Postcards from the Desert Island documents a 3-week workshop with students from the École Vitruve, an experimental, self-run elementary school in Paris. Inspired in William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, the artist asked the pupils to turn the school hall into a desert island, and to relate themselves to such new territory. The video documents the children's organisational methods, their approaches to the problematics raised by self-governance and by the possibility of imagining institutions and social relations from scratch.

Postcards from the Desert Island is a project in which the artist Adelita Husni-Bey pursues with her inquiry on pedagogic models and education systems, combining them with her ongoing interest in collective and collaborative activities. Adelita Husni-Bey’s practice is strongly grounded in research and collaboration gestures, and encompasses drawing, painting, collage, video, and participatory workshops. Her work often looks at social relations under different political contexts, from late capitalism to communitarianism. Following her documentation activities on the comparison of different educational models and norms, with a particular focus on self-run projects, the artist uses live action to observe early pedagogical theories of the early 20th century, and the anarchist education experiments on the United States. The figure of Catalan free-thinker and anarchist Francisco Ferrer y Guardia (1859-1909) – who in 1901 opened The Modern School (la Escuela Moderna) in Barcelona, to teach middle-class children radical social values, and whose ideas were essential for the formation of the US Modern Schools (also called Ferrer Schools, modelled after Escuela Moderna) – has been central to Husni-Bey's investigation.

After the projects developed throughout 2011 in two French schools, the LAP (Lycée Autogéré de Paris) and the Saint Merri Renard elementary school - which the artist processed in a series of material that combined artworks and documentation, namely videos, drawings and paintings - Husni-Bey collaboated with yet another school located in Paris, the École Vitruve. This institution is a self-run public primary school that took its name from its original location in rue Vitruve, and which was originally founded in 1962 by the French pedagogue Robert Gloton, a militant of the experimental pedagogical movement Éducation Nouvelle.

In the video Postcards from the Desert Island (2010–11) Husni-Bey activates a three-week workshop with the pupils of the school, aged 7-10, which allows her to observe how the model and functioning of self-run education permeate the children’s organization models and social-political imaginaries.

Borrowing scenarios of Peter Brook's film Lord of Flies (1963) – an adaptation of William Golding’s eponymous novel - Adelita Husni-Bey invited the children of the École Vitruve to turn their school hall into a desert island. The children were therefore invited to start building a life from scratch in the imagined island, which is a trope of isolation, a place that offers the opposite possibilities to the cultural and political contexts in which these children actually live and will grow up. Promoting a mode of deflection as a form of reaction to the way Western society is structured, the video documents how the group of young kids embraces a social life in a no-man’s land, showing how they relate to some of the key principles and unresolved problems of self-governance, such as imagining a life without institutions; questions of punishment and the struggle for power; how to deal with immigration and civil disobedience, and where to draw the distinction between public and private realms.

Postcards also touches some fundamental aspects and problematics of classical ethnography, and the closeness of the camera to the pupil’s bodies and activities, often circulating among them, never allows the viewer to ignore the presence of the observing subject, whose presence might have conditioned and affected the youngsters attitudes and behaviour.

In a moment in which there is an ongoing critical evaluation of conventional pedagogic institutions and formats, and a clear interest from artists and theoreticians alike towards alternative educational models, Postcards uses the format of the documentary, grounded in the praxis of anthropology, to offer a compelling and complex analysis of the role of schooling in determining social models.

Credits

Courtesy: Galleria Laveronica
Special thanks: Vincenzo Latronico