FREE SCHOOLS AS TOOLS FOR INCLUSION
Tiny Toones and Arte Moris
This chapter explores intersections of the visual arts and education by analysing the development of free school and classes organized by Tiny Toones (Phnom Penh, Cambodia) and Arte Moris Art Centre (Dili, Timor Leste). I argue that Tiny Toones and Arte Moris not only serve as a model for alternative schooling, but emerge as spaces for nurturing local strategies for everyday sustainability.
INTRODUCTION
This chapter examines the ‘free school’ practices of Tiny Toones and Arte Moris. Tiny Toones is a Phnom Penh-based organization that focuses on young people in Cambodia. Arte Moris is a free art school based in Dili, Timor Leste. The establishment of Tiny Toones and Arte Moris provides an avenue for exploring the link between art and pedagogy. My research poses direct questions about youth culture, cultural infrastructure, a sense of crisis, and the development of agency that shapes a collective vision. Tiny Toones’ and Arte Moris’ long-standing practices reveal a relationship between doing art and the creation of collective sustainability mechanisms that intersect with the organization of the spaces. I elaborate the ‘studyingturn’ and the notion of ‘studying together’ as both inter-relational thinking, and a mechanism to develop a long-term cultural strategy from below.
Tiny Toones was founded during the post-Khmer Rouge period, when the country had attempted to achieve normalization through the assistance of various international NGOs, UN bodies, and capital investments. The country strives to become a more democratic nation, while still healing from the wounds of internal conflicts and wars. My research provides insights into how the organization of Tiny Toones is also informed by the volunteering culture, and by various workers of these international organizations.
Arte Moris was founded when Timor Leste was in the process of transitioning into a newly independent country. The Indonesian New Order military regime invaded East Timor (or Portuguese Timor) shortly after the Revolutionary Front of an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) gained independence from Portugal in November 1975. During the New Order regime, East Timor was the twenty-seventh province of Indonesia. Following ‘Reformation 1998’1 in Indonesia, seventy-eight and a half per cent of the East Timorese people voted for separation from Indonesia through an Independence Referendum. The conceptualization of a ‘studying-turn’ grows from my observations of various independent initiatives and artist collectives that develop various education or learning activities as the basis of their work. These organizations function as both independent art spaces and public learning spaces. The ‘studying-turn’ involves two ways of doing. First, it attempts to provide learning spaces for the public. Second, it attempts to reframe certain spaces as studying spaces. It shows an intention of going back to studying. Here I use Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of ‘study.’2 Harney and Moten situate the act of ‘studying’ in between debt and credit; studying is located between what we can do, and what we fail to do. It assumes the readiness to accept the condition in which the future does not always lead to an expected outcome.
This chapter is divided in two parts: the first explores the learning processes in Tiny Toones and the diverse narratives that inform its programme; the second part explores how Arte Moris has emerged as an independent art institution that facilitates the survival process of an artist community. Both these sections include field-work descriptions and reflections which bring to life the spaces and faces in these places.
Free schools, as organized by Tiny Toones and Arte Moris, provide the ground for imagining a pattern of alternative education projects embedded in the formation of independent arts organizations. In the context of Tiny Toones and Arte Moris, my research shows that organizing a school means to perform a new mechanism for caring about local ecosystems.
In the context studied, education is both the product of crisis and a way of dealing with the crisis. This research argues that doing education through art is an intuitive act to be performed in a socially challenged context. Further, the studying-turn is inter-relational thinking that can connect art and community.
In labelling Tiny Toones and Arte Moris as independent art organizations, I use my definition of alternative spaces. An alternative space, as expounded in my previous research, refers to new cultural spaces—an artistrun space, gallery, performance space, or discussion place—for thoughts that would otherwise be ‘homeless’ in the cultural spaces formed and designed by established cultural authorities.3 These spaces are composed of a group of individuals with different backgrounds and trajectories who develop their own attitudes to test their thoughts on arts and culture.
Their works range from art production and research and are all conducted with clear interdisciplinary intention: be it for the provision of art and culture that in turn supports wider infrastructure, or to facilitate dialogue with policy makers, or to organize activities that can be classified as community empowerment. An alternative space serves as a model platform for artists and cultural activists to fulfill their visionary ideas.4
TINY TOONES: AN ARCHITECTURE OF FREESTYLE SCHOOLING HELPING CREATE EQUALITY IN EDUCATION SYSTEMS
Tiny Toones’ founder, Tuy Sobil (better known as KayKay or KK), was born in a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border in 1977. Like thousands of Khmer people who populated the camp, KK’s family fled from the country to escape the Khmer Rouge regime and other internal military conflicts.
In 1984, when KK was seven years old, he immigrated to Long Beach, California, with his family. The number of Cambodian refugee communities in Long Beach is reported to be the largest outside Cambodia and the centre of the Cambodian diaspora.5 A major event in KK’s life led to his deportation from the United States in 2004. He arrived in Phnom Penh later that year: everything felt unfamiliar, as Cambodia was a ‘foreign’ country for him. KK found himself scrapingby with various jobs in the city’s foreign and local NGOs. He observed that there were not many activities conducted specifically for children in Phnom Penh’s urban landscape. As a skillful breakdancer, KK opened his house to provide free breakdance classes for kids and teenagers in Phnom Penh. Tiny Toones grew from a dance centre to a free school providing, in addition to dance classes, free classes in English, mathematics, and Khmer.
WORK TYPES
Assembly
Creative writing
Radio drama
KEYWORDS
Storytelling
Animal resistance
Radical pedagogy
Climate change