Showcase Project
Hipatia Project: Pedagogies of Gender in Spaces of Imprisonment
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My name is Belén Sola and I work in the Education and Cultural Action Dept here at MUSAC I am presenting, coordinating and curating—in fact this is my first experience as a curator— the museum’s Showcase Project for this season As you know, the Showcase Project normally focuses on editorial projects. Then last year, the museum director, Agustín Pérez Rubio, asked me to present one of our department’s ongoing projects. One of the educational department’s works in progress It seemed clear to me that the long-term work that best suited this space would be the Hipatia project Hipatia is more than a magazine It is a cultural platform that works with the prison space. The idea was to bring culture, the museum, what the contemporary art museum here in León, in Castilla y León, could offer the prison community This meant that the actions were much more ambitious that just editing a magazine This is where everything we can see in this exhibition comes from Coming from the workshops, the projections and the various actions that have been taking place against this backdrop And these were featured periodically in Hipatia But everything has a reason and in this four-year project everything has its own meaning What I wish to say is that the magazine is no more nor less important than a workshop, public readings or projections and a video-forum at the prison. In fact, that has been the great thing about it and what this space has given us: a chance to lend visibility to what a long-term project like this is all about, a project in which various actions feed off one another and somehow lead to a whole set of goals. The exhibition has been conceived thinking of the public of the city, in the public visiting the museum
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so that they can get an idea, that they can somehow understand what the work entails and not just to see it. I was very conscious not to over reify the project. That it would not be simply a project to look at, as if we are going to see something pretty that has been made in prison On the other hand, the idea is to provide an opening, to allow for, to enter a little more into the life of these women within prison, But more than the prison itself, where I have not been, because I have not been part of their everyday lives in prison, in the workshops and in the Hipatia project In other words, when we screen the films made there, its is because I want the spectator to see the films that these women made there and also the context that took place for the projection When we show an image, texts, books, I want spectators to be able to read what we read during those meetings Therefore, the exhibition I wanted to do is conceived to introduce us fully into what we lived and experienced inside and that, for a moment, the spectator can put themselves in the shoes of those women. This is the end of Hipatia as a project and as a magazine and as these highly localised and specific actions with the women from the Mansilla de las Mulas prison In the exhibition we have a chance to see the last issue, issue number four, which is really the fifth because the first was issue zero, So it’s the fifth we have published And this fifth and, as I said, final issue of Hipatia, will be given out free during the show. We wanted to do a special issue. We have been conscious over the last few months that this was going to be the last number, the last publication. It has more pages than normal, because we wanted to invite all the people who have been involved in some way in the project over the four years. There are texts by Silvia Zayas, Sara Rosenberg, María Galindo, Yera Garrido and Eva Moreno Según las notas de prensa que nos habéis pasado sería Yera Moreno y Eva Garrido In other words, the people who led the workshops in the prison. And there is also a special piece by Chela Sandoval, the Professor of Chicanos Studies at the University of California. But, of course, all these texts, the main body of texts and
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the push behind issue four of Hipatia came in March 2010 when the women decided to dedicate a special issue to the specific situation of foreign women in prison This decision they took was very interesting. I remember that it was before International Women’s Day in 2010, one of the last meetings in which they took a group decision to prepare an issue dedicated to the situation of foreign women in prisons here in Spain CREDITOS Special thanks to Curator To all the women who collaborated in Hipatia magazine Particularly Aurora Martos, Alicia Villareal, Rita de Fåtima Goya and Leslie Video production Translations The whole team who made this exhibition possible