Under the Mango Tree – Other Sites of Learning is a convening of artist-led initiatives, schools, libraries and project spaces in Athens and Kassel from different parts of the globe. In the last years, we have been concerned with forms of collective learning/unlearning, indigenous knowledges, oral history and nonhierarchical modes of exchange. Grafting different shoots onto the same tree is not easy. The ending of one branch means the beginning of another. But as educator and political activist Paulo Freire notes in “Pedagogy of the Heart”. “Knowledge has historicity. It never is, it’s always in the process of being.” We come together in a fundamental sense of what it means to be with, to be in communion with one another. In his solitude, Freire writes under the shade of the mango tree, recognizing the importance of moments of coming together, of sociability. But one cannot resist the thought of the sweet-smelling mango that awakens the senses to warmer climes, the branches and leaves that provide shade, a space for public gathering. While Freire drew from the close observation and experience from a local context, his work had a wide and global resonance. We hope that by bringing together thirteen contributors from different parts of the world, carrying with them their embodied knowledges, we might learn how to graft these experiences onto what we already know and extend branches for the future.

35 pages, 21 x 29,7 cm
Thread binding
Language: English
2021

• Education
• Social Practice