Memoirs microlab 2015

Memoirs 2015

micro lab pedagogía y curaduría

PROYECTO EDUCATIVO

INDEX

1 What is Micro-lab?

Pedagogical Curating: Revisions and Posibilities

by Claudia Segura and Caridad Botella

2 Guests

3 Discontinuous Fragments and Dialogues a) I don’t know what I am

- Educator, Artist or Curator

- Reflections on the Formative Experiences

- Between Curating and Research - Curatorial Practice and Research Processes b)

Hybrid Spaces for the Production of Knowledge

- Education, History and Stories within Education

- Between Utopia and Disenchantment: a space for mediation c)

Mediation • Mediation, Workshops and Technique • The Endogamy of Contemporary Art • Mediation with an Expanded Audience • Affection and the Mediation Processes • Users of the Museum, The Audience as a Content Programmer • Mediation in Context

d)

Visibility and Registration

e)

Teaching and Pedagogical Curating

¿WHAT IS MICRO-LAB?

Pedagogical Curating: Revisions and Possibilities In order to begin writing an introduction about the Micro-lab 2015 that allows us to understand it as a laboratory that reflects on the practice and the theory of pedagogical curating, I propose to review the work done by the artist and educator, Luis Camnitzer at the Mercosur Biennial, in 2006.

This works as an archeology of the practices and themes that were discussed during Micro-lab 2015. Camnitzer’s work at the biennial was an educational proposal about activating the space, pointing out the learning experience of the audience, and simultaneously intended to stimulate the public’s interest in, or for, the creative process.

For the first time at the biennial, recognition was given to the continuity of work with the community, within the space of the event. This gesture implies the imbrication of the biennial in the social dynamics of the city.

Pedagogical curating questions, inverts and interconnects the institutional roles of the artist, the public and education itself. The idea of creating an educational program as pedagogical curating questioned the identity of the artist and his role in society, but at the same time, questioned the role of the spectator as a generator of knowledge.

The collective processes of learning were at the center of attention and raised the possibility of seeing artistic education as a common element to different disciplines, placing the viewer as a cultural producer that brings in his or her personal experience and not a learned discourse.

Undoubtedly, the most relevant aspect of the format mentioned before is that it forced guests and participants to rethink the institutional position of art, and to understand that educational programs are no longer appendices of artistic exhibitions but instead have an autonomous position and leadership.

The interrogations mentioned before, in addition to the identity of the institutions, artists, curators, the public and the collective and contemporary art’s transversal character, were the threads, which ran through the workshops and panel sessions held during Microlab 2015.

International artists and curators Sofía Olascoaga (MX), Fito Conesa (SP), Erick Beltrán (MX), Miguel López (PE) and Julia Morandeira (SP), were invited to this event to share a lecture along with teachers: Sandra Barrera (CO), Adriana Tobón (CO), María Teresa Devia (CO), Alejandro Sánchez (CO), Adriana Peláez (CO); they were selected based on an announcement for projects on the relationship between curatorship, art and education.

Simultaneously, Maria Villa, editor of Errata magazine and members of NC-arte´s Educational, Project; Yuly Riaño (CO), Tatiana Benavides (CO) and Marcela Calderón (CO), along with director and curator Claudia Segura, were present and participated in each session.

Micro-lab was held from October 1st through the 4th, 2015.

The sessions were divided into three panels and were part of Articularte, ARTBO’s education section.

These sessions were organized according to the following topics: “Curating and Pedagogy As A Territory”, “Pedagogical and Creative Practices with Educator Artists”, “I Don’t Know Who I Am: Educator, Artist or Curator” and “Mediation and Pedagogical Curating at the Independent vs. Institutional Space”. Additionally, the lab also offered other workshops that expanded on some of the topics covered on the panels.

These included “Pedagogy and Curating” (by Fito Conesa); “Pedagogy, Curating and Practices with the Community” (by Sofia Olascoaga); “Pedagogy, Curating and Other Narratives” (by Erick Beltrán) and “Pedagogy and Curating with Teachers” (By Yuly Riaño and Tatiana Benavides, NC-arte Education Project).

This lab, in its initial version, far from defining the concept of pedagogical curating, facilitated a space for listening to all of the numerous voices and roles. In these memoirs, the fragments of the conversations are presented through a series of themes that discuss artistic and curatorial practices that work with, or for, the public as a community and active community. The intention was to problematize the two axes of both art and education from the theoretical and practical points of view.

In addition, and in order to measure the reality of a profound change in education, we took into account the presence of teachers who discussed, how contemporary art is introduced into classrooms to mediate all types of content from which the work of art departs.

