SYNTROFI PROJECT AN AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY SERVED IN 4 DISHES 5 LETTERS ELLI VASSALOU -AUV DEPARTMENT -KASK SCHOOL OF ARTS -AUGUST 2018 (original) (raw)

2018, KASK school of arts

This Thesis is an autoethnography, a form of qualitative research in which the author uses self-reflection and writing to explore anecdotal and personal experience and connect this autobiographical story to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. It also explores the methodology of the “vulnerable observer” coined by the anthropologist Ruth Behar (1996). Behar argues that the ethnographic fieldworker should identify and work though her own emotional involvement with the subject under study and strongly critiques conventional ideas of objectivity. Syntrofi are taking on a perspective of the vulnerable observer who is both a student in, and a researcher of, the educational institution, Syntrofi examines the potential of school environments to facilitate practices of commoning and inclusion. The project draws its material from collective processes in classrooms, corridors and kitchens, with students, teachers, maintenance personnel and administrators, as well as with those who, for one reason or another, ended up outside KASK’s walls. Syntrofi ventures out into a liminal space between arts and politics, by exploring forms of interaction, coexistence, engagement, togetherness and maybe a collective identity – that of syntrofi. Although Syntrofi is standing critical towards art education today, it is not intended to protest against it but rather to attempt reclaiming it by discarding the Us/Them divisions of the people that constitute it and act as a community. It is a process that tries to open up a dialogue to change and expansion, focusing on exclusion as a tool of inclusion as it was explored in relation with the 6 lunches that took place in the academic year of 2016-2017. These public events, were recorded and transcribed to create Syntrofi’s field notes along with the material produced off record. The plurality of this testimony comes by all the participants of the lunches, the academic community of KASK, members of the community of erg [école de recherche graphique, école supérieure des arts, Brussels] and a.pass [Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies, Brussels] but also other artists, curators, art workers and friends who came and became our Syntrofi for the duration of a lunch.