Collective agency, resource distribution, and knowledge sharing represent a critical foundation in the advancement of arts education and social justice. It was in this spirit that the grassroots initiative Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) was founded in Uganda in 2015.

ARAC is part of an international network of practitioners and researchers of arts education, who work both in formal and informal educational settings in twenty-two cities on four continents. The name of the initiative draws on UNESCO’s “Road Map for Art Education,” a supranational document that was created in 2006 with the aim to explore the role of arts education in building a creative and culturally aware society. The purported universality of this document, in ARAC’s own words, represents “deficiencies and abuses” in the acceptance and application of this policy despite the absence of substantial, nuanced, and context-aware research on arts education practices in different parts of the world, as well as the lack of discussion about how arts education relates to social justice. ARAC’s work responds to this specific urgency.

In this effort, ARAC members analyze current policies and practices of arts education in various African contexts; examine the legacy of colonialism in this field; develop paradigms for practice and research in arts education; and build strategies to make this knowledge accessible in their respective local contexts. In this way, ARAC proposes a method for “correction,” the Vera List Center’s 2022–2024 Focus Theme, as it demonstrates a collective, long-term effort to study existing histories, policies, and systems and offer methods to de-center and revise them.

ARAC proposes a rare working method for mutual learning and resource redistribution in the field of arts education. It currently has working groups in Kampala, Nyanza, Lubumbashi, Kinshasa, Maseru, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Cairo and acts as a network structure where any member or working group can initiate projects and programs for collaboration. This type of horizontal knowledge exchange and organizational model enables collaborative work between self-organized initiatives and formal educational settings in different contexts in Africa, but also in dialogue with other geographies with colonial legacies. ARAC’s working model also responds to the limitations of the current infrastructure in arts education in Africa, where there are few departments, research institutes, academic positions, and publications dedicated to arts education, and small-scale grassroots initiatives often suffer from precarious working conditions and the lack of capacity to document and share their research and activities in a sustainable way.

The collective has an inspiring methodology to bring together research and artistic interventions ranging from in-depth analyses of specific case studies to self-organized initiatives that intervene on formal educational settings and international platforms. One of their most sustained research interventions in a formal educational setting is the three-year staff and curriculum development project for the Nagenda International Academy of Art and Design (NIAAD), a school in Uganda that operated between 2015 and 2017, where they organized a series of week-long workshops during the semester breaks and distance learning activities for and with the administrative and teaching staff.[1]  The project aimed to better connect the curricula with recent developments in the arts and to interrogate the colonial legacies in the educational models and tools.

An example of resource building is their publications and exhibition kits about historical initiatives of cultural mediation that are rarely discussed in formal educational settings, such as the Medu Art Ensemble, a collective of South African cultural workers active in Botswana between 1977 and 1984, who used poster making, music, and film as part of the anti-apartheid resistance movement. This initiative demonstrates ARAC’s commitment to excavate and reactivate the methods of lesser-known historical efforts and their belief in the potential of art making as a form of collective learning.

As part of the larger Another Roadmap School initiative, ARAC also contributes to the development of a glossary of arts education as a public resource, where research groups analyze art educational terms from different contexts and juxtapose terms and genealogies so as to contribute to a more nuanced international discussion. For instance, ARAC prefers the term “symbolic creative work” over “the arts” as they reconsider the gap between the imported terms related to culture and those that emerged from local and Indigenous contexts and were devalued by colonial powers.

ARAC members have been an immense inspiration for cultural workers like myself—a member of Asia Art Archive, a Hong Kong-based organization that aims to create a more generous art history—who think about specific regions as sites that generate theory to enable decolonial efforts. For me, ARAC is not simply an initiative that produces and shares knowledge about arts educational possibilities in places with colonial histories. It is also an urgent, vibrant, decentralized, and collective response to the ever-increasing commodification of education and the resulting disintegration of sites and tools of critical thinking in civil society.

This essay was originally written in nomination of Another Roadmap Africa Cluster for their project Another Roadmap School for the 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice in the summer of 2022.

Özge Ersoy is Senior Curator at Asia Art Archive (AAA), an independent nonprofit organization based in Hong Kong. Her recent projects include co-curating Translations, Expansions (2022), AAA’s contribution to documenta fifteen, and The Collective School (2022–23), the inaugural exhibition at AAA’s newly renovated library. Her writings on cultural institutions and contemporary art have been included in Curating Under Pressure: International Perspectives on Negotiating Conflict and Upholding Integrity (Routledge, 2020) and The Constituent Museum: Constellations of Knowledge, Politics and Mediation (Valiz and L’Internationale, 2018), among others.