Aleksandra Knychalska
EXPERIMENTAL PEDAGOGIES – TOWARDS STRANGE AND UNKNOWN

This text has been born of the necessity to search for and create alternative ways of knowing as a response to multitudinous crises that shape the world as we know it today. I look into the nature of these crises for I am interested in materiality as a factor that builds the circumstances of the pedagogical encounter which suggest a radical relationality of more‑than‑human beings and phenomena, and open up new possibilities for the development of survival strategies based on responsibility and care.

It is for this reason that I scrutinise relational forms of learning which do not isolate cognition from the body, situation and affects, but enable a better understanding of what is happening and the development of responses that rely on mindfulness, attunement to context and openness to the non‑obvious. Particularly inspiring in this perspective is the new materialist pedagogical turn¹ – not as a ready‑made theoretical proposal, but an area capable of sensitising to the complexity of the relationship between the human and the more‑than‑human.

Evelien Geerts claims that new materialism calls for revisiting the traditional and canonical by adopting “pedagogy that is centred on critique and creativity, situatedness, geopolitical (self-)awareness, accountability, and an immanent ethical attitude that takes current‑day political constellations and complications into account.”² I interpret this turn as encouragement to conduct a close inspection of the effect material conditions and affective tensions have on cognitive situations – of the possibilities they offer us for developing ways of critical presence, embodied agency, and shared responsibility.

My preoccupation with materiality in cognitive processes merges with my practice which takes place at the intersection of artistic, curatorial and research activities and centres on alternative experimental pedagogical formats. In these modes, artistic strategies become tools which facilitate shifting between different types of knowledge and practices. I am interested in how new materialist discourses resonate with postdisciplinary approaches to learning. I examine embodiment and speculation as strategies for unlearning and map the ways in which these strategies are used within experimental pedagogical practices. It is also my intention to stress the importance, within these processes, of the awareness of our deep entanglement with more‑than‑human systems and mindfulness in regard to the socio‑economic contexts affecting daily life.

I believe that searching for other formats of learning is not just a creative whim but an attempt to respond to the tensions and limitations inherent in many contemporary models of education – especially those rooted in the logic of productivity, individualisation and knowledge extraction. In the face of deepening social and environmental crises, expanding cognitive imagination seems a necessity.

Facing the crisis: on relationships, entanglement and the need for change

The times we live in have come to be known as the Anthropocene.³ The term stands for an era in the history of our planet in which human activity, through rapid development of industrial civilisation, has exerted a huge negative impact on climate, natural environment, geology, and ecosystems. Among the consequences these far‑reaching changes have led to are air pollution, rapid extinction of an ever greater number of species, and ocean acidification, but also a drastically widening gap between the rich and the poor, and an endless escalation of armed conflicts which claim thousands of lives every day, while forcing tens of thousands people to resettle or seek asylum away from home.

The concept of the Anthropocene has been widely criticised primarily because inherent in it is an apparent equalisation of the status of all people, regardless of race, gender, or social class, in relation to the climate catastrophe, oblivious of the systemic causes behind the ecological crisis.⁴ As the term has gained popularity, it has also started to be used as an instrument for distracting attention from real systemic problems, strengthening defeatist visions of humanity as a whole heading for an inevitable end, a lack of alternatives, a sense of stagnation and inertia. Kathryn Yusoff, whose work explores the racial and colonial genealogies of the climate catastrophe, points out that not everyone bears the same responsibility because, after all, it is “imperialism and […] colonialisms who have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence.”⁵

In my work, I increasingly find myself revisiting the question of how to recognise and embody our entanglement with the world – material, more‑than‑human, unpredictable. Within this context, I derive inspiration from Bruno Latour’s thoughts as he writes about the need for a new collective agent – ​​capable of responding to contemporary crises not by means of detached analysis, but with a deep recognition of its own entanglement with more‑than‑human relations. In his lecture “Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World Through Arts and Politics”,⁶ Latour indicates that the main reason for humans’ sense of helplessness in the face of the ecological crisis is their lack of recognition of their profound entanglement with the surrounding world. They neither understand nor embody this entanglement with powerful forces generated beyond our control (outside us), which effectively hampers their creative possibilities.⁷

To illustrate our limitations and powerlessness when confronted with eerie more‑than‑human powers and systems, Latour invokes the moving final scene from Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, in which the protagonists, hyperrational white upper‑middle‑class Europeans, on being faced with uncanny nonhuman forces beyond their comprehension, resort to infantile rituals supposed to protect their innocent and powerless minds against reality. “When the trumpets of judgement resonate in your ear, you fall into melancholia! No new ritual will save you. Let’s just sit in a magic hut, and keep denying, denying, denying, until the bitter end.”⁸ He continues: “As if the West, just when the cultural activity of giving a shape to the Earth is finally a literal and not a symbolic meaning, resorted to a totally outmoded idea of magic as a way to forget the world entirely.”⁹

