Essay from Unnatural State exhibition catalogue by Olubukola Gbadegesin

UNNATURAL STATE: The Experience of Absence and Critical Agency

With the recent high interest in social consciousness, more contemporary artists are developing new, compelling practices that speak to countless structural injustices in our society. For some, this path is a response to the present moment, while for others, it represents a lifelong commitment to socially engaged art-making that is vital to everyday life. Unnatural State belongs in the latter category—as a moment of meditation in an ongoing artistic journey that thoughtfully centers critical pedagogy as its subject and method.

But what is critical pedagogy? In his influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian philosopher and educator Paolo Freire describes critical pedagogy as a profound civic, political, and moral practice, that can nurture self-reflection, critical thinking, and imagination in socially engaged students. Critical pedagogy offers a vision of education as a practice of freedom that creates conditions in which we can explore how to be informed, thoughtful, people in the world. Freire urges us not to sacrifice the possibilities offered by education in order to churn out students as workers for market-driven, corporate labor demands. Instead, critical pedagogy theorizes that teaching can help us to confront the oppressive systems that shape our daily lives by nurturing habits of freedom that guide us to live promising, self-determined, informed, socially responsible lives.

With the wave of teachers strikes that swept across the United States in 2018-19, traditional public education is clearly an urgent issue facing American society. Even as they rallied against real and impactful attacks against public education—slashed budgets, “teaching to the test” policies, racist allocation of resources—these educators also raised important questions about our values as Americans and the conditions of education in our communities. Does the state of our schools and classrooms today reflect our ideals as individuals and as a society? As critical citizens doing their part to realize the promise of a worthy democracy, these activist-educators are also proof of the critical pedagogy that Freire theorized. With these protests, they affirm that education itself is an embodied civic, political, and moral practice that encourages critical agency in teachers and learners alike.

As individuals, it can be hard to imagine how to put these ideas into practice in everyday ways that might transform the hard realities around us. With the Art Bike, Room13Delmar, an ongoing project started well before this exhibit, Ilene Berman roots her art-making practice in communities north of Delmar Blvd that feel these oppressive structures the most in St. Louis City. Stripped of public services and funding, this predominantly Black area remains home to thousands of families, elders, professionals, and children, who bear the inter-generational brunt of this civic neglect.

As in many other American cities, education is often the first public service to be cut, and with that, arts programs quickly disappeared north of Delmar. Even though the area is directly adjacent to the Grand Arts Center—a large well-funded art hub in the city—it is often overlooked in the St Louis arts ecosystem. Shared civic space and proximity don’t seem to make a difference to decisionmakers. But, moved by Freire’s ideas, Ilene collaborates in long-term, exploratory, art-making practices with a group of elderly residents of Renaissance Senior Living located north of Delmar. Using their collective knowledge, interests, and abilities to guide their work together, these collaborators create new conditions of learning in the pursuit of free imagination, and civic identity.

While Unnatural State grows out of Ilene’s work with Room13Delmar, it is also influenced by experiences at a three-week residency at Pocoapoco, a multi-disciplinary, research-based residency and cultural exchange project in Oaxaca, Mexico. Here, working with a local after-school program, Paz and Play, she collaborated with a group of young children in experimental play and artmaking using paint and video cameras. The results of these experiences of free imaginative learning are included in this installation.

And so, in a practice that is local and international, Unnatural State contends with space as a critical but silent factor in our experiences of the world. At the heart of this installation is the contention that, in education, the closed and limited space of the classroom often creates an unnatural relationship with learning. Though it is presented in three different ‘rooms’, the exhibit is conceived of as a cohesive experience. Each spacious ‘room’ offers remnants of artifacts we can quickly associate with learning, but that evoke different meanings or memories from person to person. Each ‘room’ evokes a contrasting sense of potential and constraint.

Blank chalkboards and institutional floors—the inevitable, yet incomplete template of a conventional classroom—invite us to fill the void with our own past experiences or imagined visions. What does this emptiness evoke for you? Like much of the exhibit, this empty space encourages visitors to fully experience the absences— physically, emotionally, and intellectually—and enter into the larger conversation about critical agency that the installation has initiated.

