(Re)Searching Rupture and Repair: An Artistic Inquiry on Decolonial Education

French filmmaker and essayist, Georges Perec (1973), argues that the media often frames strikes or protests as extraordinary events. However, Perec reminds us that the conditions that bring us to challenge the status quo are intolerable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. He calls on us to pay attention to the habitual, everyday occurrences—the stuff we believe is of no consequence. Once we pay attention to our quotidian world, we realize that the impact of patriarchal, imperial, and neoliberal systems dictates what languages we speak and how we speak them; what food we eat and how we procure it; and what clothes we wear and how they are made. Māori scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2021), highlights how schools reproduce hierarchized knowledge for uncritical consumption, and how any attempt to “indigenize” colonial academic practices have been fraught with major struggles over what counted as knowledge, as literature, and as research. Given this history and impact of colonial powers, it becomes important for us to examine the scholarly world we occupy through non-traditional methods. In this roundtable presentation, I practice artistic inquiry to make the impact of colonialism on our everyday lives both seeable and sayable. Inspired by Jim Melchert’s (2004) Feathers of the Pheonix, where he drops prefabricated tiles and reassembles them, I explore the impact of rupture on the clay body. I expose unfired clay and fired ceramic tiles to the elements like fire, water, and air, and materials like porcelain and sand to posit how our lives are constantly impacted by systemic injustices. Keeping with the idea of the phoenix—something rises from the destruction—these ruptured ceramic pieces not only display the ever-lasting impact of rupture, but also how the clay body heals itself after the damage. This artistic inquiry asks us to pause, process, and take in the destruction we live with every day, reminding us that the resistance against oppression is on the horizon.