Training for the not-yet is a Rotterdam-based project convened by dutch artist and curator Jeanne van Heeswijk. Her work often focuses on social practice art, or the relationship between space, geography and urban renewal. She facilitates the creation of dynamic and diversified public spaces in order to ‘radicalize the local’. Her long-scale community-embedded projects question art’s autonomy by combining performative actions, discussions, and other forms of organising and pedagogy in order to assist communities to take control of their own futures. This particular project unfolds through a series of trainings in civic engagement, radical collectivity, and active empowerment, bringing together collaborators from various fields and communities to create and practice alternative imaginings of being together in the face of the pressing emergencies that shape the world today.
In spite of the threatening amalgamate of the ecological, political, social, and economic emergencies that define the present, van Heeswijk proposes to shift the emphasis from emergency to emergence. Seeking to radicalise the possibility. The artist turns it into a site of transversal community-to-community exchange and trainings, aligning the ‘fields’ of art, theory and social action. Over the course of nearly a year, van Heeswijk has reached out to a myriad of individuals and communities across geographies, practices, movements, and disciplines.
The trainings range from ‘dreamscaping’ to radical listening, from creating sanctuary to enacting radical care, from fighting housing struggles to building solidarity economies, and from composing intersectional alliances to becoming collective. They take place amid and with artworks by van Heeswijk as well as by an array of international artists engaged in social change and modeling collectivity. Van Heeswijk sees these works as learning objects. Meant to be used and accommodated by and in the trainings, they are living repositories of knowledges, stories, and experiences; the tools-in-wait for activation in difficult conversations and joyful praxis; and the archives of past and future anticipations of what we want to become when practicing visions of transformative justice, equality, dignity and love, care, resilience, collective power and sharing, and the relationality spawning alternative possibilities.
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