Introduction

This chapter gives a chronological account of the different activities carried out in the context of school without school, the educational program of this biennial. From May 2021 to January 2022, sixteen formative instances were created, including face-to-face and virtual talks, workshops, pedagogical laboratories and a book presentation. All of them led by artists, curators, theorists, architects and photographers of different nationalities, in close collaboration with SACO's Education, Communication and Production areas, as well as with the different communities in which each of these activities took place.

Along with an important presence of national artists, the program brought together creators from Germany, Brazil, Belgium, Colombia, Spain, the United States, and Nigeria. In this way, the educational program was formed by an exceptional heterogeneity of voices, all of them with unique, exclusive stories, memories, and tales; dreams, desires, and interests anchored to territories as diverse as they are surprising, always ready to think and situate their research in relation to the specificities of the territories of the Chilean Norte Grande.

All this, in the context of the global pandemic of COVID-19, with its demanding preventive measures and its often-burdensome official protocols of displacement. Between confinements and openings of public space, the formative experiences did not rest. With limited capacity and reduced physical contact, the program was almost entirely face-to-face, except for two virtual activities. Therefore, in one way or another, all these actions highlighted the value of the intimate, the close, the near, and the personal, in direct dialog with the others, the collective, and the communities. In fact, the need to rethink interpersonal ties, beyond mediations and virtualities, constantly emerged.

This program is not anchored in one place and its territorial expansion encompasses different spaces. In Antofagasta it took over the premises of the Casa Azul Cultural Center, the Regional Library, the roof of the AIEP Professional Institute of the Andrés Bello University (UNAB), the Antofagasta British School, the Gabriela Mistral School, the auditorium of the Licancabur Hall of the Minera Escondida Foundation and the ISLA Center for Artistic Residencies; on the other hand, in Quillagua, the G-15 Ignacio Carrera Pinto School; in San Pedro de Atacama, the La Tintorera Artistic Residence and, finally, the inescapable virtuality of Facebook.

This extension and territorial diversity show that it is possible to continue developing face-to-face educational experiences, safely and without risking the health of the participants. It also expresses all the knowledge learned from the most critical moments of the previous year's pandemic, while SACO9 was being carried out. Therefore, it is possible to mention that school without school continues to be a resilient educational program, which values materials and bodies; direct experiences with the territory; the proximity between individuals; their inter and transpersonal contact and dialog. And, also, that it continues to safeguard its ethical and political commitment to the local communities with which it works, because, as Dagmara Wyskiel expressed in SACO9: "The digital enclosure of culture increases the access gap, [and] further eliticizes the already hermetic world of art."