the kind of tasks they undertake, and the assessment of the kinds of learning that takes place. Unit Plan I: A Turn to Domestic Objects It was early in the morning, when she walked into Room 3 in the Senior School to start her class. They had moved her grade 11/12 Visual Arts class out of the Art Room this year. She is still not comfortable with being in Room 3 but she enjoys her occasional side conversations with her colleague on ethics and politics. She projected onto the white board a video from Art 21 about the artist Kara Walker. She did a short intro about how artists potentially approach their research and making and invited her students to pay attention to the kinds of processes that Walker goes through in making her massive sugar sculpture installation. After watching the video, there was a class discussion on how Walker had used a single everyday material when she had come across an abandoned sugar factory, then started to do research on sugar and accumulated interesting concepts and history which led to her massive sugar sculpture production. She invited her students to choose an everyday domestic material to work with; something that could afford them to dive into the history and the associations that the material evokes43 and that could potentially guide their research, thinking, sketching, and making. She explained that their “final product” will be a video presentation44 similar to Art 21 video of Kara Walker’s process and work, demonstrating their thinking, research, sketches and making for this unit. She eased them into the process by offering them a statement of inquiry they could follow to navigate 43 Inspired by readings of Jane Bennett’s materialism, and Sara Ahmed’s notion of use, and José Muñoz’s backward glance and a turn to the past. 44 Link to A Turn To Salt, and A Turn to Medical Mask 98 their creative process: everyday domestic objects have the potential to examine social complexities such as injustice, exploitation, and domestic practices, in scrutiny. For Sara Ahmed (2019), in order to think about the use of something, one needs to think about “where they go, how they acquire associations, and in what or whom they are found” (p. 3). Kara Walker’s encounter with an abandoned sugar factory has inspired her work with sugar, inquiring about sugar’s uses, history, associations and practices. Ahmed points out that to follow the biography of something is to ask how it has been practiced and used in everyday life and as a result to attend to its complex associations and history (p. 3). Similar to Ahmed’s notion of following the biography of something, Walker’s interest in sugar’s performative biography guided her creative process and ultimately led to the creation of A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (2014) at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, a massive sugar-coated woman-sphinx sculpture with “undeniably black features" (Smith, 2014). Imbued with layers of associations and metaphors, Walker’s sculpture is inspired by place and history and therefore consumed by ideas of racism, sexism, and classism. The artist explains in an interview on Art 21 that the Sphinx accumulates its power by “upsetting expectations, one after the other” (Walker, 2014). For Walker sugar was a tiny grain with a capacious biography, what the word ‘use’ was for Ahmed (2019); “a small word with a lot of work to do” (p. 4). Walker’s interest in the biography of sugar brings forward for me José Muñoz’s (2009) concept of ‘backward glance’ in reference to Ernst Bloch’s notion of ‘educated 99 hope’ and ’concrete utopia’45. I am going to take a moment to really pay close attention to the conceptual richness and the conceptual permissions that part of Muñoz’s works allows me to do that is very particular to my teaching, artistic, and my scholarly practices. In his book Cruising Utopia, Muñoz explains that Bloch’s concrete utopia is about a ‘backward glance’ that entails a forward vision imminent in historical time, for Muñoz this is queering (see footnote 21 page 31). Muñoz invites us to glance at different times, at different objects, and at different spaces as it might offer us something that is there but has not yet shown up or has not yet been understood in some ways; a potentiality. An example of glancing backward would be examining public bathrooms. Public bathrooms are public, yet they are incredibly private spaces. The bathrooms serve as meeting places and pleasure spaces for some people who have a certain understanding and relation with certain signs, objects, and practices and at the same time they can be meaningless or have different meanings for others. Muñoz is referring to the symbolic practices (for instance having sex in the public bathrooms of New York city between two black and white men in a play written by Baraka in 1966 called The Toilet) that communities engage with in order to survive and in order to avoid certain kinds of violence. He speaks about the ghosts that are present in these spaces and objects; what these objects witnessed as being part of these repressed private practices and how layers of the past are always present in them to some degree. Muñoz is inviting us to glance backward to pay attention to the multiplicity of presence that objects and spaces can reveal to us. I wanted my students to turn to these objects and substances (among others: salt, soap, coffee, candle, medical mask), to glance 45 In his book Cruising Utopia, Muñoz (2009) connects Bloch’s concrete utopia in being different from the abstract utopia. See page 3 of Cruising Utopia. 100 backwards and to look with scrutiny at some of the histories of their uses and the social practices that surrounded them as I see them as objects that carry with them not only ordinary gestures, in hopes that it might bring to their awareness the ghosts that are present in these objects but are not easily visible; to bring to visibility perhaps some of the unjust histories that these objects have witnessed. In some ways as a teacher I wanted to enact the impulse that Muñoz encourages his readers to enact and that is to be curious about the multiplicity of presences that show up in a given moment or given situation—how the domestic objects has been framed as domestic objects because of the use to which they are put, but that it can always mean more than the way in which they are currently being used. I wanted my students to access this multiplicity that is present but not easily accessed in the objects they engaged with. For some, sugar might mean sweetness for their morning coffee, and for others the exploitation and the racism they have endured. In the unit A Turn to Domestic Objects, I invited my students to go beyond the everyday use of these mundane substances by following their cultural, material, and affective biography46, by making time and putting effort into looking into the history of social and domestic practices of exploitation, racism, and sexism that these substances 46 Some readers may think about the famous book, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective written by social cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. Appadurai (1986) states that methodologically speaking, it's only when things are in motion that they can reveal the social context they have been entangled in. And so, to illuminate the history of things and the social context they have been entangled in, we must not only follow their forms, uses, and trajectories, but also analyze these trajectories to better understand the “human transactions and circulations that enliven things” (p. 5). While I have not deeply engaged with Appadurai in this thesis, I want to recognize that the notion of following the social and cultural biography of object is something that he has mentioned in his work. 101 perhaps have witnessed. As an educator I hope to create space for students to make, think, and research where for instance coffee is no longer just a drink they make every day. I hope to create a space where my students take the time and embed themselves in a turn— in the materiality and the research, as a series of learning that changes them and critically engages them. Maxine Greene (2001) describes this as uncoupling from the ordinary and moving deliberately into an aesthetic space, a place where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, where we attend to a different aspect of things that “the cotton wool of habit has for so long obscured” (p. 69). The uncoupling from and the critical engagement with the ordinary is the kind of art education I am interested in. My hope was and is that through the unit A Turn to Domestic Object where my students turn toward the domestic and the mundane, they would be evoked to be present, to attend to the unattended, “to come alive, to think about their thinking, to create meanings, [and] to transform their lived worlds” (Greene & Lincoln Center Institute, 2001, p. 70). In addition, in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Sara Ahmed (2006) states that “bodies are shaped by histories” (pp. 552-553) and how that history can disappear as sometimes repetition of gesture makes something seem effortless and therefore their history disappear. For me, attending to the history of mundane things can reveal the history that is there but has disappeared from consciousness perhaps through the repetition of our ordinary encounters with them like drinking coffee with sugar and cream every morning. My way of revisiting domestic objects, which at first appear simple and banal, is the reorientation in my teaching to create a space for the political. Drawing from Ruth Gilmore, Edouard Louis (2019) in his 102 book Who Killed My Father described politics as that which separates some groups of people, whose lives are always nourished, and supported, from other populations, who are exposed to injustice and therefore premature deaths. Thinking back to my text and video on needle (نزوس suzan), the work is a conceptual play in creating a political space alluding to the historical, social, and political oppression of women47 and the kinds of violence they have been enduring48. Through usage of language, I tend to unpack the word needle نزوس by playing with the Farsi words it prefixes and suffixes. In the poem, despite what it suffixes and prefixes to, the word zan نز (meaning woman) carries with it violent connotations such as hitting, bullying, howling from pain/from being silenced, biased gender roles, disappearance of personhood, and agism. Suzan نزوس therefore is an artistic and conceptual gesture that creates a political space to consider the violence that has been suffered by a group of people. This is the kind of political gesture49 that this kind of art education can afford, not necessarily in the making of objects/things but in thinking and working with them. 47 Here women are used as an example of many oppressed groups of people such as homosexuals, trans genders, people of colour, and disabled folks. 48 As I am writing my final notes on نزوس suzan in January 2023, I realize that نزوس suzan is indeed being enacted and embodied across the globe by people of Iran and elsewhere against oppression and against violence during this Iranian revolution. Suzan is no longer only a conceptual gesture for me but a political one that is fueled by hope—perhaps a utopian and concrete hope which I would like to further engage with in my future studies. 49 I like to close this section by iterating that for me the political and the political gesture is a multifaceted and complex phenomenon that I would like to attend to in my future studies by engaging more deeply with the work of José Muñoz and Jacque Rancière’s notion of political. For Rancière (Gage, 2019) injustice and inequality are the forces that evoke social change. In his interview with Mark Foster Gage, Rancière denounces Plato’s view of workers not being able to do politics because they do not have the time as they need to work. Instead, Rancière points us to the political gesture that the worker embodies: “The laborer stops his arms in order to let his eyes take possession of the place” (p. 10). For Rancière politics happens in the common world, when those whose conditions of life do not allow them to have time take the time to redistribute justice and fairness that is denied to them. In the closing chapter of this study, I will further discuss where my curiosities and ambiguities reside regarding the concept of the political. 103 For Kara Walker as well, the glance backwards to sugar’s history and biography invoked a creation of a kind of symbolic work, a gesture, imbued with meanings referencing unfair social practices of racism, exploitation and sexism. Walker’s work for the future generation will evoke a ‘backward glance’ to revive ‘the-no-longer-conscious’ of its time and ‘the-not-yet’ visible of its future. Walker’s work with sugar also led her to explore the materiality and the potentiality of sugar in its various forms and textures: sugar syrup, sugar paste, powdered sugar, sugar grains, sugar glass and molasses. In her process, Walker had to play with these various forms and textures to understand and come to know how to work with sugar to create her sugar sculpture, something she couldn't have done just intellectually but rather through a series of correspondences and interactions with sugar with its thing-power and affective qualities. This materiality and correspondence also took place through collaboration with other artists and fabricators along with sequence of knowledge and technologies that have come before her to make the creation of her piece possible. Unit Plan II: An Encounter with Clay—Materialities and Correspondences, Uses and Functions, Concepts and Scholarships Several years ago, she wrote a unit of inquiry and titled it Functionality and Pottery. Back then her thinking was oriented towards concepts such as innovation and adaptation. She was considering these concepts through the lens of human agency, functionality, and subjectivity. Her teaching approaches and methodologies to this unit reflected this orientation and consequently the unit’s 104 ‘Statement of Inquiry’ read “interaction50 and adaptation to change can result in innovation”. Even then she was interested