De kunstschool als ecosysteem

Foerageren als een artistieke tegenstrategie

Frederiek Bennema

This morning I went foraging for mushrooms. Armed with a foraging guide, knife, and basket, I entered the woodlands. With all senses wide open I started looking for patterns, landmarks, and points of reference. I knew that I was most likely to find the mushrooms I was eager to pick – penny buns or ceps – on open spots in the forest near oaks, birches, beeches, or coniferous trees. With plenty of oaks around and a heavy shower the previous night, it was a promising endeavour. Following a small unpaved track and later animal paths, I went deeper into the forest, finding traces of deer, wild boars, foxes, and badgers. Accompanied by an orchestra of birds, I encountered a great variety of plants, in recurring combinations. After a while I left the paths to finally find mushrooms. As a modern-day woman, I identified them with an app and the foraging guide, concluding that most where edible but not very tasty. While returning home empty-handed but with a valuable experience, I promised myself to go out again soon, but with an experienced mushroom forager.

This story is a starting point to investigate metaphorically how foraging as a practice with characteristics originating from the exploratory search for food in nature, could be applicable to art education. As a researcher and member of the teaching staff at Minerva Art Academy Groningen (Nl) I search together with students in various fields or domains, whether it concerns a physical space, material research, or a knowledge context. With my experience and knowledge, and equally important, through observing, attentively listening, and encountering obstacles together, I help students to recognize the potentialities to use and act upon. This enables students to conduct research through their artistic practice, exploring various things that fuel their work and role as future artists. In this article I outline foraging as a strategy for learning and doing research within the context of higher art education. As such, foraging in the broadest sense of the word, I will argue, is a practice and attitude that encompasses ecological thinking, care, and dialogue. I will highlight how foraging as a practice and attitude is already present in an educational environment and how insights into foraging can be a counter strategy for students to navigate the art school in ways that bypass hierarchical discipline, consumerism, and powerplay. Lastly, foraging will be linked to artistic research, and I will address how foraging therefore helps to establish artistic research as an emergent-based way of engaging in research and as opposed to more traditional research.

Before delving into foraging and how this practice fits into the art school, I will sketch the context from which the need for foraging as a strategy arises. Psychology researchers Peter M. Todd and Thomas T. Hills describe how humans create patches or clusters of rewarding resource items in both physical as in information spaces. Examples are supermarkets, with various food sections, farming or offices, and information space where one can find autocorrelated structures on the Internet such as Facebook groups, Wikipedia, or websites from municipalities.¹ This analysis of human behaviour is related to the sociological term ‘peg communities’ introduced by Zygmunt Bauman. Following Bauman: “The ‘pegs’ are points on which the scattered and shifting attention and diffuse and drifting concerns of many individuals can be simultaneously, and for a time, hanged.”² Pegs connect people through what they have in common, like the patches or clusters with rewarding resources connect people to what they need or look for. As the term patch is used in foraging research of Todd and Hills, whose theory I use in defining foraging as a research practice and attitude within the arts, I will furthermore use this term for indicating categories of resources as well as groupings within social structures and connections.

Unlike premodern societies, most categories that nowadays shape social structures are not solid entities, based on long-term thinking. As Zygmunt Bauman explains, society is being transformed by “the disappearance or weakening of social structures in which thinking, planning, and acting could be inscribed for a long time to come.”³ As a consequence, both political history and individual lives are split into short-term projects and episodes.⁴ Bauman refers to the current times as liquid modernity, which is characterized by many possibilities, but also comes with a package deal of uncertainties. This results in a state of our world as increasingly precarious and defined by “the diverse mobilities of peoples, objects, images, information and wastes; and of the complex interdependencies between, and social consequences of, these diverse mobilities”.⁵ Not only people move across countries and continents, but categories and patches are also being rearranged, and people are adrift in moving environments. In this global situation, the art academy resembles the patchy structure of most Western systems: the art school is categorized by courses, modules, majors, disciplines, years etc. The art academy is equally liquid, reflecting this shape shifting world, in a sense that the art academy modifies with change of management, commercial trends, subcultures, economic ties, political movements, technological innovation, and a blend of students from all over the world who come to study art or design. Synchronously, the art school is marked by a rigid structure of disciplines and departments, linked to policy rather than student needs.

Foraging is focused on the roles of individual members of the educational institute and how they engage with the educational ecosystem. It allows students to take on an ecological perspective, even if this is not explicitly acknowledged by the institute.