From the intersections of curating, artistic practice, community and pedagogy, NC-arte opens a line of research carried out as a theoretical/practical laboratory that wants to position the institution as an active agent on the existing debate about the relationship between curating, art, and education.

Micro-lab wants to leave NC-arte’s daily space and discuss many of the concerns that we have, when discussing how to work together between the Exhibition, Project and the Education Department.

Finally, considering and thinking about how to get the community involved on a deeper level, not only the community that visits us, but those that yet have not visited us.

Claudia Segura Campins NC-arte Director/ Chief Curator

Caridad Botella NC-arte Educational Department

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GUESTS

ADRIANA PELAEZ Holds a BFA in Visual Studies from the Superior Academy of Arts (ASAB) at Francisco Jose de Caldas District University in Bogota and a MA in Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Theory from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She has participated in various collective exhibitions in Bogota and Barcelona. , her project Identidad en obra was part of the Children Pavilion curated by the National Museum of Colombia at ARTBO. She was part of the pedagogical research group at the Educational Department of the National Museum. In 2008, she worked on the workshops of the project entitled Poligrafías Miradas al grabado y a la gráfica contemporánea, Laboratorios de exploración y experimentación gráfica. Her artistic practice revolves around investigating the representation of the contemporary subject through video art, performance and painting. Her academic research has focused on questioning the discourses of institutional criticism.

ADRIANA TOBON Has been a university and high school instructor and considers this professional experience an essential environment for discussion and dialogue considering Colombia’s particular historical moment. Her research interests centers around the philosophical and historiographical studies of art, the city, and its architecture. She has created study programs and pedagogical strategies that allow participants to approach diverse transformation processes and understanding the knowledge of communication; in order to generate connections between disciplines and methods along with connections between pedagogies and scriptures.

ALEJANDRO SANCHEZ Studied Visual Arts at Pontificia Javeriana University and holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of Texas, Austin. He currently works as a practicing artist in photography and video.

In September 2016, he participated in the exhibition Fotográfica Transversal at Galeria el Museo, Bogotá. He has designed curatorial and pedagogical projects for the Gimnasio Campestre a high school located in Bogota. He is the director of Arts Programming at the same institution.

CLAUDIA SEGURA Works as a researcher and curator and holds a Humanities degree from Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona and an MFA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths University at London.

She has collaborated with London’s Tate Modern’s curatorial department; the Loop Festival in Barcelona; La Caixa Foundation, and with the department of Culture and Exhibitions. Additionally, she has worked extensively in both Spain and Latin America including as coordinator for DNA Platform, Barcelona; the external curator of the Mardin Biennial, Turkey; the curator of Barcelona´s Young Art Hall and Frontiers Biennial, Mexico. While accomplishing these vocational pursuits, she has been a guest lecturer at both Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) and the University of the Andes, Bogota. Currently, she is chief curator and director of NC-arte in Bogotá. She has curated and co-curated numerous projects at several institutions in Mexico, Istanbul, Porto, London and Spain. Simultaneously, she is a collaborator and guest editor at pecialized art publications such as Florae from Flora ars + natura and ArtNexus.

ERICK BELTRAN Is a Mexican artist living and working in Barcelona. His work is created from constant research and reflection on the structural mechanisms of thought systems. More specifically, he is interested in the relationship that exists between the editing processes and the construction of speeches. By analyzing diagrams, compiling archives or researching material in the media, he analyzes the way in which images are defined, valued, sorted, selected, reproduced

and distributed to create political, economic and cultural discourses in contemporary society. Likewise, he is interested in how the process of edition defines our world and how this affects the relationships between different groups of people.

FITO CONESA Directs and curates a space called Habitació 1418. This center is coordinated jointly with Macba and CCCB. He holds a bachelor of Fine Arts from University of Barcelona. He has taught workshops for the educational department of the La Caixa foundation. He was formerly the art director for the “Santo Domingo Verde” campaign and was also part of the Sala d’Art Jove team in 2012.

JULIA MORANDEIRA Is a researcher and independent curator. Her work deals with issues linked to globalization, decolonial theory, the body and image policies/ politics: cultural production devices and their inscription as places of knowledge production. She is a member of Declinación Magnética, an artistic and research group that is interested in the production of imagery and decolonial strategies.

As a researcher, she is a member of the MNCARS Peninsula group and is a visiting professor at the University of the Basque Country.

She is currently a resident curator at the Cultural Center of Spain in Costa Rica and during 2014 and 2015, she was the curator for the Canibalia project at the Kadist Foundation in Paris. She has a degree in Humanities from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and holds a MFA degree in Theory of Art and Visual Culture from Goldsmiths University at London.

