In 2019, in the framework of an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership, members of three European art schools (erg in Brussels, HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, ISBA in Besançon) imagined a project: Teaching to Transgress Toolbox. The project is a collective research and study programme setting out to develop insights and tools to make our higher education institutions more inclusive, with an aspiration to create intersectional feminist and decolonial pedagogies with a focus on the arts.
In March 2022, the programme will come to an end: What have we learned? We invited cultural worker Teresa Cisneros to help to review and reflect on the process of this project from multiple perspectives. We will explore the pain points of the project and share the insights that we take away from this experience so that others can learn from us for collaborative projects in the future.
Teresa Cisneros: Undoing the institution: (a person at a time)
“What does it mean for a body like mine to be inside the belly of the beast? What do I expect from it and what does it expect from me? In this conversation, I will be exploring my role as an administrator employed to think about and create ‘change’ to make institutions more equitable and just — thinking through the power of policy and behavioural change.”
Friday, December 10, 2021, 6PM (CET) @erg, rue du Page 87, 1050 Brussels, and online streaming
Teresa Cisneros is a Chicanx Londoner. Originally from the Mexico-Texas border, “La Frontera”, she practices from where she is from, not where she is. A curandera and arts administrator by choice, currently she is Manager in Culture, Equity, Diversity Inclusion at Wellcome Trust but thinks of herself as a curator of people, part of agency for agency, and recently at The Showroom she curated Object Positions to explore cultural equity, decolonial processes, and colonial administration (2016–18). Cisneros has worked with sorryyoufeeluncomfortable and numerous institutions including Nottingham Contemporary, Tate, Goldsmiths, and University College London to explore care, policy-making, learning, colonial infrastructures, institutional change, and rethinking museums. In 2018, she published document0 a publication exploring our inability to “diversify” the arts. She is interested in reconstructing systems and institutions to begin working towards forms of transformational and institutional justice by holding staff accountable for their bad behaviours. Cisneros centres her life and work practice in collaboration, care relations, and collectivity.
