FUGA: Situated Pedagogy, Uncertainty, and Strangeness as Artistic Practice
In the world of contemporary art, the notion of education has been absorbed by an institutional desire to produce visible, measurable, professionalized outcomes. In other words, part of art has been instrumentalized by the econmic system. But what happens when a small group is given the space to hold a workshop with no defined goals, no final product, and flexible methodologies?
The workshop was born in a museum, and that matters. Museums—despite opening up to experimental approaches—still operate under vertical structures of validation. However, CA2M offered a rare kind of space: the chance to build a curriculum from scratch.
Gabriela Jáuregui once asked, “What if we escaped from those who want to civilize us and created an archive of the fuga?”—and that’s the question we’ve been circling around ever since.
Beyond content: affect, care, and shared knowledge
Pedagogical processes don’t just bring ideas. They bring affect, tension, pauses, and negotiation. Nato Thompson writes in his book 'Seeing Power in Spaces' that knowledge is produced in spaces, and those spaces produce subjectivities. You can’t open up pedagogy without also opening up the affective dimension. In the same vein, Eloise Sweetman suggests that perhaps we should start to hear an “I don’t know” not as ignorance, but as a call to intimacy. In many knowledge systems rooted in territory, saying “I don’t know” is not a failure — it’s a way of being present. Ecofeminist anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose puts it this way: “Saying ‘I don’t know’ is fundamental to participating from a place. Being inside means knowing that one’s knowledge does not encompass that of others.”
This approach is radically different from that of more institutionalized educational spaces, where not knowing is often hidden or penalized. In FUGA, “not knowing” was not an obstacle, but a starting point. The archive we created was not a synthesis or a final product — it was a way to hold what was happening: doubts, intuitions, shared desires, insecurities, and recurring themes. A living archive, open to rewriting, with no hierarchy or fixed logic.
Diverging as a method
FUGA was never meant to be a total alternative or a replicable model. It was a localized detour. A crack in the dominant format. And in this case, that was enough to remind us that learning doesn’t need to look like a classroom. That a curriculum can be a non-linear map. That methodologies can be written collectively. That memory can also be organized through the body. And that there is not one single valid pedagogy. Because as long as we keep repeating just one, we continue to domesticate our capacity to imagine.
Open conclusions
FUGA leaves us with questions:
- What kinds of spaces do we need for memory, imagination, and for redistributing possibilities?
- What minimum conditions allow something different to emerge?
- What happens when “not knowing” is given room to be explored?
- What happens if the archive is never closed or vertically controlled?
It’s not easy to imagine alternatives when most of our imaginaries have already been co-opted. But we need to try. To create our own rules, our own ways of being, our own living and collective archives. We need less normed relationships, more expansive connections, and pedagogies that allow us to escape expectation. Not for aesthetics, but out of a need to experiment and to reconnect on our own terms.
