Graduation projects supervision
Indisciplined by learning
2022
undisciplinarity
materialist practices
Lorenzo Gerbi on his research project:
"In his graduation project, Lorenzo Gerbi proposes a rupture in the broad discourse around inter-, trans-, and multi-disciplinarity by disengaging from the methodological trap of the self-referential academic discussion around disciplinarity. The latter is too detached, in his opinion, from concrete experiences and existing non-disciplinary practices. Therefore, starting from his personal practice and struggles inside an interdisciplinary cultural institution, he decided to sketch an alternative approach that relies on temporarily removing disciplines to help develop a better collaboration attitude between them, not in an interdisciplinary project but by having people from different disciplines learning together.
In this way, learners become aware of how people with different backgrounds think and grasp reality, challenging the assumptions and hierarchies that normally originate from stereotyped images of specific characters (the nerd scientist, the greedy economist, the eccentric artist…). He called this approach indisciplinarity, a concept already briefly introduced by French philosopher Jacques Rancière, which he expanded to distinguish between the specific discipline that students learn within a traditional teaching environment and disciplines, the way they divide knowledge and separate those who can contribute to it from those who cannot.
For his graduation project, Gerbi co-designed an indisciplinary online learning community, called Make Economy Yours Again (MEYA), whose aim was to co-create a new knowledge base for developing alternative economic narratives. Participants were diverse in age, nationality, background and level of education, united only by their interest in economic activism. Through two editions of MEYA, he tested different pedagogical devices and de-disciplinarizing strategies to translate the approach of indisciplinarity into a concrete case study. The learning community became a space to practice economic change, a weekly 3-hour training session to exercise other ways of being in the current economic system, while questioning some of the assumptions and ideologies that dominate our understanding and action in our complex world."
Source: The Master Education in Arts, archive
"In his graduation project, Lorenzo Gerbi proposes a rupture in the broad discourse around inter-, trans-, and multi-disciplinarity by disengaging from the methodological trap of the self-referential academic discussion around disciplinarity. The latter is too detached, in his opinion, from concrete experiences and existing non-disciplinary practices. Therefore, starting from his personal practice and struggles inside an interdisciplinary cultural institution, he decided to sketch an alternative approach that relies on temporarily removing disciplines to help develop a better collaboration attitude between them, not in an interdisciplinary project but by having people from different disciplines learning together.
In this way, learners become aware of how people with different backgrounds think and grasp reality, challenging the assumptions and hierarchies that normally originate from stereotyped images of specific characters (the nerd scientist, the greedy economist, the eccentric artist…). He called this approach indisciplinarity, a concept already briefly introduced by French philosopher Jacques Rancière, which he expanded to distinguish between the specific discipline that students learn within a traditional teaching environment and disciplines, the way they divide knowledge and separate those who can contribute to it from those who cannot.
For his graduation project, Gerbi co-designed an indisciplinary online learning community, called Make Economy Yours Again (MEYA), whose aim was to co-create a new knowledge base for developing alternative economic narratives. Participants were diverse in age, nationality, background and level of education, united only by their interest in economic activism. Through two editions of MEYA, he tested different pedagogical devices and de-disciplinarizing strategies to translate the approach of indisciplinarity into a concrete case study. The learning community became a space to practice economic change, a weekly 3-hour training session to exercise other ways of being in the current economic system, while questioning some of the assumptions and ideologies that dominate our understanding and action in our complex world."
Source: The Master Education in Arts, archive
©Lorenzo Gerbi
©Lorenzo Gerbi
©Lorenzo Gerbi
Illustration from the publication Trans-realist Design, Mona Dekker, 2019
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©Irina Shapiro, 2016-2025