Numbing Like the Stingray

A performance lecture on alternative and autonomous educational spaces and practices given as part of a weekend of workshops and performances organised by School of the Damned, the independent alternative postgraduate art programme, at LARA, London, February 25, 2016. Numbing Like The Stingray - Meno's Servant at the Care Farm: On Alternative and Autonomous Spaces makes reference among other things to Peter Kraftl's writing on educational spaces, Richard Sennett on anarchy and society, James C Scott on the art of not being governed, and Plato on education, and the music of Miles Davis and Steve Reich. The five-part structure to the text is provided by the words of a slogan that appear on a tufted wall hanging made by Will Bartlett - A Way Not To Think. The final part of the performance is a rhythmic cycle through all possible permutations of those words. The tufting hung on the wall while I read. After finishing each page I passed it to the Portuguese sculptor Carlos Nogueira, who inked it with green lino cut ink and dropped it on the floor. This deliberate obliteration was a gesture of refusal, a denial of the possibility that the text could itself become a kind of rule book for future action