The Other: Collaboration between ArtEZ and the Police Academy
Marieke de Jong and Saskia Korsten form artistic duo Korsten & De Jong and they are both lecturers at the Fine Art and Design in Education course in Zwolle. Together with Peter Sonderen's Theory in the Arts professorship, they developed innovation project The Other.
The Other is a collaboration between the Academy for Art & Design Zwolle and Police Academy Apeldoorn. Lecturers, students and associate professors worked together with the aim of making different voices productive and to meet that which is different in the other, but particularly in yourself.
Two pillars form the approach route. Korsten & De Jong: “For us, theory is also 'creating’. We use theory as a material, which allows us to freely take things out of their context and reuse them. Besides that we act: we perform an act. Live and preferably physically. In The Other we act with others.
Actually, with this project, we are building a kind of border area: a bridge or a fence, which you can see through or have to cross.
Let the other be the other
The project came about through an innovation request and was financed from innovation funds of ArtEZ Art & Design Zwolle. “Diversity was the focal point of the innovation funds. What we found upsetting while talking was that in the context of diversity we often hear about how you can find each other in each other's similarities. We thought it was actually interesting to let the other be the other. You yourself are the other. We take each other's position. Sometimes we pronounce each other's words. You will always be separated in an attempt to approach each other. Accordingly, we submitted a proposal that approached diversity from a different angle.”
Border areas, agonism and subjectification
“We were inspired by three people. Firstly, Michel de Certeau, who talks about building bridges so that you have border areas. That border area is interesting. We're interested in these connection points. While acting, we look in that border area at where we can cross it, where that other's territory is. Chantal Mouffe, political philosopher, talks about agonism, where you don't have to agree with each other. You let differences exist and don't look for consensus. Dispute can be very fruitful and constructive. Thirdly, we found Gert Biesta, educational philosopher, important. He talks about subjectification: personality formation. What Biesta suggests is that subjectification does not have so much to do with the concept of identity, as it is too much of an invariable, but is rather an ongoing process of personality formation.”
Our acting with others takes the form of participatory performances: others participate and create the performance together with us. That way everyone has a share and we meet in that act.
Getting to know each other differently
“During the project we worked together with the professorship of another training institute, namely the resilience professorship of the Police Academy. That was super cool. You meet through a different area. At first you don't know each other at all. By acting together you begin to understand each other better. It was fun to invite people to the academy, especially the moment when we saw each other for the first time and skipped the traditional introduction round. We always show ourselves from the perspective of creating, in the form of a performance. We did the same with the people from the Police Academy. In this way, you meet each other much more from the perspective of doing and wanting than from thinking. Otherwise you're portraying yourself. By taking action together you get to know each other in a different way. There were people who were immediately confused, but because you're both vulnerable you leave your comfort zone together in this way.”
Programme with the Police Academy
“We worked together for four days. The first days were at both locations: one day at ArtEZ and one day at the Police Academy. Those two equal days centred on perception in the form of observation. One example was that we had to draw not the subject, but the environment. That's a switch of thinking. You then look at a subject from its context. This is also important for a police officer. During observation exercises at the Police Academy, every police officer wrote down the registration number. It's interesting to see what you pay attention to because of what you're trained to do. It becomes very clear that one person is different from another. When you start doing, you come together.”
“On the third day we invited Ismail Ilgun (former bully vlogger). In the bus from Apeldoorn to The Hague we did a kind of question and answer game. The whole group was mixed, because we had already known each other for two days. Someone asked Ismail if he could tell who was from the Police Academy and who was from ArtEZ based on their appearance. That proved impossible!”