Wild School
Wild School encourages experiments in artistic pedagogy through looking at the space between the built environment and the wild backcountry. This interstitial zone - “front-country” - is the interface between development and wilderness. Front country includes the parks and bike trails that provide us with a sense of “getting back to nature”, it is a highly regulated space that is both access and control. It is a contact zone for plants and animals, a meeting of settler species and indigenous ones - revealing complex, non-linear, other-than-humans encounters. Coppermoss is located in this front-country, on the edge of a wild salmon-bearing creek, and the manicured waterfront playground of the Sechelt Inlet. From this location, Wild School undertakes a series of experiments in artistic pedagogy, exploring the physical interface through practices of walking, climbing, scrambling and crawling. Without trails and paths to follow, Wild School examines how one might traverse across this interstitial zone. What other knowledges might we turn to? The bear running his ‘trap-line’ from the community garbage cans? The squirrels who move across branches and rooflines with equal ease? Or the deer who traverse the steep cliffs with no consideration for the limits of bipeds.
Front-country presents us with infinite ways to consider moving from the constraints of the built environment towards the wildness of the forest. In this way, it acts as a metaphor for moving from the constraints of education, to the wildness of learning. Wild School believes that education today is an instrument of production and consumption. Wild School believes that education must be reinvigorated as a site of heterogeneity through the planting strategies of wild (and feral) thinking, so as to percolate radical ways of moving into increasingly uncertain futures. Wild School seeks to actualize critical thinking and risk-taking through personal and transformative processes in which we learn to act experientially from the inside out.
Recent Events:
Western Front Sonic Playground Retreat , 2017
Graduate Student Slow Research Workshop with Silent Walk, Emily Carr University, 2016-2017
Interactive Art and Social Media + Bear Path Scrambles, Emily Carr University, 2017
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