MARÍA TERESA DEVIA Her main interest is art. She was born in Honda and studied in Bogota, Barcelona and Paris. She is an author of texts that help to understand and apply the arts. Her text above has been published by Norma and Pearson. She participated in a project called La Maleta Didactica created by Museo del Banco de la

Republica, Bogota. This project is a pedagogical tool that teaches children, youth and teachers to become involved with the arts in their daily lives. She is interested in the collaborative practices of pedagogy.

MARIA VILLA Holds an undergraduate and MFA degree in Philosophy from the National University, Bogota. She has been the editor and the editorial coordinator of numerous cultural, research and pedagogical publications for various institutions. She is a consultant of promotion and creative writing programs for the Ministry of Culture and a researcher at Corpovisionarios. She coordinated the training and research programs of the Visual and Plastic Arts department at IDARTES and Galeria Santafe.

In 2012, she designed and coordinated the education pavillion at ARTBO and during 2013, she created the first mediation research laboratory of IDARTES. For this project, she received a scholarship at the Observatory of Latin America at The New School Public Engagement, in New York.

MIGUEL LOPEZ Is a writer, researcher, and and chief curator at TEOR/ética and Lado V at San Jose, Costa Rica. His work investigates collaborative dynamics and transformations in the ways of understanding and participating in politics in Latin America in contemporary times, as well as trans-feminist transfers of history from a southern perspective. His texts have been published in noumerous journals and magazines including: Afterall, Ramona, E-flux Journal, Art in America, Art Journal, Journal of Visual Cultur, among others. In 2014, he curated the “Dios es Marica” section for the 31st edition of the Sao Paulo Biennial. Among his most acclaimed exhibitions are Perder la forma humana (2013) and Una imágen sísmica de los años ochenta en América Latina (2012) with the research group Red Conceptualismos del Sur Museo

and comissioned by the Reina Sofia Museum. His most recent edited books are: Teresa Burga: Estructuras de Aire–Air structures co-edited with Agustín Pérez Rubio (2015), Sergio Zevallos: La muerte obscena: Dibujos 1982-1987(2015) and Saturday Night Thriller y otros escritos 1998-2013 (2013). He is a co-founder of an independent space called Bisagra, in Lima, Peru.

SANDRA BARRERA As a cultural manager, she was a founding member and coordinator of ArteLab a laboratory for electric fine arts and created the Salón Maestro. She is a painter and has exhibited in spaces such as ARTBO (2001); gallery The Museum, Casa Cuadrada gallery, Artecámara, and at the Salon Regional de Artistas (2007) among others. She has nearly a decade and a half of experience in teaching, and is currently the director of the Artistic Studies center at Gimnasio Campestre School, in Cota, CO. SOFÍA OLASCOAGA As an educational curator and sporadic artist, she focuses her work on the activation of artistic platforms for critical thinking, collective work, and knowledge building. She completed curatorial studies at the Independent Studies Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), and holds a BFA from the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving La Esmeralda, (MX). She was a resident researcher at Independent Curators International (2011-2012) in New York, and was the director of Clínicas en edición X at SITAC, in Mexico. She was also the educational and public programas coordinator of the Carrillo Gil Art Museum (2007-2010), where she founded Estudio Abierto, a platform dedicated to program the agenda of the museum based on visitor prferences. Her recent, curatorial practice is focused on researching processes around notions of community, through a project entitled: Entre utopía y desencanto. She was the academic curator for MUAC-UNAM, she coordinated the 2014-2015 Campus Expanded Program. Additionally, she was a co-curator of the 32nd Edition of the Sao Paulo Biennial, which opened in September 2016.

NC-arte EDUCATIONAL PROJECT CARIDAD BOTELLA (Head of the department) Is Head of NC-arte’s Education Department. This project has, at its core, a special focus on experimental mediation practices.

She holds a degree in Art History from Complutense Madrid University, Spain and an MFA in Museology from Reinwardt Academy, Amsterdam, NL as well as an MFA in Film Studies from the University of Amsterdam. She was the director at Witzenhausen Gallery in Amsterdam. She also contributes to several international publications such as Artpulse and Artnexus.

YULY RIAÑO (Project Coordinator) Is an artist, instructor, and researcher. She holds a degree in Art and Visual Arts from the Superior Academy of Arts at Bogotá.

She is currently enrolled at the Arts Education MFA program at the National University of Colombia, Boogota. Since 2013, she has coordinated the NC-arte Educational Project, where she has led the creation and development of pedagogical programs, creative thinking and curatorial laboratories that are currently being carried out by the project. Between 2009 and 2013, she was a resident artist at the aeioTU Early Childhood Centers in Suba, Sopo, Nogal and Parque Nogal in Colombia. In 2016, she became part of Colectivo Invisible as a cutaror and instructor.