For the art academy, the Bologna Process has had a major impact on the current educational system. The agreement, which was signed in 1999 by the European ministers of education, marked the beginning of the neo-liberalization of education.⁶ Bologna sought to bring more coherence to higher education in Europe, through installing a three-cycle higher education system, Bachelor, Master, and doctoral studies, uniformity and comparability of qualifications among universities, and implementing a system of quality insurance. It promotes mobility of staff and students and aims at inclusivity, accessibility, making higher education in Europe more attractive and competitive worldwide.⁷ The standardization of education led to the implementation of the so-called catering regime. Pascal Gielen and Paul De Bruyne describe the catering regime as the school’s business administration imposing students, teachers, and scientific staff with rules they must comply with.⁸ According to Gielen and De Bruyne, this regime implies that “Responsibility lies foremost with the ‘organizing forces’, i.e. school boards and, at the end of the day, the authority or government that decides on educational policy.”⁹ In this system, students are clients or customers, and the art school a company, both parties delivering on demand, enhancing a competitive environment. Also, educational institutes compete in a struggle to obtain students, becoming increasingly corporate enterprises.

Another outcome of the Bologna Process is the desired mobility, from which many students, not only within Europe but also worldwide, benefit. The mix of students with various backgrounds offer many possibilities for sharing perspectives and learning from each other’s differences. However, not every school, student, or staff member is equally equipped to deal with, let alone pick the fruits of the current diversity of students. The uniform protocolized structures of the educational environment reinforce hierarchies, keep students within the boundaries of the silos like departments, or disciplines from which the art school consists, and prevent students to thrive within the diversity of the institute. Within the art school, it is often expected of students to experiment, to surprise their teachers, and to perform their true artistic nature. However, the system is based on demanding control mechanisms and power structures that obstruct students to find purpose in themselves and instead fulfil the aims of the school. Simultaneously, in an increasingly precarious world with overwhelming crises, it is tempting to stay within the borders of the prescribed educational categories like courses, modules, or a discipline.

As for research, the Bologna Agreement can be seen as an opportunity to establish research within the art academy. According to philosopher Dieter Lesage “the Bologna Process opens up a discursive space in which art academies can begin to understand themselves also as laboratories of artistic research.”¹⁰ Indeed, research within higher art education has developed enormously. Courses, projects, publications, exhibitions, and PhD programmes have resulted in a growing discourse around research within the arts. What is more, research has expanded into almost every field of art.¹¹ Despite the increasing interest in performative forms of knowledge transfer, it is still a persistent misunderstanding that research within the arts should be scientific or academic in the sense of relating to the modus operandi of established research disciplines. Lesage further states that: “for art academies, the academization process is absolutely not about becoming more scientific; it is about becoming more… artistic.”¹² Thus, with art schools as potential laboratories for artistic research, the development of artistic research from here can be an emancipatory movement for the arts.

In this global age shaped by power structures, in which artists not only move across continents but need to engage with moving environments, it is important to prepare students to develop their practices within a liquid world that simultaneously offers numerous opportunities as well as many insecurities. Also, students are embedded in an educational environment which is unstable and hierarchical too, making it a precarious context of both opportunities and insecurity. Within this current situation, I would like to introduce foraging as a counter strategy to the catering regime, a counter strategy that enables students to navigate the art academy in its full potential and that sheds a new light on artistic research as a challenger to other more established fields of inquiry.

What is foraging and how does it fit into the art school?

Foraging in a literal sense of gathering plants and herbs from nature, has become increasingly popular in Western countries the past few decades. From foraging schools in the Netherlands, urban foraging in cities in the United States, to foraging holidays in Scotland: a complete field of enterprises, activities, and events has been emerging the past decades. However, foraging is as old as mankind. Psychology researchers Peter M. Todd and Thomas T. Hills investigated foraging as a search process with evolutionary origins, which entails searching for resources in an environment that is structured with clusters of rewarding resources. This exploratory process takes place both externally, for information, material, or food, as well as internally as a cognitive search mechanism “to recall and reconstruct information from memory both for retrospective and prospective purposes.”¹³ Whether our ancestors navigated savannas for food and water, or we search contemporary cities for the best restaurant or nice ideas for a project, Todd and Hills argue that “a search strategy that works well to achieve high overall levels of reward is switching between exploiting local resources near where other resources have been found in the past and exploring farther afield when the local resources are depleted.”¹⁴ Our internal information space resembles structural qualities of external physical space. Like external physical space, our memory has a patchy structure, with information that can be near or far from other information, creating clusters of concepts and ideas. Toggling back and forth between exploitation and exploration, the foraging part is a risky enterprise, as emeritus reader in German film studies Martin Brady explains, “the forager may return with rich pickings or empty-handed. Unlike the hunter, the forager has no tracks to follow in pursuit of the quarry. What is more, the forager cannot rely on established paths.”¹⁵

