texts set by Xin and was hosted by rm gallery, an artist-run gallery on the first floor of a building at the back of Karangahape Road, down Samoa House lane and up some narrow stairs. Xin provided homemade food and tea, and the group read the texts aloud, passing the reading from person to person and pausing for discussion at certain points. The texts chosen were predominantly written for a university-educated but non-specialist audience and in various ways proposed alternative economic and social paradigms, relationships to the natural and built environment, and concepts of making. The second ‘potluck’ series handed over the choice of text, discussion object or exercise to the participants, deliberately ‘squatted’ in existing educational spaces in the city, using the interior and exterior public areas of the Sir Paul Reeves WG Building at Auckland University of Technology. In keeping with the potluck kaupapa, participants brought food to share. The series, while still text-focused, gently put into practice some of the ideas proposed in the writings we read in the first series.
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Situating the series under the UWC umbrella meant that the discussion groups were positioned within a contestation and reimagining of education and research as a practice, an ideology and a form of collectivity. As Irit Rogoff wrote about her engagement with reimagining pedagogy through art: ‘at its very best, education forms collectivities—many fleeting collectivities that ebb and flow, converge and fall apart. These are small ontological communities propelled by desire and curiosity, cemented together by the kind of empowerment that comes from intellectual challenge.’11 This desire to form a (transitory) community is reflected in what Xin wrote to me in a later email discussion about the two series: The reading series 1 was a way for me to share some of the texts that influenced me at the time, a kind of re-thinking/seeing of how the world is running, and wondering about my place within it (and a desire to do something without money/when I had no income). I wanted to meet people who might be interested in similar topics, and I was curious how they might relate to the ideas (and possibly practice them together, somehow).12 She went on to say ‘[t]he actual conversations were beyond my imagination, and varied depending on the people present’.13