Beatriz E. Balanta - Mary Walling Blackburn, Quaestiones Perversas, 2018

The Anhoek School is a nomadic pedagogical experiment that analyzes educational structures and investigates alternatives to traditional North American methods for learning. Under the auspices of the school, the Anhoek Record Examination–an obscene form of the Graduate Record Examination–aims to gum the data production and collection of standardized testing as well as question the ideological underpinnings behind it. Compiled by Beatriz E. Balanta and Mary Walling Blackburn, Quaestiones Perversas gathers together unruly record examinations (Beautiful Economy; The Reproductive; F|Slash|F), a traumatizing listening lab (Doggy… Doggy), and a physical fitness test that maims more than it measures. The answer keys are an intervention/irruption of poesis in the field of systematicity or the lust for order: the position of the father and the controlling language of the state. The book undoes the benign voice of the test, awakens the reader to the history of violence embedded in the form, and activates it as a site for aesthetic expression.