People keep telling me that their year’s gone quickly, but it’s stretched out for me, month after month of unusually long days. Some were spent in quarantine and consequently on Zoom, which has its own infernal clock, but most were at the University, at a desk, staring into a screen’s abyss, or sometimes with a class in the printmaking studio with ink smeared across my brow, or like a moustache on my upper lip that no one bothers to tell me about, until I finally get home and it’s suggested I take a long hard look in the mirror.

One evening earlier in the year, as I was heading home, tired and hungry after another long day, walking fast to not miss my train, I looked up and saw in the middle distance a sandwich board promoting a public lecture. These are a relatively regular occurrence on campus, and they seem to attract a loyal crowd, a little older, retired, smart casual, muted tones, well heeled, respectable. But although the topics and speakers sometimes pique my interest, I’m seldom tempted. After a hard day’s thinking, all I really want to do is dumb it down. But this night, the title of the lecture spoke to me, sang siren-like to me, and all my thoughts of dinner and the couch, TV and a glass of wine evaporated. The sign ahead read, ‘Teaching for a Stranger Future’ and I was hooked. In an instant, as if my feet had seen it first, I had veered towards the automatic doors of the lecture theatre, already anticipating their low mechanical moan and the hushed expectant tones within. I couldn’t yet imagine what would be said, but I was certain I would listen spellbound, and perhaps even ask a question at the end and be thanked by the speaker for its excellence.

Still 20 metres from the entrance I had decided that the lecture’s title should become the Bachelor of Contemporary Art’s motto, its by-line, because what else were we doing but teaching for a stranger future and encouraging our students to look unflinchingly into that strangeness, addressing its wrongs and injustices but embracing its wonders and marvels too. And what else were we doing but asking students to defamiliarise the familiar and the taken-for-granted, to frame new questions, to look at the world and ourselves askew, to experiment and innovate, to bring things together in unexpected ways, to shift perspectives and meanings, to unmake and remake anew, and to imagine a future not bound by the conditions of the past.

What a difference a vowel can make. Approaching the door and about to enter, I looked down at the sandwich board that was alongside me now and saw that the title of the lecture was ‘Teaching for a Stronger Future’. Unaccountably disappointed, I resumed my route to the station and missed my train, but the title I’d imagined, and the lecture it could have been, stayed with me. And if I were to write it, as I think I might, that lecture would begin with gratitude to the graduates of 2022 whose work has so much to teach us about the stranger future that begins now.

Stephen Atkinson 
Program Director 
Bachelor of Contemporary Art