In December 2018, we invited Peruvian multidisciplinary artist, performer and scenographer Jorge Tadeo Baldéon for a two week residency in Copenhagen. The aim of the residency was to question common strategies of education in the arts. More specifically, the question posed was if and how art practices can be shared without the traditional, still typically vertical power structure between teacher/master/knowledgeable person/teaching subject on one side, and student/learner/blanc canvas/teaching object on the other.
Jorge and Jörn had previously worked together on a series of workshops in performance art, a field where learning processes are less formalised than in most other disciplines. Some methods smilar to the ones applied here were first developed and tested with a group of performance artists in Lima. In an additional field of study it was explored how these methods could be transformed to make them useful for practicioners from different fields of performing arts and for people from non-artistic walks of life, preparing for Teching Each Other projects on a larger scale in the future.
Creators from different disciplines within the performing arts were invited to share a common space, to question the concept of pedagogy as a hierarchical practice of knowledge transmission and to explore new, more fluid forms of knowledge exchange. All participants were invited to share exercises they used in their own creative work.
Each day for lunch we cooked a collaborative soup. Without further planning, each participant would bring one ingredient. We would take a break from the workshop around 11 h, to clean and cut the ingredients and talk, seated around a long table. While they were boiling, we would continue with the practical work in the space and at lunchtime the soup would be ready. Like the teaching of the workshop, the soup generated itself, out of the common process and a sharing spirit.
The Teaching Each Other Lab was made possible through a grant from Statens Kunstfond.
The Teaching Each Other Lab was chosen as one of the ten most important experiments in the history of Forsøgsstationen. We were interviewed in the context of the ten year aniversary of Forsøgsstationen.
B&W Art and Support received a grant for international aktivities for Teaching Each Other Lab from Statens Kulturfonds.
