Letter 5: The Curriculum—What went down?
Packed with photos, highlights, and the future of piloting the 5-day Curriculum workshop
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The previous newsletter (Letter 4) unpacked the call for applications and the process for selecting participants for Cycle 1 of the Curriculum. We’re now on the other side of piloting it. This past July, 4 artists were brought in from Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden, to travel to Aarhus, Denmark for a 5-day course to investigate the inner workings of their respective creative practices that are politically-engaged.
This recent pilot run of the Curriculum sought to put last touches how the activities and days flow from one to the next, reveal the required competences and relationships with the supporting team, and document the participants’ transformations and practical learnings.
You can read all about the Curriculum’s purpose, process, eligibility, costs covered, the site, history, background and what it’s not at nordicotherwise.com.
Contents
While the process of planning, facilitating, coordinating, hosting, collaborating, and participating in the workshop isn’t feasible to summarize here, the focus will primarily be on higher-level purpose and meaning of this pilot.
Developing the Curriculum
Evaluating practice-based inquiry
Uncertainty to competency
What’s Next?
On a separate note, here’s a reminder to pre-register to join the Network. Thanks to all of you who’ve already done so! More soon on this.
The Network for Nordic Otherwise focuses on underground work methods essential for navigating the art, design and culture industries as racialised individuals.
1. Developing the Curriculum
The framework of the 5-day workshop was first finalized at the end of 2021. This architecture behind the workshop took the form of my doctoral dissertation. I did this through my research community at Monash University in Melbourne; Wonderlab. Concretely speaking, I , Myriam, produced a 150-page piece of writing that presents a package of tools and a methodology for studying and evaluating the theory and making that goes on in one’s own critical creative practice. The use-case was a three-year study done between 2018 and 2021 of my own critical creative practice. See more here. Traditional research is led by theoretical, historical or socio-scientific analysis. However, as a defiant and sincere commitment to the epistemic depths of critical practice, this research was led through literally using the mediums of my creative practice itself; practice-led research. In the beginning of 2024, I took on the task of distilling that long-term study down to its core components and translating it to fit into a series of activities and prompts into 5 days. The hope was to invite fellow critical creative practitioners to try out the process—offering a way for them to deepen their political commitments and further mature their understandings of their own practice.
The mediums I used to study my own practice at the time were paper model-making—common in industrial, interior design, and architectural practices—and reflexive writing, informed by academic and autoethnographic approaches to writing.
The Participants
Fast forward to this summer, each of the four participants also worked with just one (of many) mediums with which they’re already fluent: drawing and mark-making as an architect; a cello as a sound and performance-based artist; one’s own body as an embodied performer; and sand, flour, and a lightbox as a sculptor of stone. Across the four participants, they engaged with queerness, indigenous ways of knowing, Black feminism, and more. The participants ranged in age from their mid-20s to mid-40s and included Master's graduates, current students, and a PhD candidate. You can read about how I selected the participants here.
2. Evaluating practice-led inquiry
Similar to the way that other research disciplines—be it sports science or archeology—study how things work in their disciplines to further understand and advance things in the hopes it trickles down to everyday professional practice, the research fields of art, design, and architecture do the same. Institutions, organisations, and other individuals in power put resources together to make that happen. However, there are problems. I’ve had the chance to come across researchers from Melbourne, New York, Helsinki, Stockholm, Aarhus, and Copenhagen who are dedicated to this important meta-perspective of further understanding and developing these fields. Some are stopping to ask, How can we study critical creative practice? By third-person observation? By curating after the fact? By historical analysis? Is there any theory in these practices? What knowledges do they produce? If we’re trained as historians and theorists, how can we advise and approach the creative practitioner and the things they make?
On the ground, we critical creative practitioners tacitly, steadily and securely know that (1) we negotiate not only decisions about how things look and sound or about technical things like how something should be coded or welded together, for instance, but we simultaneously negotiate socio-political concepts as we glue, code, weld, cut, twist, etc. And (2) we know the world through our bodies—our worldviews are informed not by philosophical texts, but inescapably developed through first-hand experience and the ways the bodies we inhabit are gendered, racialised, politicized, etc.