in the materiality of clay. She was excited to have her students work with it. Clay had just the right kind of properties to challenge her students' agency51. Clay’s immediate and unconcealed interaction with air, water, and fire made it a great material to work with. She was also excited to have her students tune into some of the subtle and unnoticed forces and materialities that were at play: hands, previous skills, moods, feedback, temperature, humidity. As her attention was directed towards these concepts, the questions that she asked guided her teaching and cultivated certain curiosities and inquiries: What is innovation? How can one be adaptive and innovative in their creative process? Can innovation happen without interaction and adaptation? O’Donoghue (2020) in his editorial Orientations, Dispositions, and Stances, in Art Education Research and Scholarship speaks about one of the contributors' research projects as follows: “In being directed, her attention was cultivated, challenged, nurtured, given to flight, and opened to possibilities that previously did not appear as such” (p. 188). Drawing from O’Donoghue, my thinking with Jane Bennett’s vibrant materialism directed, challenged and opened new kinds of possibilities for me. I changed the name of the unit from Functionality and Pottery to An Encounter with Clay. As my concepts and Statement of Inquiry52 changed, so did my questions that guided 50 Within the IB curriculum which you can see in figure 1 and 2, teachers opt to use colour-coding (key concept in red, related concepts in blue, and global context in green) for highlighting how the concepts taught are woven into the unit’s planning, teaching, and learning. 51 By agency I am referring to how students intended to bring their original ideas to reality and in the process of interacting with clay they would come to realize that they had to listen to clay, come to understand its vibrancy, materiality and its affective quality in interaction with other things. 52 In IB curriculum, a Statement of Inquiry is a statement that contains concepts that are going to be explored in the unit as well as the orientation (known as global context) with which to approach the inquiry. The Statement of Inquiry also informs the Lines of Inquiries which are questions that guide the exploration of concepts. 105 the unit’s inquiries: What is knowing? How does interaction with things lead to new ways of knowing? Can we ever know without experiencing? Since its inception, my thinking about this unit of inquiry has become more complex. In this section I will explain how An Encounter with Clay as a unit afforded my students and I the opportunity to extend our thinking about materiality and correspondences; uses and functions; and human agency and intentions. Bennett has extended my considerations about the kinds of interactions that occur in the making process with clay. Bennett’s (2019) political project gestures toward the ability of inanimate things (actants) to exceed independently beyond human experience and to expand our understanding of agency and affect beyond human meanings, habits, or projects. Bennett explains her concept of thing-power and vibrant materiality as the ability of inanimate things to create affect in subtle and dramatic ways (p. 6). For Bennett this materiality includes the human body. She states: It is easy to acknowledge that humans are composed of various material parts (the minerality of our bones, or the metal of our blood, or the electricity of our neurons). But it is more challenging to conceive of these materials as lively and self-organizing rather than as passive or mechanical means under the direction of something nonmaterial, that is, an active soul or mind. (p. 10) In this light, human and clay are not passive and mechanical matters but rather lively and vibrant matters that have the capacity to affect and be affected by other bodies and 106 things. It is amazing to watch how clay alters ever so dramatically or so subtly in correspondence with air, water, fire, and slip53. Fresh clay is a balance of hydration and dryness. Once out of the package, too much exposure will dry it out enough that one cannot mold it easily during the initial making process, and yet towards the end of the making session, more exposure to air is needed during the leather hard stage when carving and refining processes take place. Clay’s response to water is just as fascinating; too much makes it dissolve into a liquid chocolate substance and won’t allow it to hold and endure more highly gravitational forms, and just enough water sustains its freshness and malleability to do more vertical and curvy structures. This wet and malleable substance also transforms into a rock-solid form with exposure to fire at high temperature, though, if it has not had enough exposure to air, it can explode into many pieces during the firing process in the kiln. There are also other bodies and things contributing to these phenomena such as the way clay tends to draw out the moisture of the making hands that tend to mold and shape it into something, the way students find a middle ground between their original ideas and discovering the intricacy of working and interacting with clay. The interconnectedness, dependency and correspondents that surround working with clay makes clay a great educational substance to teach students about these concepts and more importantly to teach students about human agency in various life assemblages as not the one and only agentic force but one that works in correspondence with other things powers of life. She prints a large poster of the First Peoples 53 There are other bodies and things that are part of the assemblage of making with clay but for this section I intend to focus my thinking on how clay and elements of water, fire and air expand my thinking regarding concepts of materiality and correspondences. 107 Principles of Learning54. Her attention is directed towards the words ‘reciprocal relationship’. She uses her earth magnets to mount it on her whiteboard where she and her students can access it easily. She opens the file on her laptop. Instead of her previous concepts of innovation and adaptation, she revisits them and starts playing with other concepts until she finally settles with knowing, interaction, and reciprocity. Her Statement of inquiry reads as ‘Interaction with things is a series of reciprocal relationships that lead to new ways of knowing’ (see figure 1). She projected the Statement of Inquiry onto the projector’s screen and asked her students to join a small group of peers. She invited each group to create a mind-map as they discuss what each concept means to them and how these concepts might relate. Figure 23 An Encounter with Clay Note. Grade nine unit of inquiry. The unit’s key concept is in red, related concept in blue and global context in green, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2022 While Jane Bennett's project engages with a wide range of political topics, for the 54 Developed by The First Nations Education Steering Committee (FNSC) learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place. 