She is a co-founder of the Latin American Festival of Multimedia ALTERÓPTICA. She has collaborated with institutions such as MAC (Museum of Contemporary Art of Bogotá), MAMM (Museum of Modern Art of Medellín), Bogota’s Chamber of Commerce and the Ministry of Culture, Bogota.

TATIANA BENAVIDES (Assistant) Is a visual artist who gratuaded from Jorge Tadeo Lozano University, Bogota. She is interested in the development of collective creation processes and the configuration of workspaces for the production of knowledge, based on the word (what is said) and affection. Since 201, she has collaborated with pedagogical

and mediation projects at exhibition spaces. She is currently the educational assistant at the NC-arte Education Project.

JUANIKO MORENO (Mediator) Is an artist, who holds a BFA in Plastic Arts from the National University, Bogota. He currently works as a mediator at NC-arte Educational Project. He has experience working with mediation in spaces such as museums and works with temporary exhibitions.

His artistic interest lies in finding ways to link the artistic process along with curatorship and pedagogy in and out of exhibition spaces.

MARCELA CALDERON (Mediator) Holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the National University, Bogota, CO. She was a mediator at NC-arte Educational Project between 2015 and 2016. She is interested in understanding the artistic practice as a learning medium that has diverse types and levels of knowledge. Based on that premise, she has developed various pedagogical, curatorial, production and cultural management projects.

DISCONTINUOUS FRAGMENTS AND DIALOGUES

Discontinuous fragments and dialogues The compilation of the texts in this section, is an attempt to preserve some of the discussions that occurred during the Microlab panels. The conversations and questions between guests, assistants, and artists were about topics related to the curatorial practice and pedagogy; their ways of manifesting themselves in different spaces, both artistically and pedagogically, and about the types of mediation that can be carried out in such contexts.

The story of this section has been raised, regarding to the concept of memory. Memory, being understood as the ability to remember an image or a set of events. However, and in a bid to approach the term in a more humanistic point of view, we undestand that in the excersice of reconstructing past events, the memories appear in a fragmented and discontinuous/ disconnected manner. This aspect has allowed us to play with the possibility of providing a new experience that allows one to interpret, what has happened during the Micro-laboratory from other perpectives and readings, and at the same time, provide of setting up a the reader the oportunity to reconstruct and configurate their own relationships.

I don’t know what I am

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-I don´t know what I am! I am interested in art but, I do not see myself in a studio, I am interested in educational processes but, I do not want to be a teacher (...)

-In a very direct way this friend answered me: -I think when you identify that there are many things in life that you like, the problem is not choosing which one you are going to do, but how are you going to create a way that allows you to combine those interests into a way of making your own.

”

Fragment of a conversation with Sofía Olascoaga

Educator, Artist or Curator - María Villa: When someone asks you, ‘which is it’? I frankly do not know what to answer because, although I am not a curator and I have not had the opportunity to directly curate exhibitions, I am in constant dialogue with artists that determine how to hang their work or on what they would like to happen out there. I (often) get into a discussion with them about how to make the interaction with the audience; a real help to get the message across the other side but, taking into account that all the time, I am of course, working directly with the public, that ranges from small children to specialized people of the arts and with whom I have to be able to achieve a meaningful conversation, either with the children or with the specialized public, with any of them, and there is where the the role of the educator appears.

- Fito Conesa: If I had to define myself, surely the first thing I would say would be (that I am), an artist–or silver dancer– which, is important in this case because, I am an artist who runs a project linked to a museum’s pedagogical department. My role is to make the link between the space, the adolescents, the possibilities or what the museum can offer, the city itself.

A Reflection on the Formative Experiences - Sofía Olascoaga: That idea of “I do not know what I am: artist, curator or educator”, is something I am currently carrying with me because, in the last few times they (have) said to me: “Well, in reality what she does is confusing, so it’s better that she explains how she defines herself beause it is a rare mix”.

Then I kept thinking that, in reality, when I saw the title I understood it as an invitation to make a reflection, one that was more personal, but including very important formative experiences.

The first part that I remembered is that, at some point, very early in my university education, I was enrolled in five different careers –I left all of them except for Art and Sociology– and this had to do with, that at that moment, Mexico had few university degrees or plans within art and humanities that raised more interdisciplinary processes or where there was dialogue between different fields of knowledge.

Then, you were either an artist or a sociologist, but there were no cultural studies program (s) or anything like that. In general, I was a very good student and my switching of programs was not a thing of just dropping out, instead, it was a search for a combination of practices, trainings, and lines of thought that responded to what I thought could be done.