Through the two concepts, the Curriculum answers the dilemma around languaging and evaluating critical creative practice:
Who should do the theorizing and evaluating? The critical creative practitioner themself is equipped to articulate the goings-on in their own practice. In both an ideological and deeply emotional and convicted way, the process I developed believes in the epistemic depths of critical creative practice. Rather than ‘speaking from nowhere’—in which a gigantic gap between thinking and doing is enforced, the practitioner becomes equipped to speak back to theory from their bodies, particular social contexts, and making processes.
How can the practitioner ‘prove’ their criticality? Where’s the theory? As critical practitioners who are racialized, gendered, disabled, etc., theory is already being done in our everyday practice. Disability studies, gender studies, Black studies, etc. first are lived through one’s the body—irrespective of whether it eventually gets written about, published, and reified via the academic institution. We only need to revisit past experiences in the our practice, scan the sensations in our bodies, and materialize them so we can see them in order to ‘find’ the theory and ‘prove’—to ourselves primarily—that it’s present.
How should we evaluate and judge whether the work done is critical enough? Artistic or designerly enough? Art, design, and architecture educators look to instill self-awareness and professional and academic maturity in their students. Through this course, I teach the practitioner to
(1) locate with precision the theory in their practice,
(2) specify the ways it’s present in their practice,
(3) redefine concepts and theories in terms of their own practice, and
(4) name how the theory in their practice speaks back to relevant lineages and schools of thought.
Participants learn to use this process over and over for various past moments in their practice—building a capacity and skillset for high levels of self-awareness and maturity in their critical practices.
3. Uncertainty to Competency
Through this 5-day process, participants came to recognize, for instance, that the medium they preciously have worked with and stowed away—because of the violent contexts in which they were asked to perform—could be given a different, illegible, private space to be worked with. They came to see weighty misalignments between what they value in theory and what they do in action. They instigated productive refusals against languaging theory for the outside gaze. They walked away realizing that out of survival of the academic and institutional spaces they navigate, that they had to pinch out space to recognize the frightening enormity of theory they already are doing—and subsequently elbowed more space for themselves. They learned to name specific past moments in their critical creative practice, locate the socio-political theory in each moment and in their bodies. They took the pre-requisite skills I taught them in the first 2 days of the week, sat with the uncertainty of where it’s all going, and eventually reached a point where they reconfigured these skills to their own practice and personal, professional, and emotional needs.
At dinner on our last day, participants were awarded with an “unauthorized graduation certificate.” Photographed below, it reads:
Centre for Nordic Otherwise
A certificate for committing to interiority, unauthorized knowledges & the study of theory and practice granted to
[Participant Name]
for the completion of The Curriculum
A 5-day course dedicated to embodied, practice-led critical inquiry and studying the inner workings of theory, making, and being in one’s own critical creative practice
4. What’s Next?
Workshop to School
A few months after this workshop in July, I put together another funding application. This time, instead of seeking funding to deliver the course or cover participants’ costs, I sought funding to support a R&D period from January to July 2026 to plan, do research (interviews, gather case studies, attend events) and come up with a concrete plan for scaling the workshop from 5 days with 4 participants to a 10-day course with 10-15 international students that runs once or twice a year.
We were awarded this funding and will start the research and development period early next year.
Newsletter Series: The Introvert’s Cultural Initiative
Look out for 4 forthcoming newsletters dedicated to those of us who are introverted, shy, prefer to be at home, yet do cultural work which is typically public, visible, and extroverted.
A Book, published by Set Margins’
I have had my head down this August, September, and October proofreading my forthcoming book, working with a designer to design to layout and cover of the book, and planning an international book tour!
More on these 3 points in the coming weeks and months!
Thanks for your patience and continued support.
Myriam
Nordic Otherwise