108 purpose of my study I will focus on her idea of materiality and thing-power and how materials have the capacity to impact our bodies. It is noteworthy to mention that Bennett’s project does not claim that there is no difference between human and mineral. Yet she invites us to think of human as a complex and potent collection of various matters, in order to reduce the subject-object relationship, and to therefore raise awareness of the “shared materiality of all things” (p. 13). This stance allows a more horizontal, and less hierarchical and central, examination of the kinds of interactions that occur between human and non-human matters, which appears to be an important step toward a “more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things”, what Bennett calls as “ecological sensibility” (pp. viii, 11). Bennett (2010) states: [...] an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces. A lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonomous but as vital materialities. (p. 21). In addition, Bennett points out that the capaciousness of vibrant materialism extends our ideas of self-interest beyond an “end-in-itself” (p. 13). In a sense, we come to realize that our own materiality is entangled in relation with other bodies and things, and so to harm one aspect of this entanglement is to harm oneself. My hopes were that through this unit my students come to realize that just like working with clay, phenomena like climates change, forest fires, heat domes, Covid 19, consumerism, economical 109 inflations, etc. are not isolated phenomenon but series of bodies and things (including their and others) coming together to make it happen and to also realize their own immediacy to these phenomena perhaps provides the grounds for them to think, act, and hope for a different future however big or small. She asked her students if they can think of different ways we come to know something. Class came to an awkward pause, an uncomfortable state she was quite familiar with. She then asked the class if they know what an apple is and how they think they come to know what they know as an apple. Aside from the usual class comebacks, the class discussion took all kinds of turns and finally settled on discussion of Theory of Knowledge (TOK)55. More ideas were being bounced around. She then asked her students to take a piece of clay from the pile and to play with it and in a way ‘to come to know it’. She invited her students to briefly suspend what they know about clay, to play with it, and to attend to the kinds of interactions that took place in the process. She prompted them with questions like what is clay like? What can be made with it? How does the clay feel at the beginning and towards the end? How does it change when rolled out really thin, when water is added, and when worked with tools and with their hands? She then demonstrated very briefly a few pottery techniques (coiling and slab) and instructed her students to employ these techniques to make a small espresso cup. Class came to a wrap by her asking students to identify the kinds of interactions that took place in their making session and to identify the types of knowledge (using the TOK reference) that 55 Theory of knowledge (TOK) is an integral part of IB learning that urges both students and teachers to engage critically on the nature of knowledge, and on how we know what we claim to know. In TOK we come to know something by interweaving some or all the following: language, sense perception, emotion, reason, imagination, intuition, memory, and faith. See IB center webpage at https://ibo.org for more information on how TOK is integrated into the teaching and learning in the IB Diploma Program (DP). 110 occurred as a result. Parallel with Bennett’s vital materialities, another educational potential of this unit was for students to come to a realization that their interaction with things/bodies is reciprocal and corresponding in nature and has the potential to lead them to come to know something differently and corporeally. To some extent, in working with clay my students had to let go of their intentions, listen to clay, and be humbled by it. In thinking about uses and functions, I then turned to Sara Ahmed (2019) who states that “Just because something comes to exist for a purpose, we should not confuse what it was intended for with what it is or can be” (p. 35). At home, there is more to a coffee mug that has come to be used for drinking hot liquid. Its hollow and empty body has the potential to hold other things. It can hold flowers, coins, and pins. Its usefulness also goes beyond our relations with it. Its materiality and correspondence with things continue beyond us. If left with wet coins inside for example, its process of oxidation becomes apparent. When broken, drawing from Martin Heidegger, Ahmed explicates that when something is working, it vanishes from our consciousness and so when broken it interrupts this disappearance and our blindness to things and allows us access to aspects of it that were not conscious to us. For the purpose of this unit, I asked my students to look at the objects they use and live with at home, the kinds with the capacity to be made with clay: a coffee mug, a planter, a soap dispenser, etc. I wanted my students to imagine these objects broken and in doing so to think about the property of their object beyond what they have been used for and to think towards what they could potentially be. Here I would like to bring back again what I learned from 111 Ahmed because of how influential it has been in my thinking and in the kinds of teaching strategies that I employed during and in the context of this unit. Ahmed states that “things can be used in ways other than the way they were intended to be used or by those other than for whom they were intended” (p. 44). Thinking with this idea, I asked my students to start sketching their object as it appears to them and as what they use them for at home, then by imagining them broken, begin to think about what else they could be. When usefulness of a thing is suspended and separated from function, its vibrancy and thing-power becomes more apparent. A coffee mug that was originally intended to be used for an adult to drink coffee with perhaps can be used by a child to hold her precious sought out treasures. It might also be used to encase a cookie and behold a small spoon while being a fort for a child’s tiny toy character collections during her imaginative play. She introduced the unit’s assessment tasks and rubric to her students. She explained to them that they would be making a pottery piece that can be used beyond what it typically is meant to be used for. She provided them with an example to think with. She explained to them that a coffee mug is ordinarily designed and used to contain hot liquid and to drink from. And ask them if a design of a mug can consider other kinds of use beyond the containment of liquid and drinking? If it could also carry a cookie to be enjoyed with coffee? If it could prolong the temperature of coffee? In considering their innovative ideas, she urged them to consider