On Reading ‘The New Life’: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti‐Colonial Solidarity by Polly Savage
“The Russians had learnt design from infancy, they had grown up knowing how to draw, to work with watercolours, gouache, clay.”
I thought about my own experience, starting technical training as a child. My father, a skilled draftsman, had been taught in the Soviet realist tradition—crosshatching, shading, every detail of a live portrait meticulously captured. I remember him showing me his techniques, his insistence that the drawing should be precise, each line steady and measured. His guidance, however, was never patient, often sharp, focused on the way my drawings wavered, out of proportion or lacking a firm hand.
His sketchbook, a relic of those days, still sits in his hometown of Qingdao. My aunt keeps it on a shelf, among other mementos: a clay portrait head, a strand of rosemary beads from my grandmother who passed away years ago, and old photographs of my grandfather, who retired from the navy. Qingdao itself, a city shaped by colonial history and now famous for its brewery, feels like a bridge between past and present, where the marks of foreign influence linger beneath the surface of everyday life.
When I reflect on Qingdao, it’s a city defined by the scars of colonialism. It’s strange how history operates in layers, like the sketches in my father’s book—sometimes the lines are clear, other times they blur. But within those layers, the past shapes the present in subtle and powerful ways.
Reading Polly Savage’s ‘The New Life’, I was struck by the parallels between the experiences of Mozambican art students in the USSR and my own journey through design education. Savage (2022) discusses how these students navigated the contradictions of learning in a space that offered both solidarity and subtle forms of control, reflecting broader tensions in decolonial movements. Similarly, I find myself questioning the structures within which I teach, recognizing how pedagogical frameworks can both empower and constrain.
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) resonates deeply here. Freire emphasizes that “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” (Freire, 1970, p. 34). This insight compels me to consider how my teaching can transcend traditional, hierarchical models and instead foster critical, reflective practices among students.
In reflecting on these readings, I recognize that my approach to design education must continuously interrogate its own assumptions. Decolonising the University (Bhambra et al., 2018) argues for dismantling Eurocentric epistemologies in favor of more inclusive, pluralistic frameworks. This challenges me to rethink not just what I teach, but how I teach—ensuring that my pedagogy remains attentive to diverse histories, perspectives, and ways of knowing.
References:
Bhambra, G. K., Gebrial, D., & Nişancıoğlu, K. (2018). Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. Available at: https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf [Accessed 1 Feb. 2025].
Savage, P. (2022). ‘The New Life’: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-Colonial Solidarity. Art History, 45(1), pp. 126-145.