SBC is pleased to announce the opening of the multi-part exhibition, LOOSELY ASSEMBLED, organized by Danielle St-Amour. LOOSELY ASSEMBLED will examine the role of publishing in pedagogical, collective and radical spaces. The exhibition will unfold in four cycles between February and August 2019. The first cycle of the exhibition is organized by Collective Question, a working group comprised of Julie Niemi, Steven Chodoriwsky, and Christopher Lee, in collaboration with graphic designer Ali Shamas Qadeer.

Collective Question (CQ) investigates themes of radical pedagogy and the role of the syllabus within educational spaces. These lines of inquiry emerge from their archival research on Tolstoy College, an anarchist educational community active at the University at Buffalo at the State University of New York (SUNY Buffalo) between 1968 and 1985. Tolstoy was one of a number of experimental colleges founded by SUNY Buffalo in an attempt to appeal and connect to the radical youth movements of the 1960s, a project headed by then-President of the University, Martin Meyerson. Tolstoy College’s faculty members, including Charles Haynie and Charles “Chip” Planck, organized the college on a pacifist-anarchist platform, channelling Russian author Leo Tolstoy’s essays on education and his questions on “How to live?” and “What to live for?”

Focussing on expressions of Emotion and Feeling, Tolstoy College embedded and centered the personal and subjective experience of faculty and students in both the content and the infrastructure of its teachings. In this space, the syllabus was positioned both as the aspirational outline for pedagogical experiment, as well as an agreement of sorts with the bureaucratic university that simultaneously engaged and critiqued the host institution and its actions.

Rooted in these notions, CQ views the syllabus as a utopian form of publication that acts as many things: a contract, a shroud, a plan, a lie, a projection, a deflection, a script, and a document. For LOOSELY ASSEMBLED, CQ have composed a syllabus that positions both the gallery environment and the exhibition’s design as its elements. Objects such as brooms, chairs, tables, shelves, and so on become elements of this syllabus, alongside site-specific furniture and improvised construction within the gallery space. Each element of the syllabus has been chosen or created with an imperative to disrupt, provoke and encourage engagement with the the site and its materials, while facilitating the three primary imperatives of LOOSELY ASSEMBLED’s programming: Archiving, Making, and Circulating.

As infrastructure, CQ’s syllabus will be in continuous use by invited artists throughout the following three cycles of LOOSELY ASSEMBLED. The site will actively archive the materials and documents that are produced by each cycle. These materials will be made available in the INDEX, a web platform conceived and designed by Ali Shamas Qadeer to document, reflect upon, and critically engage with the work undertaken throughout LOOSELY ASSEMBLED.