Many dominant models of cognition are far from being mindful of the material entanglement of us, humans, with a world that is largely more‑than‑human. Turning a blind eye to these relationships can sharpen the sense of separation – and make it harder to grasp what lies beyond the human scale and rational logic. However, what we do need today are ethics and future scenarios which, though critical, remain open. Ones that emerge from an acknowledgement of our relationality and bodily entanglement with the world. Rejecting the notion of human supremacy can open the way to more mindful and complex forms of coexistence.

Gaia and tangled relationships with the world

One of the most popular and terribly fascinating theories that illustrate our complex relationship with the world is the Gaia theory proposed by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock.¹⁰ Gaia is a complex organism governed by nature’s powerful evolutionary forces; a widespread and mysterious distributed network of feedback information that includes humans but extends far beyond them, and to which the human species is wholly subordinate. To quote Isabelle Stengers: “Gaia [is] a fearful and devastating power […], maker and destroyer, not resource to be exploited or […] nursing mother promising nourishment.”¹¹ Gaia’s intrusion into our affairs is a fundamentally materialistic event that provokes multiple reactions. This intrusion poses no serious threat to life on Earth – microbes will survive, but it does to a vast diversity of species, life forms, and relationships that are already fading away in the midst of the Sixth Great Extinction.¹² Gaia constitutes us and we constitute Gaia – in the fluctuations of mutual reactions, flows, and disruptions. This is not a simple cause‑and‑effect relationship but a dynamic web of connections that resembles what cybernetics has tried to describe as a theory of the feedback, response and circulation of information.

It might be that other ways of being and acting become feasible as soon as we begin to realise that the human‑run system is just one of many, without even being the most important one. We are immersed in a dense network of more‑than‑human relationships, intelligences and dependencies that operate alongside and independently of us. Recognising this shared presence can be the first step towards responsibility – the kind Donna Haraway wrote about: rooted in relationships, not in a sense of superiority or the need for control.

Thinking with matter – feminist cognitive strategies

Despite the diverse names given to their approaches – corporeal feminism, new materialism, agential realism, posthumanism – Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Stacey Alaimo and Rosi Braidotti all draw attention to how the way we think about matter, body and the world changes. Their works show that it is getting increasingly difficult to maintain the division into the physical and the symbolic, knowledge and experience – not as a theoretical postulate, but as a response to what contemporary science and cognitive practices reveal. Science and philosophy come together where matter transforms itself from being a passive background into an active participant in cognition. Their perspectives differ in terms of experience and theoretical assumptions, but they all attempt to depart from an order that marginalises matter and corporeality to make room for the “purely” intellectual. Common to their writings is a shift of focus from a cognisant subject to the very fabric of the world – to matter that acts, reacts, impacts, and is in constant motion. This type of thinking is unlike earlier models that treated the body and matter as less important than language, culture, or knowledge. Instead, they offer a perspective in which materiality is active, co‑creative, and involved in the processes of cognition, relationships, and action.

In Posthuman performativity, Karen Barad references the research carried out by Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics, who noticed that on a micro scale – at the level of elementary particles – it is not possible to separate what is observed from the act of observation itself. That is, the measurement affects the phenomenon. There is no pure and neutral view from the outside. Barad extends this idea beyond the laboratory – she suggests that it should be used as a philosophical tool. In her approach, all cognition is co‑creation: things and beings do not exist “before” a relationship but come to be in its course.¹³ Barad refers to this dynamic as intra‑action,¹⁴ laying emphasis on the fact that agency is not an individual feature, but a world in motion, in a constant process of self‑reconfiguration.¹⁵ Barad develops this idea in the direction of ontology, describing the world as a constant process of becoming – a dynamic network of relations in which it is not “things” that are the basic units of existence, but phenomena that arise within relationships. Donna Haraway talks about narratives of intra‑active subjectivity – material‑semiotic nodes, or sites where bodies and meanings co‑create each other.¹⁶

This shift – from perceiving “humanity” as a superior identity to seeing beings and things as arising in relationships – reveals a different view of our entire sensorium: not as a set of neutral senses, but as an embodied system shaped by evolution, experience, and relationships. This is no longer about an individual or a superior cognisant subject, but about the tangled processes of coexistence that are starting here and now – in a specific situation, within the body, within matter.

