Alison Nadunga, Gudskul — Indonesia
On 1st January 2020, the worlds gates open into a literal leap year and the day Edgar Kanyike and I set off for an experience that stamped a new way to learn and rewrite our art practice away from what is the norm in a conventional educational space. I express this in the context of learning and education because I can’t help it — learning and teaching are almost second to breath for me.
With a couple of origami paper batched up from Uganda and a few insights from the literature on Jakarta Indonesia, I set foot into Gudskul with the hope that this would be my total reference for experiencing the art and education scene in Indonesia.
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Also, prior to my travel to Jakarta, the 32° East organized two KLA ART Labs sessions on Research and Concept Development as well as Documentation, that were a major player in the way things turned out for me at the end of my residency in Gudskul. Contrary to my linear experience of research, my pre- Jakarta experience was an eye-opener on how concept development and research is beyond a theoretically guided footpath to collecting, interpreting and disseminating information.
I set foot into Jakarta with all this running through my mind and with the hope to visit lots of learning Institutions and have the things I had envisioned come to life and of course take part in social-cultural scene of this new space. To my surprise I did not hit my target, the reason being my targets were merely clues to what I really needed to achieve. My long walks through Jakarta, my never-ending conversations about Indonesia’s social-economic and social-political context, my classroom & out of classroom experiences, tours to cultural- heritage/historic sites got me longing to explore my art form and its process of execution in relation to this new space.
I recall a workshop at Cikal (one of my favourite times in Jakarta) where I explored origami as a possible solution to the growing challenge of global warming. Although I didn’t have time to follow up on each child’s project after the workshop, it warmed my heart to jointly experience another facet of the process of origami. A place where it moves away from being something aesthetically appealing to something more that is more of a critical thinking tool. It felt like the invention of another face of a rubrics cube. We literally unearthed a world of invention and our strictly 2 hours workshop turned out to be 3 hours. It felt good to experience a light bulb moment above my head each time I engaged with the different faces of Indonesia.
Recounts of my reflections and experiences in GudSkul Indonesia at large opened a new face to countless possibilities to exploring and engaging with a practice as taxing as origami.