the limitations of it and find a balance between their ideas and the quality of their design: Does your idea make washing the mug more problematic? Does it make the mug too heavy to lift for drinking? Is it suitable for working with clay? Is it meant to be used by a particular able body? 112 I don’t have a lot of memories of what I learned as a young student during my high school education56 because perhaps they were not taught at a personal and experiential level, and because perhaps how it was taught didn’t reach and move me as a young person; I was a very tactile and curious person. Since I felt I was deprived of personal and experienced-based learning, as a teacher I felt that this would be one of the core components of my pedagogical practices. Today with my own sense of professional and personal ethics in accord within the confines of my own institution, I made the choice of honoring and valuing process and experience in my teaching. To think about teaching the concepts of this unit, I would like to bring back an idea by Mieke Bal that I have touched upon previously as a way to demonstrate how I approached my thinking about the kinds of learning experiences that I wished to provide for my students in this unit. For Bal (2009) concepts are not fixed and require frameworks and practices to be meaningful and that we come to frame and surround concepts in order to make sense of them. Bal states that “no text yields meaning outside of the social world and cultural make-up of the reader” (p. 15). In thinking with Bal, I devised a unit in hopes and with the assumption57 that it would be meaningful for my students because I created conditions for my students to make personal connections with the concepts of the unit. I wove the unit’s concepts into real-life experiences students took part in during the unit. In weaving the theories into practice, I had to consider my teaching methodologies, the tasks I created for my students to 56 Textbook-based, memorization-based, provincial examinations-based were some of the core structures of teaching and the core structure of evaluating and assessing learning. 57 Because as a young student I didn’t have experiences that I could make personal connections with, as a teacher I am making the assumption that perhaps by creating opportunities for my students to make personal connections with the concepts of the unit, my students would have meaningful learning experiences. 113 undertake, the questions I asked them to think about, and the classroom environment (physical set up, student grouping, tools and materials). I used ‘GRASPS’ 58 as a framework to weave concepts into experiences. This framework enabled me to work the concepts (interaction, adaptation, knowing, reciprocal relationship) into teaching and learning experiences. Overall, the experiences that were provided in this unit allowed my students to engage with concepts through experiences that made learning for them hopefully meaningful, personal, and enriching. The figure below is a detailed description of phenomenological exploration of the concepts in this unit using the GRASPS framework. Figure 24 GRASPS for unit An Encounter with Clay Note. A detailed scope of how my unit’s concepts were phenomenologically explored using the ‘GRASPS framework’ in An Encounter with Clay unit, Rojia Dadashzadeh, 2022. 58 In IB, creating a GRASPS structure is an integral part of unit planning. The GRASPS structure allows both teachers and students to take on a real-world experience in the process of teaching and learning. It consists of the goal of the unit reflecting the unit’s ‘Statement of Inquiry’, role of the student, their audience, the situation they find themselves in, the potential product, and the standards they are assessed with. 114 The unit also invoked students to extend their ideas about uses of things by turning to the objects they live with and use, to question it and to follow its biography and its history. This is not to say that certain sets of knowledge and practices need to be eradicated and replaced by orienting students to think about use. Many processes have contributed to the creation of these pieces: hand building techniques, the science and technology about clay and kiln and about firing and glazing, the tools that are used to create pottery, and the existing and historical aesthetic considerations of things. But it was also important for me to have my students think about ‘use’ beyond what it has come to be for them up to this point; perhaps to think about who is using the mug they are making? What able body, age, person is using this object? Who is being excluded? And what are the implications of that? An Encounter with Clay was a unit and an opportunity with the potential to extend student’s understanding about material correspondences in working with clay’s many properties and thing power, to extend student’s understanding about human intentions and agency in balancing their original sketches of their domestic objects with the many other forces that are at play during the making process, and to extend student’s understanding of uses of objects they live with by inviting them to think beyond what they are intended to do and more on what they can be and continue to become—objects that perhaps through our daily and mundane interactions with them their history of uses and materiality might have disappeared for them. In this last section of this chapter, I would like to take a moment to think back and share what my students learned and valued, the types of responses and engagement I witnessed, and the challenges that we faced and how they shaped the direction of the 115 units that I have taught. I have been teaching An Encounter with Clay for multiple years now and often, specially at the beginning of the unit, some students are skeptical towards ideas59 of reciprocity, and material vibrancy, agency and “thing-power” perhaps because they have come to know clay as dead and inanimate. But towards the end of the unit, with the many experiences, questions, discussions, scaffolding, and reflections that are part of the process, most students would begin to understand the relational exchanges that occur throughout the unit in their interaction with clay at different stages. This is revealed to me mostly during classroom discussions and reflections that we carry on as the unit progresses. At the end of the unit when students created their pieces (each quite unique in their aesthetics and forms), we would place them alongside their sketches and discuss the processes that brought their work to realization. Students would speak about the many adjustments they had to make because of the kinds of encounters and interaction they had exchanged with clay (with its many attributes, vibrancy, and materiality), with their peers’ feedbacks, and with the limitation of the making space. I have taught this unit to grade nine students often in hopes to teach my student the power of process and the thoughts, ideas and realization that come along during the making process—in other words, the corresponding nature of making and the potential influence of these correspondences in how they shape their practice as young artists. I also noticed that those students that advance to grade 11 and 12 often think about the unit on clay when they are at the exploratory stages of their practice and feel more in tune with the multiplicity and reciprocity of making process and how it shapes 59 In thinking with Jane Bennett and Tim Ingold. 