Afterwards, in a hallway talk at the arts faculty with an artist that is also a friend –I was just in the middle of my conflict which was: “I don’t know who I am”: I am interested in art but I do not see myself in a studio. I am interested in educational processes, but I do not want to be an educator. In a very direct way, this friend said to me: I think when you identify that there are many things in life that you like, the problem is not choosing which one are you

going to do, but how are you going to create a way that allows you to combine those interests into a way of making it your own.”

The second part had to do with another experience, that for me represents a moment of breakthrough. This happened when I had met with other colleagues at an art school that was well known for the artistic practice of its teachers–artists were giving class– and how they shared their artistic practice intensely with the students but, in the contrary manner, their practice was inscribed in an institutional and scholastic structure, supported by chopsticks.

Then the vertigo of the existential crisis passed; a space for conversation with other colleagues in the same crisis, allowed us to create independent experiences of self formation and dialogues with others. These experiences generated study groups where we attempted to dwell in a studio in which some of the same colleagues had their work spaces. Thursday was the day for the painters’ crisis, on Friday, we had an Almodovar movie club; on Saturday, there was a party; Sunday we talked about those who had interests in certain texts. Then a thing that was closely linked to that space with a lack of structure also allowed us the possibility of organizing events with other, self-generated spaces of learning.

So, the “I don’t know who I am”, has nothing to do with an ontological definition, but with the context in which we are recognizing ourselves. I think there is a part that is double-sided there is a part that has at, and has to do with the gaps that academic education has –within the careers in which we are involved– and those gaps, at the same time, raise the possibility of designing our own searches and tools.

I also believe that we have a schizophrenic relationship with what we recognize as an artistic scene. An example of this is international, contemporary art, with the models of professionalization that are –most of the time– generated from cultural, economical, institutional and academic centers, where the conditions to be academic experts in a specific field or subject exists, and also where the institutions of art and culture have in their career structure, the place for this ‘specialist’. On the other hand, as two sides of the same coin, there are other contexts where that institutional place is much more porous, unstable, and most of the time, austere.

We, the ones that work on these, move from our desire, creation, and interest in art and cultural spaces, and often we respond to what needs to be at, or, in the moment and, in the specific project. Then this fact has less to do with defining ourselves from a perspective of professional specialization that has a real counterpart in the institution and the academy, and more from the need to edit a magazine; to participate as a curator in a museum; to generate a personal practice that in reality, aims much more to a type of learning, to leave aside the words of curator, educator or artist.

On the other hand, sometimes there is the possibility of doing a project and participating in it as a curator, then it is better to clarify expectations before accepting. At other times, it turns out that it is as an artist, sometimes from an educational position. I believe that the possibility of having a transversal dialogue with those that are known as professional boundaries of the field in which we move, opens up new forms of dialogue that are not reproduced as certain specific formulas of the specialization.

- Miguel Lopez: My relationship with the institution has changed over time and I would say that initially, it was a bit conflictive, in fact, I did not finish university –I was expelled– and to a certain extent, I have been building self-learning spaces, also because there is not an art or criticism aparatus, in Peru, at a university level; it is absolutely flimsy and empty. It is something that is in process.

Of course, that also forces you to build learning spaces; for example, if I want to know about video art and there is not a single place where I can learn it, the solution is to build a platform to invite people and publicly discuss what video art means. In this way, you can learn in a collective way and you do not have to wait for knowledge to come from a vertical transfer and without putting yourself through all the protocols that the academy usually has.

Protocols of power, in which one has to climb certain steps and fulfill certain rites to have enunciation ability, to have a type of agency in how the knowledge is produced or how it is distributed.

All this is a thing that, let’s say, I happily escaped from, but of course, that also made my relationship with the institution a bit conflictive at first.

But now, being inside an institution working in TEOR/ética for the last four months and collaborating with the Museum of Art in Lima, I am assembling the collection of contemporary art at this museum, and I work with a curator which implies, constructing critical infrastructure and the type of situation that it is to work, in an institution.but of course, that also made my relationship with the institution a bit conflictive at first. But now, being inside an institution working in TEOR/ética for the last four months and collaborating with the Art Museum of Art in Lima, I am assembling the collection of contemporary art of this museum and I work with a curator which implies constructing critical infrastructure and the type of bet that is to work in an institution.

Between Curating and Research - Julia Morandeira: I always define myself as a researche/curator, because they are two stances of my practice that are in constant feedback.

In addition, I also work as a professor at a university which in context, are different spheres that do not exist one without the other. Somehow, I do believe that it has been important for me to be able to understand how to mobilize certain concerns, but also certain methodologies, not only from research but, also from teaching within curating and how that can impact or redefine certain successive positions within our work; understanding curating as different ways of producing knowledge.

Collective Processes in Curating

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The collective, in curating, opens up processes of cocreation that puts the public in the role of creator, and content producers.

