What is the transformative potential of the transmission of knowledge? Transformation at once aesthetic and social, poetic and political, yes, but what else?
In a global moment when academies, universities, and cultural institutions are being assailed and defunded by increasingly anti-democratic regimes across the world, the radical importance of artistic education must reassert itself. For its transformative potential is not just for the artists within its systems, but for democratic society and its wildly vulnerable structures at large. Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, in collaboration with Skowhegan and Culturescapes 2025 Sahara, will thus dedicate its fall symposium to artistic transmission and transformation writ large, and to the production of pedagogies that can resist the anti-intellectual, supremacist political forces of the present. To create and sustain environments in which artistic practices are nurtured and centered on transformation—across generations and geographies—this is our aim.
The symposium’s participants will include celebrated artists from Skowhegan’s long history, exceptional figures from educational initiatives across Saharan Africa and its diasporas, and those integral to the teaching community of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. All will consider the role of poetic imagination and artistic solidarity in self-reflective and communal practices. Each will describe those remaining places—real and true—where artists and thinkers might rehearse their imaginations. For all believe in the transformative possibilities of artistic life—one based in the social—as well as those future generations who might further such knowledge. The symposium is part of the biannual symposia series, ongoing since 2018, curated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.
In February 2026, Transmission for Transformation will have a second iteration at Skowhegan’s program space in New York.
The symposium is free and open to all. It will be conducted in English online and in-person at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel (FHNW).
Participants and program will be announced soon!