Like in other fields, foraging in the arts and art education is an exploratory search for resources like information or materials. This counts for every student or teacher to a greater or lesser degree, not just for those who are adventurous. Since foraging as a name for a certain practice is new within art education, the exploratory search, internally or externally is most often not recognized as such and therefore predominantly an unconscious process. However, when acknowledged, we can see how foraging is present within artistic practices while trying out a different workshop or course, discovering a new discipline, artistic strategy, or a novel theoretical, political, or social context. The exploration can be a deliberate and self-inflicted engagement but can also be the result of a moving environment or changing circumstances. For instance, when years ago, the academy turned bi-lingual, and a group of Dutch students, assumed to follow a Dutch curriculum, found themselves in English-taught courses at the start of the year. Or when the academy was forced to operate online due to the COVID pandemic. Students were forced to search for ways to operate in new situations under insecure conditions. Not every student was able to forage and benefit from the new circumstances, some were lost in translations and were rather surviving than thriving.

Bringing awareness to foraging and offering ways to canalize it, will equip students to consciously develop their role as artist or designer within the complexity of the educational system. This system is not only characterized by a curriculum with a clear-cut structure in which students can choose to explore new areas: classes, modules, projects, studio sessions, trips, assessments etc, but also a dynamic force field shaped by power relations between management, teachers, students, cleaners, facility. There are many more factors that impact the art academy and the individual learning journeys; from the design of the building, the student population: scale, ratio in size between departments, origin and backgrounds of the students, the political and cultural climate of the city and region, to wars impacting global economy and political stability and the welfare of students who originate from those counties, but also climate change and let’s not forget the COVID pandemic. Some actors have a more concrete and immediate impact on the academy while the influence of others is harder to pin down; together they create a field of interdependencies. This makes the art academy an ecosystem, which is impossible to define within one sentence or capture within clear boundaries.

Like in nature, foraging students leave their comfortable field of interest, discipline, or routines to forage in another context or method

To further outline the analogy of foraging in nature, it is fitting to proceed exploring the art academy as an ecosystem. This ecological approach to education is based on how biology defines ecology, namely as the study of the relationships of organisms with their environment, which entails both other organisms and the physical surroundings. From an ecological approach, the learning environment can in its entirety be considered as an ecology. Art students work from the affordances of the environment in which they are embedded and incorporate possible values and meanings into their artistic processes. This environment can be the art school, but also a context outside the art academy.¹⁶ Ineke Edes, one of the developers of Ecological Pedagogy, states that: “From an ecological point of view, relations get their meaning only in context”.¹⁷ Translated to the art academy this entails that the school is organic and context dependent: each educational journey has an infinite number of perspectives and possibilities that change over time.¹⁸ This systemic perspective on the art school can help to understand the complexity and relationality of the educational system. However, foraging is focused on the roles of individual members of the educational institute and how they engage with the educational ecosystem. It allows students to take on an ecological perspective, even if this is not explicitly acknowledged by the institute. It also enables students to not be encapsulated in one specific category, since it is the tendency of educational systems to categorize in order to make the huge variety of students manageable. When students or teachers treat the academy as an ecosystem and not as an ever-expanding network of both efficiency driven and random connections, the art school becomes a relational fabric to them: “Because the dominant existential drive of ecology is not so much to extend itself but to hold together resilient relationships.”¹⁹ Navigating the art school through foraging from an ecological perspective starts with the awareness of being part of a bigger whole of interdependencies, while using the various patches like courses, projects or modules as open and breathing organs.

Foraging as a practice also encompasses reciprocal and empathetic aspects of care within the academy that enables students to dwell in the complexity of the relational web of the educational context and to not escape by placing themselves outside the context. I will highlight this type of care since care is diverse and is everywhere. This corresponds with the definition of care given by civil rights activist Bernice Fisher and political scientist Joan Tronto: “A species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world”.²⁰ It indicates seen and unseen dependencies. Within the academy there is care between friends and classmates, for the students’ development, or for the maintenance of the building, but care is also defined by power relations, people protecting their positions, care is bureaucratic, informed by the need to organize the administrative side of education, and care is efficiency driven to make results measurable. The type of care that characterizes foraging, is based on the ethics of foraging in nature. One of the basic rules of foraging in nature is to pick a small percentage of the plants you find and to leave alone endangered species. This way the forager takes care of the environment by leaving enough for others, for the plants to sustain or even multiply, by spreading seeds or splitting roots. It is furthermore an act of self-care for the forager to contribute to a flourishing environment because of the dependency on this ecosystem. This reciprocity should also be key within the art academy, foraging here should be a two-way road making students responsible actors, instead of enhancing a consumer attitude and individual growth within a competitive environment.