This always implies the detonation of deeper and more horizontal learning processes than when the discourse is assumed to be absolute from what the expert says

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NC-arte Education Department Team

Collective Processes in Curating - Miguel Lรณpez: A greater part of the work I have done has been collective and that seems interesting to me, as it is a kind of direct questioning to a curatorial model that is currently well established.

I believe this model is more profitable to the neo-liberal models of legitimacy production and to the visibility of the autonomous curator figure, the curator as a creator who produces in solitary and who also builds this kind of symbolic capital that can be accumulated. I find it interesting to think from a different place, to think of curating as a place of collective investigation and as a space that is rethinking the ways in which that knowledge that is produced, has a participation in the public domain.

I think that is also linked to several groups in which I have worked.

Doing editorial projects for example, always involves a collective work, a work in which many people participate because they are part of independent spaces, finding projects, work or research platforms. I think that also generates a series of interesting questions about for how questions about for how long a curatorial work can be inscribed in a specific context.

- Julia Morandeira: The exhibition is always a collective statement.

The idea of a single voice, the authority of the commissioner.

I think it is a highly debatable premise that can easily be questioned. In order to explain this in a more complete manner, I would like to set the example of a collective of which I am part of called Declinaciรณn Mรกgnetica.

We are eight friends who began working together about three years ago, driven by different concerns. We knew each other and we had different bonds of friendship, but suddenly, there was a desire to start working together but not out of obligation.

In fact, we had several concerns about the types of power structures within everything that has to do with the production of history, discourse and the production of institutions in Spain, more specifically, in Madrid. At that time, we all lived there, and we were working within the framework of an investigation that was called Aesthetics and Decolonial Knowledge.

It was an absolute failure as a group, but the urgency of working together became concrete. In fact, all of us participate in the world of culture and art, but each from different positions: curators, educators, people who work in the scenic arts and performance, but also as artists. That is to say, that each contributes with some type of specific methodology that is very interesting when it comes to working together and more so when everything begins to dilute and to become something else.

We in Declinaciรณn Mรกgnetica, assume all types of roles. Everyone assumes several roles (well, not everyone at the same time, it is not a homogenizing thing), but to exchange the roles of producer, organizer, curator, artist, communicator, and so on.

Hybrid Spaces for the Production of knowledge

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[...] Going back to the basic questions and thinking about how we can reorganize and rethink those spaces of encounter, be aware of which are the logics, rituals or formats that we reproduce many times, without asking how those structures were constructed.

What purpose do they have and if we could from that autonomous perspective, reorganize these encounter spaces as part of learning and of a public resource that is experience, and to share the tools among those that share working fields.

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Fragment of a conversation with Sofia Olascoaga

Hybrid Spaces for the Production of Knowledge - Sofia Olascoaga: There is an author, that, since the seventies, has written in several publications, about the possibility of removing the process of imagination from the school stage and to think about learning outside the type of institutionalized structures that we incorporate from school.

These premises were discussed by the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich, who, in a later book, a smaller essay, talks about the disqualifying professions and the profession –he reviews all the professions–and problematizes how since the eighties, the figure of the professional approach is closer to that of a manager than to someone who establishes a relationship with others.

Not necessarily the expansion of a field of knowledge; the place of a mediator between an institution and a consumer of the service of that institution, in which the consumer has a function in a broader economical, institutional, and social structure.

I think that the criticism mentioned before helps us to think about the place in which we mediate processes of learning and exchange. How it is related to a broader methodology and at the same time, how we allow ourselves to open up or to question certain logics that normally reproduce almost by inertia. Those logics are not questioned but we can create other ways of communicating and encountering with each other.

Education, History and Stories within Education - Julia Morandeira: It is important to start from the idea of hybridizing or mobilizing methodologies that come from other fields, as in the case of Silvia Tallas, who always works from research and the body, and whom with we proposed a project called Margen de error. The project began when we were started as a research group (Aesthetics and decolonial knowledge) that ended up being an organizational failure for various reasons.

Many of us are involved in education; that being said, it is true that Spain is also very structurally insufficient throughout the cultural sector, and education is the area in which many of us find stable jobs. This area is also a space where all of us are constantly being exposed.

The first question that we worked on (in part because we were at that time asking how to decolonize knowledge in institutions, especially in relation to national narratives), referred to how we continue up to the present, perpetuating the stories about the “discovery� of America in Spanish education.

Basically, what we did during an entire summer, was to work on how it would be the deconstruction of a traditional class of History in Spain. We work with required textbooks as the material that supports the class structures, but also as the object that links all the narratives.

