Conference Agenda

This research workshop adopts a phenomenological and post-structuralist perspective to examine the concept of not-knowing as a conceptual framework through which its potential future can be explored. It presents an image of not-knowing, whose potency lies, on the one hand, in indeterminacy and sensible intuition, which allow it to emerge continuously, and, on the other, in a form of anarchism yet to come, understood as an ethical condition for the possibility of its experience. This image is developed through the work of Rancière, Lyotard and Malabou, alongside artistic practices associated with Rothko, Cage and Feldman, and through revisiting the lived experiences of libertarian schools and pedagogies that continue to offer glimpses as critical horizons of emergence and resistance. Accordingly, the research workshop does not merely trace the pathways of not-knowing in contemporary arts education. Its main aim is to bear witness to the potency of the unpresentable that not-knowing embodies, particularly when it is intentionally brought into play within educational and artistic contexts today. The research workshop also considers pedagogical approaches that embrace alterity and incompleteness in their practices and ways of thinking, showing how these invite us to inhabit the ungovernable and engage with the indeterminacy arising from anarchism and processes of transformation without rupture.

What is the use of the concept of not-knowing in Tampere? This articulator of meaning asserts itself as a decisive political contribution to rethinking all ways of teaching, learning and coexisting. In a time excessively marked by the obsession with measurability, productivity and the standardisation of skills, not-knowing introduces a critical interruption in the dominant regimes of knowledge, opening space for doubt, listening and experimentation.

Assumed here pedagogically, not-knowing deactivates rigid hierarchies between those who teach and those who learn, allowing the classroom to become a space of co-investigation and shared vulnerability. This posture shifts the focus from the transmission of content to the creation of emergency conditions dedicated to one's own thinking, sensitivity, relationship and political imagination. Not-knowing thus becomes a practice of emancipation.

In Arts Education, in particular, not-knowing is structuring, as it legitimises error, deviation and the unfinished as engines of the creative process. By refusing normative models of excellence and by welcoming minority, corporeal and situated forms of expression, not-knowing contributes to work processes that are more inclusive, more critical and more committed to social transformation.

More than a gap to be overcome, not-knowing asserts itself as an active political force, as it is the emergence of a gesture to be announced that destabilises certainties, redistributes voices and inaugurates possibilities of existence yet to be imagined.