As a counter strategy, foraging within the art school implies being an intrinsic part of the art school while taking a position of care within the school’s ecosystem. The reciprocal nature of care defies a consumerist attitude of primarily using the educational environment for one’s own benefit. This attitude makes it not only hard to recognize unforeseen opportunities to act upon and to embrace new terrains to discover and learn from, but it also complicates making one’s potential available for others to use. Like in nature, foraging students leave their comfortable field of interest, discipline, or routines to forage in another context or method, to not simply discover and use the pickings they find, but to interact with the environment or situation, while being accountable for their actions. Through care, students can find what matters to them and take the responsibilities that come with their actions. To follow art critic and writer Jan Verwoert: “You perform because you care for someone or something. This care gives you the strength to act, not least because to not act is out of the question when someone or something you really care for or about requires that you should act.”²¹ Because of balancing one’s own interests and values in relation to the environment, foraging can also be related to feminist care ethics, since art theorist, writer, and educator Jacqueline Millner writes: “Feminist care ethics proposes a values revolution: to prioritize interrelation and interdependence over individuality and autonomy, to reward acts driven by the collective wellbeing of communities and ecologies rather than those motivated by self interest.”²² Learning through foraging is thus not a passive act of taking, but an act of giving too. One is caregiver and care receiver at once, growing, learning, and contributing to the educational ecology one is part of.

In line with the caring nature of foraging, I define foraging as dialogical, as it is reciprocal and relational accordingly. The dialogical aspects of foraging help to evolve not according to the rhythm of the measurement systems, but to be in continuous development; change and learn through interaction with the environment. Foraging shares with dialogue its interrogative nature. In philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s words: “If an answer does not give rise to a new question from itself, it falls out of the dialogue.”²³ Within the educational environment, students explore for sources or concepts in classes, projects, or with their peers through literal dialogue, which can be defined as: “an exchange of ideas and meanings that develops our thoughts and helps us to be aware of what we think and how we value things.”²⁴ Dialogically exploring also takes place figuratively and non-verbally in the artistic practice, with materials, objects, texts, or together in collaborations and co-creations. Within the search for ideas, connections, or materials, students engage in a dialogic relation with people or materials. While foraging dialogically one can, as it were, refine one’s role, through finding your own voice in relation to the other voices. Since through dialogue one’s “voice is formed in an ongoing process of anticipation and response to other voices.”²⁵ This makes foraging an empowering practice because it gives students, to some extent, control over their role and acting in a context of which they are a part. The finding will mutually change the forager and the environment or the other from which it is picked. This makes it necessary to take responsibility for the environment and for “the other’s becoming, as well as recognizing that the other’s voice has entered one’s own.”²⁶ Furthermore, to not drain or exploit the other, it is fundamental to foraging to acknowledge the values, work, ideas, of the other, whether it is a peer, a tutor, or someone from outside the educational realm. There are numerous ways of formalizing acknowledgements and still many conflicts can be traced back to the neglect of the origin of a work or idea, or in fact to people who are not listened to or cared for.

As in nature, to forage in the art school is to engage in a search for an unpredictable outcome. To challenge the goal-oriented system of the academy, it is vital that foraging is a risky exploration to become sensitive to opportunities to act upon and to be attentive to what can be used or not. Dialogue is necessary in the risky enterprise of foraging, moreover risk is inherent to engaging in dialogue. According to professor of educational psychology Jennifer C. Greene, a good dialogue is one “where participants are not simply behaving according to their role, but where they are actually engaging as persons.”²⁷ Fear for misunderstandings and revealing oneself as a person, can be fuelled by hierarchical situations or powerplay. For students it is often unclear what is expected of them and what the consequences are of things that are being said in a conversation. Because of this, students often play their assumed student role. An essential characteristic of dialoguing is therefore the willingness to take risks.²⁸ In order to embrace the risks of dialogue, one needs to be open to the other and find what is interesting about the other. This can be achieved by giving attention to the other through careful listening. To attentively engage in dialogue, is to suspend one’s own ideas and aims in order to give space to others to refine and develop their thoughts and ideas.²⁹ Subsequently, dialogue enables students to attune their aims and desires to others, various materials, practices, subjects, and on different scales, whether it is personal or on a metalevel, such as the climate crisis. Foraging students explore knowing that uncertainty is imperative to finding opportunities to develop their role. Thus, to forage is to embrace failure as part of the practice and educational journey, because failure is valuable too, as something to learn from for future explorations.

