Elephants in the Archive

Abstract

This chapter is an attempt to show how racialised meaning is produced through art practice. It is founded on the following paradox: How can we reconcile ourselves with the fact that racism exists in society when the majority of Norwegians will publicly denounce it? I examine how prevailing art teaching practices are influenced by racial understandings of the self and the Other. Inspired by post-colonial theory, I interrogate experiences in my own White artist-educator practice to uncover power differences and acts of racial dominance. I examine the events of a visual art workshop through two central concepts, White innocence (Wekker, 2016) and the cultural archive (Said, 1993; Wekker, 2016), and consider the operationalisation of structural racial bias through digital technologies and contextualising spatial understanding of art practice. This is an experimental text that aims to engage the viewer with their emotional embodied understanding of racial positioning as much as academic discourse. I employ the figure of the elephant as a narrative device to disturb reading patterns. The clumsy elephant is a disruptive element in the text, weaving together two distinct forms: the literary and fictive narrative, and the academic discourse. I conclude with the idea of decolonial aesthesis (Vázquez, 2020) as a tool to challenge the dominant aesthetic understanding of art practice as an individual form of expression. Thus, decolonisation or undoing erasure of otherised knowledges and experience is deemed a vital process imperative for students’ well-being, as well as that of teacher educators and student teachers wishing to teach in a pluralistic society. I ask the reader to resonate with the unfolding of “White” gaps in a subjective understanding of the self and give discursive room for addressing the complexities of race through understanding how Whiteness works as a complex phenomenon within Norwegian art education.