Start of studies 2024: Cecilie Sachs Olsen's speech

Dear Students,

I want to start with some wise words from the Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said. In one of his most heartfelt pieces about academic freedom, he urges us to: “always view the academy to a place to voyage in, owning none of it but at home everywhere in it”. What he meant is that we should not see the search for skills, insights and knowledge in the academy as the search for ownership, control and mastery.

There is a significant difference between owning something, taking it into possession, and making something your own. Mastery based on possession and ownership comes with a dark colonial baggage: The colonial master is someone who sees himself as superior to others because he has conquered them intellectually and can therefore insist on the supremacy of his practices and worldviews over theirs. Resisting this form of mastery, Said encourages us to regard our journey as students as being willing to travel into unknown and unfamiliar worlds – worlds that we can never fully own, but that we nevertheless can regard as our home. This way, he says, we might traverse and crossover fixed positions and inhabit the academic world in different, more inclusive, playful and mobile ways.

As art students, you might be well familiar with inhabiting the world differently and with challenging conventional and fixed positions. But society at large is far less comfortable with this approach. When we look around us today, we see constant attempts at mastering the world through convention, control and coercion.

We are told that there is no alternative.
We are told that capitalism is the only viable way of organizing society.
We are told that economic growth benefits everyone.
We are told that the climate crisis can be solved through technological fixes.
We are told to sleep – not to dream but to be more productive the next day.

But, to invoke Audre Lorde’s famous words: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. We need new tools that enable different responses to the world’s problems. Tools that enable different types of being, knowing and learning rather than trying to establish the mastery of fixed positions and conventional methods.

Just look at the dominant response to the climate crisis: The focus is on a solution-oriented approach that are based on conventional expert-based questions of what do we know, how do we know it – is it a valid form of knowledge production? – and what is the concrete and implementable solution?

First of all, these questions leave little space for all the things we do not know – things that are unknowable and unthinkable – despite the fact that not-knowing is an essential part of being human and living with uncertain climate futures. And, secondly, this focus on so-called “valid” knowledge leaves little space for “other” ways of knowing and experiencing climate change. That is, they often neglect Indigenous ways of knowing, or ways of knowing that are sensory, relational and subjective, rather than objective, rational and technical. And so, these questions foreclose – rather than open – any proper debate around possible alternatives.

Sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls this approach a form of “vanguard theory”. He defines this as a form of thinking that explains everything in advance and thereby excludes any form of knowledge or experience that does not fit its prescriptions. We are constantly faced with this form of vanguard theory. We see it in the demand for the arts to be useful, for the arts to contribute to the never-ending quest to find applicable solutions to narrowly defined problems. But I would say that our task – as students, teachers and practitioners within the field of arts – should not be limited to produce concrete solutions. Rather our task should be to develop methods and knowledge that help broaden the understanding of the problem! This means to make space for much more explorative processes that helps us navigate complexity rather than simply reducing it.

In other words, what the arts have to offer is approaches to societal challenges and problems that does not define in advance the problems, solutions and processes that are “valid”, but that instead make room for a knowledge pluralism. That is, a knowledge production foregrounds voices, perspectives, experiences and ways of being in the world that are often marginalized in the more solution-oriented and technical approaches. This requires us to embrace what we do not yet know and what is currently unthinkable. It means that we must be willing to stay with the questions until they take us in a direction that we might not have predicted. It means that we must learn to search for something ‘better’ without necessarily knowing or deciding in advance what this ‘better’ is. And this is where the arts can help give us the tools we need.

So, if someone asks us what the arts can do for society, we may answer:

• Art can give us stories, images and sensuous experiences that enables us to imagine alternatives before they exist in the world, and thereby enable us to explore what is yet unknown or unthinkable.
• Art can help us access how we ‘feel’ and ‘experience’ the world and any attempt at producing change should care about that.
• Art is good at engaging with the complexity of life – other forms of science and practice is sometimes less good at the ‘messy’, unfinished and contingent things.
• Art can intervene: it can connect us with other people and the environment in different ways.

By broadening the lens through which we look at the world this way, we will be better equipped to face present and future challenges. Our room for manoeuvre will be drastically bigger.

Think of it a bit like the difference between a mosaic and a puzzle. The approach of mastery, solutionism and control can be compared to a puzzle. Here, the pieces can be moved around, but there is only one pre-determined way to put them together and the pattern they portray is given. In a mosaic on the other hand, the pieces fit together in all kinds of ways and can create all kinds of patterns. By unthinking mastery we can traverse the fixed outlines of the puzzle and accommodate all these different patterns, and thereby also create several – rather than one pre-determined – ways to engage with the challenges the world is facing. In turn, this might open more inclusive ways of engaging with the world in which more voices can be heard, more alternatives can be explored and more perspectives can be engaged with.

I wish for all of you a mosaic journey into the academy, mastering none of it, but at home everywhere in it.

Thank you.