To Rangoato Hlasane

Rangoato Hlasane
Johannesburg, South Africa

Liverpool, UK
4 October 2014

Hi Ra

I thought of you because I’m working alongside Sofía Olascoaga again this week. She’s been discussing her project Between Utopia and Failure, about Iván Illich, radical pedagogy and CIDOC, in Cuernavaca, overlapping with some of what she did in Porto Alegre last year at our conference on equality in education — though I admit I largely missed what she said at that time due to the (very welcome, for sure) anti-elitism protests that day by the mediators of the Mercosul Biennial.

Essentially, Between Utopia and Failure is asking: how can we think of the performance of collective memory as a tool that informs cultural practices?

I hadn’t known that, only a few weeks into the public presentation of the project, one of the participants and his wife were murdered.

How was it possible for the participants to continue?

D