Over there, a tangle of school desks is carelessly tossed aside. But unlike the typical, factory-made, uncomfortable surfaces that still sit in classrooms today, these carefully hand-stitched, soft, natural replicas are made of felt.This thoughtful substitution elevates a kind of loving attention and emotional integrity that isn’t required by pedagogical dogma, with all its rigidity. What more is expressed by remaking these desks in this way? Years ago, I remember glancing into a storage closet or two where I saw broken piles of desks that couldn’t bend or move the way that a classmate wanted. And that person usually ended up in detention for their efforts. Looking at this assemblage, we may wonder what other remnants of education are tossed aside, or locked away, without thought? How does this disregard shape our experience with these spaces?

And throughout this experience, the faint sounds of playful conversation drifts gently throughout all three spaces. In a third ‘room,’ a video projects images of friends, nature, and sky onto a wall, as seen through the eyes of an unsupervised thirteen-year-old with a video camera.The camera attention flits briefly from some plants, to the walkway, then to the bright blue sky. These relatable, nostalgic flashes are reminders of free play and experimentation—the natural states of childhood that we all enjoyed but are often stripped from our pedagogical practices.

Across these different spaces, Ilene Berman’s work strikes an evocative contrast of soft yet austere simplicity, like finding traces of tenderness in an empty house that almost prompts visitors to imagine what was or could be there again. This installation challenges us to reconsider our relationships with the spaces and experiences that we move through in our everyday lives.

In its subtle use of color, Unnatural States continues to evoke the affirming possibility of liberating practices of pedagogy. With its muted tones and palettes, the show is committed to the notion of organic and natural expressions of self and environment. How do these soft hues resonate with you in this space? In the soft grey of the felt material, the cool woodgrain of the floors, and the dark slate of the chalkboards, there is a sense of intentional, elemental minimalism in the choice and placement of these materials and colors.

By contrast, the flashes of brighter shades—like clear blues—are even more striking and evocative. Simulating the hues of the sky in Oaxaca, the azure shade is concentrated in the video ‘room’—from where the children’s voices emanate. A square of blue linen hangs on the wall, echoing the flashes of blue from the scenes in the video. How does this added grace note impact your experience of this space? In this room, the focus is on children, play, and the beauty of the place, brilliantly captured in the invigorating blue of the sky. What does the color evoke for you? Here, the color may lend a sense of clarity to the room that is, likely intentionally, lacking from the other spaces. However, like the sound that floats throughout the entire installation, the possibility of calm and lucidity is not foreclosed to those other spaces. Even with its underlying critique, Unnatural State leaves the door open to transformation.

Henry A. Giroux alludes to the intersection of education and art, writing that, “as a performative practice, pedagogy takes as one of its goals the opportunity for learners to be able to reflectively frame their own relationship to the ongoing project of an unfinished democracy.” In Unnatural State, art-making as a performative practice is inseparable from pedagogy. The installation is a critique of the dogmas that can come with conventional learning spaces, an embrace of cross-generational learning, and an imaginative vision of critical agency. These ideas resonate in its collection of hard surfaces remade in soft material, hints of absences in wide open spaces, and the sounds and sights of children playing freely.

Over several years, Ilene introduced me to a deeper understanding of Paolo Freire’s work in long conversations about the changing, increasingly dispassionate direction of education in the US— the United States or Unnatural State. Her courses center on social practice in the arts and engaging students in reflective conversations about their lived experiences, not just the curriculum. And so, even in this aspect of life, she continues to intentionally and thoughtfully integrate critical agency into her practice—though sustaining the balance remains a challenge, as with us all. In this way, Unnatural State, implicates the artist, the viewer, our ideals, pedagogy, and American society at large. The installation urges us to confront our own complicity in our lived realities and look inwardly for our own capacities to transform them. So, as you experience an Unnatural State and embrace the feelings that arise— questioning is encouraged. Indeed, the mission of this installation is to create a set of conditions through which we can probe our critical agency in the world.