ResearchWorks: Alternative Pedagogical Spaces: From Utopia to Institutionalization

Anna Colin will discuss her new book (Sternberg / Villa Arson, 2025), which provides a critical inquiry into the establishment, development, and transformation of alternative pedagogical and social spaces. The essay-length book explores the instituting factors, organisational life cycles, and alignments and misalignments between values and practices that permeate such a project. The book delves into the qualities and prerequisites for multi-public educational organisation, while scrutinizing the hurdles associated with the effort to remain alternative, including processes of habituation, temptation or pressure to scale up, ethos-bending fundraising exercises, and long tenure, as well as the plain desire for stability and sustainability.

Alternative Pedagogical Spaces proposes where to look for a reconceptualization of waiting, slowness, and longevity, and asks how these ideas may benefit cultural practice and the design of future institutions (or the redesign of existing ones). Overriding the common assumption that success equals longevity, the author searches for institutional models that resist chrononormativity, drawing from social movements, psychotherapy, biology, and permaculture.

Speaker:

Anna Colin is a curator and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses the pedagogical, the social, the ecological and the horticultural. She is programme director of the MFA Curating and co-director of the Centre for Art and Ecology, Goldsmiths, London. Anna was a co-founder and director of Open School East, an independent art school and community space in London then Margate (2013-20). She was associate curator at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2014-20), associate director at Bétonsalon, Paris (2011-12), and curator at Gasworks, London (2007-10). She holds a PhD in cultural geography (University of Nottingham) and is training in horticulture, permaculture and arboriculture.

Guildhall School’s ResearchWorks is a programme of events centred around the School’s research activity, bringing together staff, students and guests of international standing. We run regular events throughout the term intended to share the innovative research findings of the School and its guests with students, staff and the public.