Crafting the Beast
Protest Stop Cutting ArtsAalto University
March 2022
S.U.R. joined the strike happening in Aalto, which aimed to demand that the university stop the cuts on arts. In the context of a global tendency of neoliberal approaches towards education, we firmly believe in the importance of defending those spaces in where other forms are cultivated.
For this occasion, we comfily sat in the stairs in the lobby of Väre, inviting the students to join us to collectively craft a beast.
Through the actions of the collective body, and through threads, needles and textiles we build the beast. The assembly of the uncomfortable and the knitting of the terrifying allows us to reflect. Together we ask, how can the university move away from its normative position and rather engage with decolonial transformations?
but the beast does not seek to be accepted or recognized. On the contrary, they keep on walking along the marshy margins, entangling themselves with alternative ecosystems. and by this way, the beast is gestating, perhaps with other creatures, new ways of inhabiting the world.
The university was one of the central institutions of modernity, configuring the normative self, which becomes human, modern and universal. The normative self is constituted as such by distinguishing itself from the Earth, from animals, and from the worlds of other people who inhabit an exteriority, outside the here and now of modernity. And in this way, transforms everything else into otherness.
The beast is the figure that allows us to embody and explore this otherness.
If on the one hand there is the human or even the superhuman, God, the State, masculinity, the North, the white, the heterosexual subject, the civilized and the progress, on the other there is the beast, which is considered as animality, nature, femininity, the South, the slave, the non-white subject, the abnormal, the underdeveloped and the barbaric.
... but the beast does not seek to be accepted or recognized. On the contrary, they keep on walking along the marshy margins, entangling themselves with alternative ecosystems. and by this way, the beast is gestating, perhaps with other creatures, new ways of inhabiting the world.
Through the actions of the collective body, and through threads, needles and textiles we build the beast. The assembly of the uncomfortable and the knitting of the terrifying allows us to reflect. Together we ask, how can the university move away from its normative position and rather engage with decolonial transformations?
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The beast is the figure that allows us to embody and explore this otherness.
If on the one hand there is the human or even the superhuman, God, the State, masculinity, the North, the white, the heterosexual subject, the civilized and the progress, on the other there is the beast, which is considered as animality, nature, femininity, the South, the slave, the non-white subject, the abnormal, the underdeveloped and the barbaric.
... but the beast does not seek to be accepted or recognized. On the contrary, they keep on walking along the marshy margins, entangling themselves with alternative ecosystems. and by this way, the beast is gestating, perhaps with other creatures, new ways of inhabiting the world.
Through the actions of the collective body, and through threads, needles and textiles we build the beast. The assembly of the uncomfortable and the knitting of the terrifying allows us to reflect. Together we ask, how can the university move away from its normative position and rather engage with decolonial transformations?