116 the ways we come to know something. I am often faced with a smile and a mischievous eye role when I remind my students of “that unit on clay in grade 9...”. When I think back to my unit on A Turn to Domestic Objects with my grade 11 and 12 students, I was faced with both enthusiasm and disinterestedness. I noticed that my students’ disinterest had partly to do with the vastly unknown and open nature of the unit; it was perhaps unusual for students to work and think with alternative materials and things. As the unit progressed and through scaffolding and guidance, students began to dive into the unit’s processes (playing with material, experimenting, researching, thinking, sketching, conceptualizing, prototyping, and reflecting) while making connections to Kara Walker’s sugar sculpture processes, they saw the value and the interconnectedness of the many processes that their turn to their object entailed. it was exciting to see the different lines of inquiries and the multiplicity of approaches60 that this unit granted. It had the life of its own. In thinking with Ahmed’s concept of use (objects can be used beyond what they are intended for), it had the potential to be lived, and used differently in the future encounters. In additions, in one instance, a student was working with salt and was skeptical about the vibrancy and the materiality of salt that I was inviting them to notice. A few months later, the same student who had completed their salt sculpture and had moved on, came across their work in the hallway of school, and noticed a kind of crystallization and deoxidization that was forming around the lid on the glass jar that was holding the 60 When I taught this unit in 2022, I had six students in my grade 11 and 12 visual arts class, each choosing to work with different substances/objects such as coffee, candle, medical mask, soap and, salt. 117 salt sculpture (please see footnote 41). We exchanged smiles that marked a moment of realization and revisited the concepts of materiality and vibrancy that things/matters/objects have. As a teacher I have come to realize that at times the kind of things that I hope my students to learn often come to realization outside of the art room and in instances that are not within the time frame that I have taught them, sometimes even years after. Learning might not always show up when we expect them. As educators, I think that we can create conditions and experiences for our students, in hopes that sometimes in the lives that they live, they will be able to make meaningful and profound connections with those experiences. 118 Closing Thoughts… I went on a journey, a very generative journey, a journey with and towards domestic objects and though this journey was not too far away, it took me to many places to think and to think differently than I thought before about the objects that we live with and their educational potential… I realized that things have names, uses and social practices that surrounded them and yet they appear to have a life of their own “as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects” (Bennett, 2010, p. 4). But in thinking with Ahmed (2019) I also came to realize that the way we use things gives a different texture to that life and that to use something one enters into a reciprocal exchange. I realized that we can never really break away from our subjective and reciprocal relationship with objects and things. We become attached to things, we collect things, we love things, and we pass things along. We also use things, get used to things, use things up, misuse things, overuse things, and stop using things. And simultaneously things have the life of their own, have efficacy, and material power: they join and leave assemblages and networks of relations and they continuously transform, and we transform with them. This journey of attending to domestic objects and spaces has evoked generative possibilities for my artistic and my pedagogical practices. It evokes a kind of curriculum that creates a space to think about these objects beyond what we think we know of them. It is the kind of curriculum that allows my students to engage with their space of 119 living more critically, to follow the biography of these objects, their own autobiography that is entangled with these objects, and to follow them as materials in formation with their affective power and materiality to be noticed beyond our human agency. For me this kind of art curriculum is a meaningful and generative way to engage with the political. while still engaging with some conventional forms of art making such as photography, collage, dying, and pottery, I have been thinking differently about my art curriculum by introducing and thinking differently about the materiality and performativity of seemingly mundane objects that we live with, in hopes to open up discursive spaces for us to think differently about the world and to be in the world. I have been doing this by turning to Kathleen Stewart’s (2008) notion of ordinary affects in becoming attentive and attuned to the affective nature of things in the assemblages of life’s events and singularities without trying to totalize them into a single overarching truth. I have also enjoyed the intellectual companionship of Sara Ahmed (2019) by thinking critically about the habitual, and the mundane by following the social practices and uses surrounding these objects. Furthermore Jane Bennett (2010) and Tim Ingold (2007, 2013) kept me wondrous and curious about the agentic and lively nature of things of life, independent of our human experience, and getting lost in the processes that these materials/things/bodies/objects bestow upon us to learn something new that we have not yet realized. And finally turning to José Muñoz (2009) was a way for me to further ask the difficult questions, to glance backwards at some of the difficult histories that these things and bodies were involved in, and to linger in the state of discomfort for something else to be realized that has not been realized or has been forgotten. 