On Location. Learning as a 3rd space, through and between arts, crafts and cultural sites

This project aims to explore how local culture practices within educational aesthetic fields can develop learning and knowledge for active citizenship. It leads to examine the conceptions of culture as knowledge production and methodological revisions about the educational potentials of cultural activities for children and young people. Studying arts and culture as modalities for extended democratic education and social change beyond standard regulations, build on knowledge from an exchange program between Konstfack, Stockholm, and Wits University, Johannesburg. How can learning in contemporary arts and culture education play an inventive and critical role in building social and cultural inclusive structures from below? How can collaborative arts and craft processes enable opportunities for young people and communities to deal with current inquiries that negotiate the stories of the past, the present and the future? The project explores how it is possible to be manufacturers and facilitators of culture with participatory democratic values. This is how learning in the fields of arts and culture can enact a third space as an ambiguous, innovative area emerging when two or more individuals or cultures interact. As such the hub in the project is on the participant's resources, will, forces, ideas, and to create a third space as a negotiated space. The research methodology show how visual and performative ethnography has relevance for educational sites, where we might rethink teacher/facilitator and learner identities, along with ideas about social justice, knowledge and skills. The concept On Location is a methodological position that offers perspectives “from within”, in visual ethnographic field work, interventions and workshops. Small scale projects establish “long distance conversations” between the two continents. With on-line and on-location subprojects, the experience based research is generated through narratives, multimodality, artistic social interventions and engagements in social justice and culture entrepreneurship.