The same philosophers and scientists point out the difficulties that crop up as a result of the boundaries set by traditional disciplines. They believe that crossing these lines – combining philosophy, art, anthropology, biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, social theories – is the key to grasping the complex interconnected processes that mould our reality. In this way, we are able to see that things which appear to be disconnected from each other form, in fact, a dynamic network in which nothing exists in isolation.

McKenzie Wark provides a vivid description of this problem in the introduction to her book Sensoria. Thinkers for the twenty‑first century,¹⁷ referring to the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each of the scholars palpates a different part of the animal, stating that it is similar to a trunk, a tail, or tusks. Each hears the others say something that disagrees with their own idea of what an elephant is. Their blindness here is irrelevant as a sighted scientist is equally far from knowing the elephant in its entirety, its haptic or olfactory properties escaping their attention. None of the scholars is capable of seeing a full picture of the animal. Reading this parable as a metaphor for the limitations of the traditional cognitive process, we could say that no scientific discipline, not even the one that claims to be more autonomous than others, can know the world in its wholeness. So, rather than claiming that we see the whole elephant or that we perceive it with the inner eye of Platonic idealism, we ought to admit that all forms of knowledge only allow us to fathom a piece of it.

It is also important to recognise that every cognitive process fashions the object of study to some extent. It generates elements that are constituents of different wholes of a world or worlds. Each of these elements makes pieces of the world knowable. And since there is no such thing as the “whole” of the world, it is vital to know the pieces that make it, even if they fail to add up to any whole.

However, it does not follow that reality is unknowable. Or that we cannot help but sink into nihilistic despair or the sticky web of relativism. It is precisely the new feminist materialisms and contemporary ontological philosophies that attest the possibility of preserving objective knowledge in a specific location or – as Karen Barad would put it – in specific systems of intra‑action.

This sensitiveness to the coexistence of material bodies along with radical relationality poses an important question: what connections are there between the more‑than‑human agency of matter, as discussed by new materialist feminist philosophers, and ethical and politically engaged positions? In other words, how can we avoid the danger of losing the politicality of feminist narratives by focusing solely on the problem of materiality? One answer is that material feminisms concern not only matter as such, but try to think with matter, taking into account its specific ontological, epistemological, and ethical commitments. Matter here is viewed as alive, active, and able to destabilise anthropocentric privilege – thus forming a basis for the development of new ethics.

Cecilia Åsberg recommends adopting a materialist approach to ethics which involves expending effort to have “good encounters with others” – full of care and acceptance of the fact that otherness can never be fully comprehended. For Karen Barad, this is “responsive ethics” – a commitment to live relationships of which we are part as we ask: “How am I accountable for this body, at this moment, during this encounter?” The feminist new materialist turn then does not reject feminist ethical thought but extends and deepens it, advocating more complex, embodied and relational forms of engagement.

Due to their exploration of the relationships between matter and human practices, new materialisms are useful in crossing the rigid disciplinary boundaries and developing new embodied ways of knowing. This perspective encourages responsible coexistence with other forms of life – not only by understanding the complexity of the world, but also by being in it mindfully and ethically.

In the light of contemporary challenges, it is increasingly important to look at the processes of learning and knowing through the prism of materiality and relationality. New materialism with its attentiveness to linkages between matter and human action can be of service when disciplinary boundaries need breaking down and ways of thinking should be developed that are rooted in the world and its interdependencies. Such an attitude towards the processes of teaching and learning enhances our understanding of the complexity of the world, and encourages us to engage in real relationships and take a responsible approach to coexistening with other life forms.

Embodiment and speculation as survival strategies

In the context of the above discussion of relational processes that shape our sensorium and cognition, this chapter examines two methods – embodiment and speculation. They are often used in experimental cognitive formats which involve a deeper engagement of the body and imagination in the processes of discovery and knowledge creation. Experimentation with these methods can lead to more complex ways of engaging with and understanding the world.

Embodied cognition is the kind of knowledge that arises from being in a situation—from the way we stand, the way we breathe, the way we respond to our surroundings. It is a process that begins with the body and its presence within a space, its tenseness or relaxation, with the daily rhythms that we create and that create us. It takes place when we learn through action, not just through analysing or observing. The body remembers – what position to take in relation to others, how to move within a space, when to react. This knowledge is not recorded in definitions, it is fixed in gestures, flows, in the way of looking and listening. It is how we respond to subtle changes in our surroundings, how our postures change under the influence of emotions, it is our physical reactions to stimuli. Embodiment is also the practice of being tuned in to what is around us, following the rhythms of the body, its needs and limitations.