120 iPhone She reads the news on her new iPhone before going to bed at night. She is in Ucluelet, in the yurt the reception is poor, but it seems to get better at night. The news reads something about White Supremacy, another case of white violence in BIPOC communities in Vancouver. She is glad that the media has been covering the story (her story) since she was a young girl. She scans her memories to pinpoint the moment she felt self-conscious about who she was as an Iranian born in a Muslim family (things have changed over the years). Her memories take her to the first time she left Iran to go traveling with her family in Germany. She was twelve. She realizes it is hard to pinpoint the exact experience but rather an accumulation of years of something. Microaggressions are harder to pinpoint At breakfast her friend's husband brings up the activist work she has been doing since last year. The room comes to a stop for a moment. She feels important as she starts sharing her ideas. Everyone starts talking about their own experience with racism. At times voices are overlapped. She tries really hard not to interrupt. At night everyone gathers while smoking Hookah ( نایلق), sipping Persian tea at the campfire (the new normal due to the massive forest fires). She shares her story of the junior high school revolution. The whole morning, she felt something materializing under her skin, but she couldn’t pin down exactly what it was. She finally settled inside the Cricket61, and called her mom after a morning of packing and unpacking, doing the laundry at the local laundromat, and making coffee. She has been calling her every day to ask about Coco62. Her mom told her about a group in Iran who has been hacking into the Evin prison 61 The name of a small and compact trailer 62 Her parent's American Eskimo dog. 121 security camera and released some horrific videos of what goes on inside. She feels her insides coming together behind her eyes and bursts into a violent gush of tears. She can’t stop. She uses the white kitchen towel to wipe and hide the intensity from her mother. She is back home, and school has started, and she is thinking…and while she is doing that, she picks up weaving her tapestry. Accumulated over the years, the rows of colours and shapes are the sediments of the experiences that made an impression in her life. Working from home brought me closer to objects that at first seem mundane and perhaps homey but with some lingering and close scrutiny become much more. As an art educator, it was important to me that my students think about and engage with these objects and substances beyond their daily routine encounters and in doing so connect with other networks of ideas and thoughts. In my narrative above, once again I address the ‘political’ by turning toward an everyday object and attending to the many social forces that have been part of my own life and upbringing. For me, engaging in the political does not have to be harsh, it can be subtle yet impactful and powerful— it can be thinking about and through the domestic objects and their lives. In some ways for me engaging with the political is a kind of ‘weak theory’ approach to scholarship, thinking, knowing and doing. It is not loud and colossal, nonetheless, it is a kind of scholarship that is attuned to the textures, rhythms, intensities, and impacts of the ordinary things of life as they come in and out of various circulations and assemblages. It is a way of being and a way of committing to a practice and scholarship that is not reductive or concerned with representation, but rather generates new ideas, practices and ways of thinking through entangled, messy, and animated scenes. 122 I realize now that Covid-19 pandemic was a force and a journey that drew my attention towards domestic objects and spaces. It was a journey of personal, artistic, and pedagogical realization. It was a journey that made me realize that we as art educators need to turn to Jane Bennett's (2010) ‘thing power’ and Tim Ingold’s (2007, 2013) ‘materiality’ to take steps and teach towards a more ecologically sensible future. We need to turn to Sara Ahmed (2019) to think about use as a concept that can travel and create generative challenges and contradictions and that we need José Muñoz’s (2009) return to the past to examine and think of the not-yet for the future, and to be critical of the present in hope of a different future. We also need a kind of education that is humble, an education that decentralizes humans, an education that acknowledges the wisdom of the people of the past as well as a critical engagement with it towards a different and hopeful future. When I think back to the video of myself in Chapter 3 stitching the fabric twines that my students made for the Weaving Me to We project, I realize that it was more than just the documentation of the process. It was a moment where my pedagogical and artistic practices merged together and something new materialized. Weaving Me to We became a community-engaged project where the process of coming together and exploring the domestic space became a collective endeavor rife with hope. Perhaps a hope towards a different future, the kind of hope that Muñoz (2009) referred to as the failing present that is “insurmountable” but its difficulties and failures is the very condition of hope (p. 207, p. xiv). Muñoz states that “hope falters, we lose hope, but we need hope to think otherwise in the face of odds that are stacked against us (p. 207). 123 Covid-19 disrupted my teaching and learning routine habituated in using and working with the standard classroom art supplies, uses, processes, and thinking. This ‘pressure point’ pushed me to ‘turn’ towards domestic objects and the objects that I live with. As I discussed in the Introduction Chapter of this thesis, for Irit Rogoff (2008) “learning is a series of turns” (p. 8) and in a turn we shift away from something and towards something else, we engage deeply in a number of processes, ways of thinking, and doing and in these processes some things become activated and actualized in us. A turn to domestic objects and spaces expanded and extended my thinking about these objects imminent with educational potential. These objects might appear mundane at first but their entanglement with other bodies, processes, forces, uses, and practices bring about much to learn and think about. And what better way to teach about these ideas through the personal engagement of students with these objects and with the spaces they inhabit together. As well, a turn to domestic objects was indeed about encountering and working with concepts. Drawing from Adorno, Bennett (2010) explains that concepts require qualitative moments63 to be formed, but “no matter how refined and analytically precise one’s concepts become” (p. 14), they leave a remainder that goes beyond our control and knowledge. In this study I turned to concepts of materiality and thing power, uses and practices, collection and collecting, and hope and the political. But one can never fully explain these concepts as they are fluid, and they travel with other concepts and in 63 Our subjective understanding of our experience as defined in time, space, objects, events 124 their travels they use “qualitative moments”64 (Bennett, 2010, p. 15) to actualize themselves. And even though we rely on our experiences and subjectivities to conceptualize and make sense of these moments of reality, Bennett warns us to not lose sight of our entanglements with human and non-human things65 as configuration of bodies corresponding with other bodies in the agentic assemblages of life— to not lose sight of their wondrous and becoming nature. In this thesis, I spent a long and generative time with domestic objects and with the concepts they brought about, yet I commit to remain wondrous and in the moment to the