The starting point of this contribution is Jean Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet's short film En rachâchant based on the children's story Ah! Ernesto by Marguerite Duras. The film takes a humorous look at the hierarchization of the educational process through the character of Ernesto, who flatly refuses to go to school because he learns there things he does not know. This film is also the center around which Ola Vasiljeva's solo exhibition was formed at Vleeshal in Brussels in 2015. In the exhibition, the film is staged as a "playful attack on a current market logic that dominates all fields of education and dictates that knowledge must be economically rentable"(Vasiljeva 2015). A refusal to learn is associated with the idea of unlearning and a critique of reason and sense in favour of nonsense, fragmentation and forgetfulness. The exhibition 'occupies an anti-educational stage populated by mixed-media works, sculptures and drawings that manipulate motifs related to the subject of disobedience as learning'(ibid).
With this contribution, I want to reflect on this exhibition, and more specifically on contemporary experimental platforms that, under the umbrella of contemporary art and radical pedagogies, seek to offer an alternative response to an 'intellectual bankruptcy and spiritual emptiness of the approved educational institution' (Ibid.). I want to connect with this by distinguishing between a child-centered pedagogy and a thing-centered pedagogy. Instead of seeing Ernesto's refusal to learn what he does not know as a plea to put the child's world at the center, and seeing knowledge acquisition and the school as forms that stand in the way of thinking differently, -a reading that seems obvious at first glance-, I want to indicate that what Ernesto points at is not so much a critique of learning in school as it is a request to radically rethink how we have inherited a one-sided, incomplete concept of it. In this way, I want to use the film to consider how the notion of ‘unlearning’ gives birth to the art of noticing and paying attention.

The argument will be developed in close reading of the film. In dialogue with Jacques Rancière's Ignorant Schoolmaster, I will show how the film not only presents a critique of knowledge, and the school but points to another understanding of it. A time space where objects are transformed into things and become something that can appeal to us and hold our eyes (Masschelein 2011). Whereas in the arts this transformation is often associated with the creation of unexpected connections, I want to use Huillet and Straub's film to point to yet another experience. Besides allowing new connections to emerge by making relations that cease to be functional, in order to become expressive, I want to point out that this gesture and experience is accompanied by the art of consequences (Stengers 2019). This is taking an interest in consequences that have been ignored, disqualified or externalized, Furthermore, with Esposito's theory of the Institution, I want to indicate how the institutio vitae and unlearning practices are not so much opposed (cf. Foucault and Agamben) as inherently linked. The film not only makes us think about the blindness of the institution as gatekeeper of knowledge, but about what institute could be and bring about.

This contribution aims to give meaning to contemporary unlearning artistic practices beyond institutional critique. I want to indicate that what these unlearning practices bring into being is not so much a critique against the institution as in the 1960s and 1970s, and a plea to put the child at the center of education. Although I see the child-centered gaze itself in terms of attention, rather than intention, I want to propose that Ernesto's gaze gives birth to a radically other conception of learning that demands for other ways of perceiving the world. Rather than passing on inanimate knowledge, it may be about enriching perception, bringing other types of knowledge into view that make it more indeterminate. This refers to an art, because it needs rituals 'en rachachant' in order to foster this possibility.

Esposito, R. (2022) Institution (transl by Zakiya Hanafi). Cambridge : Polity Masschelein, J. (2011) Experimentum Scholae: The world once more… But not (yet) finished. Studies in Philosophy and Education. 30.5, 529-535 Stengers, I. (2015). In catastrophic times: resisting the coming barbarism. Meson Press Stengers, I., (2019). The Earth won’t let itself be watched. In B. Latour and P. Weibel (Eds.). Critical Zones. The science and politics of Landing on Earth. pp. 228-235. Cambridge/London: Mit Press Vassiljeva, O. (2015) En Rachâchant. https://www.olavasiljeva.net/rachachant