Embodiment is neither an exercise in well‑being nor a technique for focusing on oneself. It is not about individual comfort but about a demeanour which recognises the body as a site where individual and shared experiences – social, political, material – intersect. The body is not neutral. It is a carrier of the histories and memories of many generations. This is why being engaged in embodied cognition changes our perspective – we begin to realise that the actions and decisions we take, while seemingly individual, are inextricably linked to larger networks – cultural, social and historical.

Embodiment is a way of learning that assumes presence and co‑presence – alongside other people, a place, the more‑than‑human. This type of cognition opens our eyes to the fact that our actions are never innocent or out of context. Embodied mindfulness helps us recognise where we are, in what arrangements, and with whom or what we are entangled. It allows us to understand that our bodies and the affects they generate are part of a larger circulation – that we respond to social and ecological realities through our bodies.

Embodied cognition is also our work with the senses, including those that tend to be overlooked – smell, touch, and hearing. Each of them gives us unique information about the world that is not easily defined in traditional intellectual categories, yet it is instrumental in how we experience our reality.

I believe that speculation constitutes an intriguing way of unfastening established frameworks of thinking – not by collecting data or corroborating truths, but by activating imagination not to escape from reality but to immerse oneself more deeply in it. Developed as an educational and cognitive method, speculation has the potential of making it possible for us to imagine other possibilities, shift viewpoints, tell stories that show familiar things in a different light. This is not about predicting the future or devising scenarios for tomorrow. Speculation can also act as a tool for untangling what has already been told and established – unlearning inherited patterns, redirecting attention. It allows us to remain within the obvious, incomplete, broken – and to build other relationships with the world from there. Speculation assumes that not everything can be arranged into a coherent whole. Cognition is always partial, situated, founded on fragments – traces, intuitions, leaks. Instead of trying to “see more” and create an overarching narrative, speculation allows us to stop at what is unclear and scattered. To me, it is an exercise – in imagination, empathy, and withstanding uncertainty. It creates temporary scenarios not meant to prove a point but to open up space for joint reflection: what if? what else might be of importance? In some areas – for example, in design – speculation is a way of testing alternative solutions. Here, its creative and cognitive potential is what interests me the most.

An illustration of an experimental educational programme that applies speculation as a cognitive method is escuelita. In its first season, called Speculative Infrastructures, participants explored together how fiction and imagination can help create new models of thinking – ones that go beyond the dominant patterns of managing reality. The premise behind the programme was that in a world of complicated intractable crises imagination can be an instrument for collective response – not used to predict the future, but to formulate new questions and build unexpected proposals. The description of the programme states: “The complex nature of hyperobjects and the highly sophisticated analysis of them exert a paralysing effect on us. We become, as it were, stupider. Bearing this in mind, we decided to steer the programme’s approach and methodologies towards developing the capacity for response: an ability to bring up new questions that will allow us together to come up with something unanticipated, challenging the neoliberal thought and designing other speculative infrastructures instead.”

The three pillars that supported the programme were encounters – presentations by invited guests, shared readings – reading and discussing, and resonances – an experimental space for working with corporeal knowledge. Each of them created opportunity for joint thinking about political uncertainty and ecological crises – but also for devising new ways of action and imagining the future.

Another experimental educational project that combines speculation and working with corporeal sensorium is the Postnatural Independent Program (PIP), carried out by the Institute of Postnatural Studies in Madrid. The Institute operates as a space for artistic and research experimentation focused on postnature – a planetary environment which human activity transformed profoundly. Prompting speculation on the future of the planet, PIP brings into the debate some key figures of contemporary intersectional ecological discourse, including Bayo Akomolafe, Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad and Jussi Parikka. Much of its inspiration comes from queer ecologies and non‑Western cosmologies, broadening the horizons of Western thought regarding coexistence in a complex multi‑species world. One of the problems that receive most experimental attention at PIP is the world‑creating potential of sound. The module Sound Ecologies & Ways of Listening was devoted to the role of sound in experiencing the world, a sensual form of cognition that enables the development of new ways of co‑inhabiting the planet. The module is thus described: “Sound ecology is the entanglement between the multiscalar and cosmic possibilities of exploring the noises, songs, voices, cracks, echoes, silences, and the crashes of our planet and immense Universe. Sound does not only happen outside our ears but also deep within our internal and biological human experience.”¹⁸ Although the programme addresses topical and complex questions, uniting artistic research with ecological and philosophical reflection, the teaching format remains fairly traditional with mainly lectures and discussions. As a consequence, it familiarises participants with theory, rather than teaching them how to employ the methods of embodiment and speculation as important components of the cognitive and educational process.