magic of these objects and continue to enact, think, and discover with my students. Thinking back to my unit on clay, I was trying to teach my students to think about the agentic assemblage of things that exists along and beyond their agency. Even though the units in this study are about students turning to the objects they live with, they are also about working with concepts such as materiality, correspondences and agency. They are about the coming to an understanding that human and non-human agency, as Bennett (2010) drawing from John Frow explains, should get leveled out, horizontal and in relation to other vibrant matters instead of vertically “as a hierarchy of being” (p. 10). Drawing from Bennett, to me this horizontal engagement with the agentic assemblage of the world is also engaging with the political and “a step toward a more ecological sensibility” (p. 10). As scholars, we work with concepts and the concepts make sense and come to be because of our lived experiences and our subjectivities. This study made me realize that indeed research is an encounter, an encounter with ideas that are enlivened and 64 “Qualitative Moments” is a term Bennett draws from Adorno’s Negative Dialectic (ND, p. 43) that explains how concepts require moments of reality to be formed (Bennett, 2010, p. 15). 65 Plants, humans, guts, rocks, animals, bacteria, garbage, metal, etc. 125 examined in a series of singularities and lived experiences to reveal something that has not yet been revealed or realized. My turn to domestic objects and spaces have helped me encounter and work with certain concepts and have diversified and broadened my thinking around the kind of art education and curriculum I am interested in practicing. As I am coming to the end of this study, I’d like to create an opening for future studies. I see a deep connection between the work I am doing with my students and Bloch’s notion of ‘educated hope’ in relation to Muñoz’s notion of ‘backward glance’. It also calls to mind Jacques Rancière’s notion of ‘redistribution of the sensible’ and doing ‘political’. I would like to further engage with these scholars in future studies to explore the connection between the quotidian, hope, political, and my artistic, scholarly and pedagogical practices. Nonetheless I wanted to briefly express the potential I see at this moment in some of these ideas within the scope that I understand them in my pedagogical and scholarly practices. Muñoz (2009) describes the potentiality for thinking differently and critically about the present in attending to the quotidian, as a kind of “stepping out of the linearity of straight time” (p. 25) to question and contemplate the present moment. But Muñoz is perhaps also asking us to do more than just identifying and critiquing the problematic present time. Muñoz states that “queerness, if it is to have any political resonance, needs to be more than an identarian marker and articulate a forward-dawning futurity” (p. 357). He is asking us to engage in hope (educated hope) and to engage with the political by actively doing work towards a different future. I want my students to see the potential of critically engaging with the quotidian gestures to begin to imagine differently, and to engage with the political and 126 the doing for the future. My hope is that in future studies I can engage with educated hope in my teaching practice and in the encounters that I involve my students with and in the kinds of active futurity these encounters might evoke; for something to be realized but also for something to be actualized, even if they don’t happen immediately and even if they might not be actualized in some grant gesture. And for me that makes this kind of education worth teaching and the utopian hope that Muñoz has inspired me to continue to think about and do with. For me straddling both art-based research and art as scholarship were incredibly important and generative in this scholarly journey. Some aspects of my research such as my videos, my work with soap and my collages were approached as art-based research where the process provided me with ‘data’ to think with. At the same time, I was inspired by O’Donoghue’s (2015) idea of art as scholarship, for it conceptualizes research as “a disciplined, ordered, purposeful and systematic way” (p. 346) to arrive at knowledge, and scholarship as “a form of creative work that is receptive to thought and cultivates and nurtures it, without insisting that knowledge ought to be created to support or abandon previous understanding” (p. 346). For me, art as scholarship tends to honour the autonomy and the unruly nature of art as something bigger than the artist, the scholar, and the researcher. This approach does not limit the work’s potential beyond its original intent. I am not suggesting that art-based research is limiting the arts but rather by straddling both art-based research and art studio as scholarship, one can cultivate an ongoing opening and potentiality for the work, both for the researcher and the readers of the study. 127 Now at the end of this thesis, as a scholar, a teacher, and an artist and glancing back and reflecting on the processes I engaged with, the art that I have made, and the artists and scholars that I have thought with, have brought about important insights such as the complexity and multilayered nature of a teaching life, the political-hope-oriented and untamed nature of teaching and learning, and the educative potential of engaging with domestic object as non-spectacular-everyday objects with the potential to function beyond what they have been known to function as and used for. Lastly going to various discipline to explore concepts provided me the opportunity to make deeper connections between my artistic and pedagogical practices and the concepts I have been curious about. I have also come to realize that indeed concepts need to be contextualized in the lives that we live in order to be meaningful and generative and that my research has been enriched, because living a life of a teacher, artist, scholar, has brought these concepts alive for the work that I have been doing. There are also some difficulties in doing research. It lies in the fact that to do research we orient ourselves towards something. We take a stance and think with others to expand our thinking but in doing so we turn away from something else. Mieke Bal (2009) explains that concepts move and travel “between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods and between geographically dispersed academic communities'' (p. 20) and how in their travels their meaning and values change, and these changes need to be contemplated before, during and after each trip. Although I have been entangled with theoretical concepts and I have paid close 128 attention to name, articulate, think about, unpack, describe, examine my engagements with the objects in my personal and professional life, I remain wondrous. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Art Education & Theory
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
O’Donoghue, Dónal
Berard, Marie-France
A turn to domestic objects
Text