Forms of Education: Couldn't Get a Sense of It

Three years ago, during a talk at a university, a student asked me, “What is the relationship between your work and your teaching?”..

..I realized then that there was none. I might teach experimental forms and aesthetic vernaculars, but the way I taught it looked like any other art class from Mumbai to New York, part of that dominant sameness that is global art education. Also, my work happens neither in the studio nor through “research”, but in ways that I could not quite name back then. I usually would describe it, and sometimes still do, as “looking like ethnography from the outside” with important differences in purpose and method, observational, and then, Boalian or rooted in experimental histories of theater and film. It struck me that I could not teach all of this, in practice and in a way that encompassed all the surprise, boredom, hesitation, fear, improvisation and pleasure that the process can produce. I resolved to change the form and spirit of what and how I taught.

–Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s excerpt from her text The Third Teacher

Language: English