Another intriguing case of experimenting with speculation and embodiment is ARIA – a summer school taking place in Ljubljana since 2023, designed as a role‑playing game (RPG). The programme offers an experimental experience in which participants take on various roles developed within a collective narrative. In August 2024, the second ARIA programme took place, revolving around the notion of spectrality and the end of worlds. It investigated mourning rituals and ways of connecting with spectres of (deep) past and future which visit our ecologically fragile planet. ARIA’s mission statement stresses that it is “an exercise in unworlding, unnaming, unlearning, and unbinding the entrenched structures of mankind’s current collective hallucination […]; planting the seeds for a second nature and our second bodies as the existent ones foreclose around us.”¹⁹

The programme uses the potential of narrative games to test other forms of acting and learning – those that defy the framework of rationality and draw participants into a joint processes of creating new stories and cosmologies. In ARIA, speculation, corporeality and community‑based activities intertwine in an educational process that is more like a ritual than a lecture – it creates opportunities for reflection, and for different ways of being in the world.

Finally, I would like to write about Kem School – a programme which assigns the key role to embodiment as a cognitive strategy. In this experimental educational programme, embodiment is one of the fundamental cognitive strategies. Here, the body, movement and performance are not supplementary but a departure point for joint thinking and action. Working through the body allows us to get closer to the complex connections between corporeality, emotions, social structures and a wider environment. Rather than being viewed as an individual object, the body is treated as functioning within relationships – within tensions, networks, motion. It is an intersection of various dimensions – biological and social, material and semantic, cognitive and affective. It is through the body that recognising what tends to be omitted in traditional models of education becomes possible. Choreography – understood as a way of organising relations in time and space – is our tool. Instead of relying on fixed sequences of movements, this approach hinges on a constant reconfiguration of connections: between bodies, ideas, gestures, words, tensions, presences. Kem School acts in opposition to the kind of education that is organised around individual achievement, competition and “individual genius.” Instead, it promotes being together and learning from each other – at a pace that allows one to stop, tune in, recognise. Embodiment is seen as a way of experiencing the world, one that engages all the senses and enables one to build knowledge rooted in specific situations – temporal, spatial or emotional. Kem School deploys queer feminist practices that affect the structure of educational process which is based not exclusively on what we learn, but on how we do it and with whom. The pedagogical approach adopted by Kem School features concepts rarely found in the language of institutional education: illegibility, incompleteness, ephemerality. The fleeting – like José Esteban Muñoz’s ephemera – is treated seriously as a bearer of potentiality and possible futures.

For pedagogies that explore corporeality, embodiment, affective engagement and embrace strangeness and speculation to be able to flourish, a safe environment is needed where these shared cognitive processes could take place without reproducing normative hierarchies and the violence inherent in traditional models of education. These ways of learning require safe spaces which do not, however, distance themselves from political, economic and social contexts, but recognise that knowledge is always produced within and in relation to them. Disconnecting education from these structures – particularly in the context of neoliberal systems based on resource extraction and human exploitation – tends to reproduce existing forms of violence rather than challenging them.

These experimental educational programmes call traditional approaches to knowledge acquisition and academic education into question. Instead of rigid structures and fixed frameworks, they offer formats that are more open and flexible and attach a high value to collective work. They become spaces with transformative potential that develop critical tools based on shared curiosity and reflection on what brings us joy or anxiety. They are sites where micro‑strategies of survival and ways of responsive acting are put to the test.

These spaces have been inspired by collective learning practices developed by emancipation groups of Black women, queer pedagogies, and traditional ways of knowledge transmission found in indigenous communities. The point is not to mindlessly imitate these traditions, but to recognise their value, agency, and alternative ways of organising cognitive processes. (This is an important theme in my broad research project, and I mention it here fully aware that it deserves more careful consideration.)

Placing and recognising matter at the centre of experimental learning processes not only fosters a better understanding of what it means to be human in a more‑than‑human world, but also of how our actions intertwine with the non‑human and the non‑obvious. This approach to cognition casts a different light on responsibility – as something that emerges from relationships, being together and responding, not from the need for distance or control. Rather than looking for one order, these practices allow us to stay close to uncertainty – through the body and imagination, showing us the way to persist and create in what is dispersed, unfinished and difficult to grasp. They fulfil Mark Fisher’s pedagogical fantasy that even the smallest educational event, as long as it is significant, can cut through the “gray curtain of capitalist realism,” opening up space for affirmative future scenarios that do not fend off complexity but attempt to find attachment points in it.