Shying a-Way
2022-2025
Shying a-Way
link to the research notebook published at the conclusion of the Lagos and Helsinki Shyness Workshops
How can shyness hold space for not knowing and a pedagogy of wondering alongside? How can study offer an escape from the individual/collective dichotomy, shying away from the completion of the self as autonomous subject? What kind of a space does curatorial shyness open? How to ‘shy a way’ towards educational transformations that attend to the complexities of institutional power and privileges?
The School of Shying a Way is an invitation to take part in an ongoing conversation and study initiated by CCA Lagos and the University of the Arts Helsinki. The research began its investigation of shyness from the ecological phenomenon known as crown shyness, whereby trees of similar and differing species, under certain conditions, exhibit an awareness of each other, restricting their own growth to allow space for light to travel between them. Shyness is an often-maligned contemporary character trait, when used with reference to humans, and yet one that is commonly found in art and artists. In a presentation society, we gather to wonder, what ways of knowing, and not knowing, might we find trapped in the resistant posture of shyness?
The School of Shying a Way plays in the aftermath of experiences of schooling and being schooled, both within formal education and its extensions into other forms of socialization. The work draws on perspectives from the Finnish, Nordic and Pan-African regions and is conducted as a collaboration between Uniarts Helsinki’s Academy of Fine Arts and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. The School of Shying a Way attempts to craft a space, and provide an ideological support, for a set of resistances: to the collective/individual binary, to the limited consciousness of fixed meaning, to the locating of knowledge as something and somewhere outside of the study and the student.