Foraging can be incorporated in class situations and assignments by encouraging experimentation and improvisation and guiding the student’s inquiries through observing, attentively listening, and caring

Due to its exploratory nature, foraging can be related to aspects of artistic research. As such it is helpful to find ways of engaging in research that challenge the expectations of other more established research disciplines. Foraging is a way of exploring and finding without searching for something explicitly and as such it resonates with artistic research as a search process which is open-ended and enables students to engage in an emergent-based way of working. Both foraging and artistic research are neither methodological and embedded in predetermined trajectories as in more traditional research, nor random as in wandering around or doing accidental discoveries. Cultural studies scholar Silvia Henke points out in the Manifesto of Artistic Research that artistic research “manages to dwell in various zones of uncertainty, of negativities, unclarities, or frictions, to work with fictions and disruptions and to invoke the subtlest details with accuracy and clarity and to make them aesthetically manifest.”³⁰ In both ways of doing research – foraging and artistic research – imagination is key. Students who forage within their practice combine internal and external foraging; exploring new terrains for materials or ideas while imagining internally what the possibilities are of things they encounter and how they might use and incorporate them into their work. Like foraging in nature, “internal foraging allows human and nonhuman animals to consider multiple courses of actions before initiating a choice”³¹ In nature foragers incorporate in their search process information from recent resource encounters. In the arts one does not only use memory to recognize structures, but foraging is a transformative search process of meaning making. Artists, therefore, through their foraging investigations, can open new perspectives on ways of being in the world, imagine scenarios and future states, that we cannot anticipate within the restrictions of our world.

In contrast to the catering regime, foraging as an element of artistic research offers the opportunity to unfold opportunities for acting and thinking differently, which can be used both within the practice of individual students, teachers, and to develop a pedagogy based on the principles of foraging. Foraging is based on searching for possibilities and making new connections. Artist, theorist, and educator Graeme Sullivan writes on research conducted within the arts: “Rather than seeing inquiry as a linear procedure or an enclosing process, research acts can also be interactive and reflexive whereby imaginative insight is constructed from a creative and critical practice.”³² It is fundamental to artistic research and a foraging state of mind that both the role and practice of students are not static, but processual, interactive, and reflexive. As such, foraging as a research act allows students to explore existing categories or patches that are new to them, and moreover to create new meaningful structures and categories within their practices. Thus, students can use the affordances of the environment in the continuous development of their role and practice through and from the realization of the context they are part of. Conducting exploratory and foraging-inspired research can be made explicit and supported by the academy and by that take on the role as a powerful incubator of foraging behaviour within a context of higher art education.

More concretely and operationally, foraging can be incorporated in class situations and assignments by encouraging experimentation and improvisation and above all by guiding the student’s inquiries through observing, attentively listening, and caring. Teachers offer their experiences, network, and knowledge to explore with their students for useful resources, from methods, skills, materials, physical spaces, useful contacts to philosophical, art historical, or sociological sources. Furthermore, offering foraging as a tool, implies a process-based evaluation approach allowing students to formulate their aims and desires, as a contrast to the focus on adapting to lines of control of specific categories. For management layers, promoting foraging as a practice and attitude entails to not give preference to protocols and control mechanisms but to allow regulations to result from a continuous dialogue with students, teachers, and other members of the art school. In doing so the academy can be viewed and maintained explicitly as an ecosystem, open to making connections between and within existing categories as well as individuals and rearranging the categories to the needs of its members.

Foraging as a research practice and learning attitude and the relation to artistic research certainly deserves further inquiry and attention. There are opportunities here for the art academy to use foraging to explore the affordances of artistic research as a pivotal practice that is specific to the arts and enables the development of a discourse that supports a sustainable future for art education.

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Frederiek Bennema

is an educator and PhD student at the University of Groningen and Minerva Art Academy (Hanze University of Applied Sciences), where she focuses on a dialogical and participatory approach to higher art education. Her pedagogical research aims to encourage art students to develop their practice from a position of care and to take responsibility for the role they take up within their context/environment. Bennema currently lives and works in France, where she conducts research and runs an artist in residency, based on the principles of foraging.

f.a.bennema@pl.hanze.nl

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