Textbooks need to be understood as the spearhead of what is the great economy of publishing houses in Spain and throughout the Iberoamerican region, because publishing houses such as Santillana or Anaya, produce books in Spain and then export (them) to all (the other), Spanish speaking countries. Consequently, these textbooks constituted extremely important ideological weapons to deconstruct, attack and to work with.

We designed five types of dynamics and then we worked on them with a group of twenty students, ranging in age from twelve to twenty-eight. We then connected with the students through a casting process. We promoted various ads in numerous institutions, and although it was going to be an experience, let’s say, “with pedagogical tools�, it was also an artistic experience.

We did not want to establish models of pedagogical emancipation instead, we worked from pedagogy to reveal certain positions, certain imaginaries, that are generated in Spainish education.

These exercises were divided into several fields: one was actors/ high school students, who did not know what they were going to encounter; others that were much more aimed at pointing out, removing, or making the unconscious that they had on history emerge, production of stories, colonization, etc.

Lastly, others had a more performative base, and they worked staging certain images using their bodies in order to generate new poetics that redefined those imaginaries that were established.

The experience was quite interesting, after all, what it did was to undermine history production forms such as, entering into the implications of the educational structure transmission and introducing new elements of dissent or rupture in the narratives and images produced by education.

Between Utopia and Disenchantment: A space for mediation - Sofia Olascoaga: Between Utopia and Disenchantment is the project I have been working on during these (past few) years.

This project is an exploration of the history of Cuernavaca, a small city, about eighty kilometers from Mexico City.

It is a place that, due to the good climate, the gardens and the proximity to the cultural and economic resources of the capital, allowed its creation, especially between the fifties and eighties, of various laboratories, initiatives and alternative models.

These projects invited us to rethink ideas of the community as collectivity seen from the perspective of education and the relationship between culture and processes of self-organization, in communities, regarding food, work, and agriculture. These reflections were closely linked to a moment that crossed Latin America from various lines of thought and were associated to the Liberation Theology movement.

This happened before and during the seventies, and simultaneously most of the Latin American countries had dictatorships at the time. This situation was an impulse or utopian approach to rethinking the models of space and the relationship with others.

For me, the most important mediation happened when I invited other fellow artists, educators, and psychoanalysts to learn about this story and to create a way on which to establish a dialogue with people that had experienced that particular moment and that could tell their story and share their experience.

After a year and a half of several intense private sessions that included reading and discussing related texts, we as a group of thirty-seven artists and educators, proposed to organize a small festival in the city of Cuernavaca. The idea or purpose of this event, was to establish a dialogue from the perspectives of music, dance and theater; Including different dialogue and gesture proposals, that related to that specific memory, but also to the residents of the city.

To wrap it up, I think one of the things that has marked me the most in my combined practice –bizarre– is the need to return to the basic questions and to think how it is that we can reorganize and rethink those spaces of encounter. Be aware of what are the logics, the rituals or the formats that we continually reproduce without asking ourselves how these structures were constructed?

What purpose do they have?

And if we could, from an autonomous perspective, reorganize those spaces of encounter, as part of learning and as a public resource. What is the experience and tools that we can share among those that we have a common ground with?

Mediation, Workshops and Technique

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The mediator must be able to call to a cross- dialogue full of conflicts. It is in that sense, that I mention a guerrilla strategy. We have to call attention to the conflict. This is where the piece shows its full potential or where an artist becomes a human being and ceases to be a figure framed in gold.

What seems more interesting to me about these strategies is how someone can activate that dialogue, and there the implication is fundamental, because we forget that there is only one truth about the piece; that is the first thing that happens

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Fragment of a conversation with Maria Villa

Mediation, Workshops and Technique - Maria Villa: There is something that I always return to, and it is this tension between, on the one hand, the artistic education that you have at school based on techniques such as “express yourself, express yourself in the middle of nowhere”, without a starting point –the workshops become nothing concrete– and on the other hand, the role played by a lot of clichés, because there is not an interesting starting point to work with.

Just as there are spaces for interaction in exhibitions, and you encourage people to participate, then you find that people that write: “I love Jenny. Everything was very nice” … They come back and write the same as they would write on a door of a public toilet- hate messages or whatever.

When I talk about (the) workshops, I expected them to be spaces of critical thinking, that is to say, a type of workshop where something really valuable is happening; but the tendency now is “give me a workshop of a specific technique; teach me something that is already written and I will learn it and reproduce it”, when the important thing is to work with young people that usually have a lot of technique, and surely will have a lot of interests to develop and from there you start.

But what is a unique experience, is when at a given moment, you have a mediator, a leader of that process, that goes beyond teaching a technique.In my experience, and knowing the spaces, that sadly, is the exception, and not the rule.

- Fito Conesa: I wanted to mention something: when you talked about the workshop as a future for creation or something like that, I think the workshop has to do with the approach, since it is a space for critical thinking.

