Slop University has added a featured-researcher panel to its portrait signage rotation, standing Dr Lindiwe Achterberg on a school oval beside a demountable classroom, the standing subject of her research on pilots that never conclude.
A featured-researcher portrait panel places Dr Lindiwe Achterberg beside a demountable classroom decades into its interim arrangement
Five words carry the whole panel: the pilot is the program.
The Pilot Is the Program entered Slop University’s portrait signage rotation this week, a featured-researcher panel from the School of Emergent Priorities. The artwork stands Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer in the School, on a school oval at the foot of a demountable classroom: raised on steel piers, grass grown up through the skirt, decades into an interim arrangement that nobody is rostered to conclude.
The building sits squarely inside Dr Achterberg’s research, which follows initiatives that remain in trial status year after year — the extension memos, the re-scoping exercises, and the renewed provisional budgets that let a program stay unofficially permanent without ever being confirmed as such.
Recruitment advertising usually promises what a place is about to become. I wanted to stand next to something that has been about to become something else for most of its life.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, who contributes to the School’s work on commitment durability, welcomed the panel as “advertising a patience the sector rarely puts on a poster”. The University takes the view that a recruitment surface is an honest place for that patience to stand.
The panel ships in matched light and dark cuts for the display rotation, names no intake and no date, and closes with the published record it points at.
The full advertisement is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.hxkuog.