“Really Useful Knowledge”
This exhibition’s title, “Really Useful Knowledge,” refers to a provocative nineteenth-century expression that emerged within British blue-collar communities to denote competence in intellectual realms such as philosophy, as opposed to the “useful knowledge,” or technical know-how that industrialists envisaged for their employees in order to increase productivity. The show’s curators, the collective What, How & for Whom, intelligently selected works that examine alternative pedagogical initiatives throughout history and across the globe.
Many of the featured works consider the potential for both personal emancipation and social change that radical learning contexts can have. Take, for instance, the group Chto Delat’s installation Study, Study, and Act Again, 2011–15, a reading room for the stimulation of class consciousness—a precondition for collective action. Elsewhere, several works challenge a mainstream approach to education by exploring political themes. For example, Carla Zaccagnini’s Elements of Beauty: A Tea Set Is Never Only a Tea Set, 2012–14, is an installation that investigates English suffragettes’ iconoclastic gestures between 1913 and ’14, while another installation, Daniela Ortiz’s Estado nación (Parte II) (Nation State [Part II]), 2014, scrutinizes the restrictive immigration schemes that Spain has recently put forward.
It is, however, Catarina Simão’s The Mozambique Institute Project, 2014, that best captures the curatorial principle. This installation’s central piece is Effects of Wording, a film from the same year that compellingly tells the story of the Mozambique Institute (a 1960s schooling enterprise in Tanzania developed by the Mozambique Liberation Front, which fought against Portuguese colonialists until Mozambique gained independence in 1975) through the intertwining of both found and newly shot footage of various archival materials. Examining the tension between subjectivity and ideology, utility and freedom, and exploitation and empowerment, this work brilliantly encapsulates both the utopian and activist tone of the exhibition.
