Session 2: Unlearning Maintenance with Hodan Warsame and Ayesha Ghanchi

Session 2: Unlearning Maintenance with Hodan Warsame and Ayesha Ghanchi Cultural institutions are – almost by definition – designed in a rigid, hierarchical way. The labor division within them has a knack for persisting and reproducing itself, and can be one of the things standing in the way of radical change towards justice. In this workshop we will deconstruct what we call physical, organizational and people maintenance and its relationship to decolonization and whiteness. Some of the questions we examined are: Are there people in your workplace who are invisibilized or uncared for? Who is doing the emotional and intellectual labor of pushing the institution (or collective) towards justice? After interactive and collective reflections on these questions, we took a look at how we can take actions to make the workplace a caring and more supportive place. Together we discussed how can we rigorously embody a pedagogy of care and listening to make our own workplaces more equal places. Ayesha Ghanchi is an artist-educator and academic with a specialist focus on critical pedagogy in arts practice. She holds a PhD in collaboration with Tate and has worked within the cultural and community sectors in diverse roles, mostly focusing on social justice and increasing engagements with arts and culture. More recently she has collaborated with BAK and the Side Room to teach and explore critical pedagogy. Hodan Warsame is an educator, organiser, and moderator, currently focused on strategies for radical institutional change for justice, both from the outside and inside of organizations. She makes media and creates spaces for herself and others to develop critical and liberatory understandings of ourselves and the world. She is co-initiator of the intervention Decolonize The Museum (2014–17) and founded Redmond, an intersectional feminist collective active between 2013 and 2017 that created critical online and offline spaces for women and queer people of color.