Workshop 1 Reading: Summary and Reflection

The article assigned to me is:

Polly Savage, ‘The New Life’: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity (2022)

With interests in history and politics, and in the Lusophone world, this captured my attention very quickly. The events that the article introduces, chiefly students from the recently-independent Mozambique being sponsored to study in the Soviet bloc, were entirely unknown to me. The idea was largely to educate people from various socialist-leaning countries friendly with the USSR, and then for them to return to their countries to help them develop in the ‘right’ (i.e., communist) direction, and establish ‘cooperatives’. It is clear from the title that this article focuses on art students, but the Bolseiros (sponsored ones) also studied areas such as agronomy, engineering and medicine. This took place after Mozambique’s war of liberation, but during that conflict the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) has sent students to socialist countries principally for military training.

One point that struck me was the fact that the Mozambique students in the USSR knew nothing, were “at zero”, whereas “the Russians had learnt design from infancy”: you could say that they were a blank canvas. So what happened is that the African students observed and copied the Russians in various ways, with Cejuma, one of the artists interviewed for the article, stating that “by the third year there was really no difference in design or in painting – we were totally equal” (page 9). The article later goes on to analyse elements of some of Cejuma’s dissertation work, which includes much Soviet iconography (page 11), but goes on to add “far from passively reproducing the demands of a pedagogic authority, [his] posters are emphatically oriented to an alternative political community” with references to the Frelimo Party and to the Mozambican nation (page 13).

So these students learned their practice in a multi-cultural setting, with what me might call ‘home’ students studying alongside ‘international’ students – much like we see at UAL! However, there is a massive contrast: the Bolseiros were expected to conform, whilst UAL seeks to embrace a global diversity of ideas and practices. We do not expect our students to adhere to a paradigm, but wish for them to bring their own culture, and their styles, approaches and themes. They do not arrive at one of our colleges a blank canvas.

As a closing observation, I’d like to reiterate the fact that whilst Cejuma’s work largely adhered to the standards expected by his training, his home country and culture still came through in some aspects: I hope our students can also always be permitted, perhaps encouraged, to do the same.

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