In fact, in the project, although I work with teenagers and I use the term ‘workshop’, in reality, workshop can be a meeting with someone in which you discuss topics that generate an opinion from freedom.

On the other hand, I believe that a technical learning came directly from a professional school. I mean, for example, we have never done a video editing workshop but if someone wants to learn how to edit video, well, there are YouTube tutorials.

What I want to say, is that sometimes those situations happen, and someone will say to you: “I want to learn…. something”, but you know there are ways.

- Claudia Segura: I totally agree with what you say, but there are also spaces that can be shared. For example, a person from the group can teach something to the others and then another person can do/teach, another thing and I think that is something that happens (with) the Between Utopia and Disenchantment project.

That idea that the role of the person that teaches is flexible and within (the) learning process, what is being taught is not what really matters; what matters is what can happen in the exchange.

I mean, I totally agree with the suggestion of the tutorial, but I think within practice, you can lead to other places.

- Adriana Tobon: In our case for example, getting rid o that authoritarian title has been fundamental. When our students come, and ask us: “Maria Teresa, how do I do this?” And Maria Teresa answers: “I don’t know”. That “I don’t know” means “try to do it, look at everything in the workshop, it’s full of things- just try it.”

“Adriana, how do I write this?” “Hmm ... let’s do it, let’s think about

it.” We not only should think about writing as a thing that is used to represent or, as an instrument, but also as a way to express or as a way to think (of) the world.

It has been very important for us that in the free exercise of the workshop, we allow ourselves to think politically. For example, one day our students will face a particular situation. He or she probably has been taught a certain way to solve it, but with us, we teach them that for each situation there is a different answer; for each situation, you have to think in a different way and that will be what the same thing is that you are going to live.

That is politics; that is a performative action, it is building a society and community. Let us say that, for us, at the workshop, it is very important, the game of affections, emotions, what we put out there, rather than making or finishing a product, since many of them are ephemeral or their value is not defined by the ending, is not defined by the ending but instead by the process.

They [the students], also see us as two different people, two completely different branches of knowledge, interacting effectively.

With them, we do the same; they are the ones who propose the workshop. We have a syllabus designed at the beginning of the year; we are very organized, but then, everything becomes unexpected, and that is called chance.

The decisions they make such as, “listen, lately this thing has been happening and I would like us to (do) research about this “ and we respond: “Let’s do it”! Then the project starts to change, and we can not control that.

The Endogamy of Contemporary Art

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So, if you didn’t study art or something related, you will never understand what it is trying to propose? And right there, the romantic idea that contemporary art aims to be democratic, open and inclusive, is broken.

Often the opposite occurs. Then people stop attending, they lose interest in contemporary art, because they do not handle certain codes in order to understand it.

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Fragment of a conversation with Sandra Barrera

The Endogamy of Contemporary Art - Sandra Barrera: One problem that is always going trough my mind, is that I consider that all contemporary, artistic practices, are very interesting for us, the ones that somehow are in the middle involved as producers, mediators, or in the criticism area.

We understand them, because the practices turn into a conversation between us. We understand the dynamics and we give them a value. But I also understand the place of the non-specialized general public, that has a deep resistance to contemporary art because they don’t have the means to understand it. Frequently, contemporary art is based on experiences that detonate different ways of thinking but is continuously being presented as an image.

I think that a lot of official institutions –such as museums– require a stronger pedagogical development to guide these nonspecialized visitors, so that there is a greater impact, so that contemporary art does not become something totally endogamic.

So, if you didn’t study art or something related, you will never really understand what it is trying to propose? And right there, the romantic idea that contemporary art aims to be democratic, open and inclusive, is broken. Often the opposite occurs.

Then people stop [going to museums] or they lose interest in contemporary art, because they do not handle certain codes in order to understand it. I don’t know what the ideas of these institutions [museums] are on their education programs or if there is an interest from curators or the education area, but they have to negotiate with the institution’s policies for that to be reconsidered.

- Julia Morandeira: What you are asking, points out some of the urgencies that somehow are entering into a debate and are filtering into the institutions with the intention of transforming them, but I feel that there is a lot of work to be done. On one side in Spain, mediation is almost non-existent therefore, all the projects that I have worked on, we have adapted them into that context.

In Spain, a mediation department is practically non-existent, but certain needs are being identifie, such as installing mediating devices. That situation depends on each country. For example, in France even the art galleries –private spaces– have mediators, but in Spain and, what for me is even more interesting, is the emergence of different collectives and groups that are problematizing the idea of mediation and artistic pedagogy. Additionally, there is a tendency to draw on certain established ideas or clichés such as that art has to be understood entirely.

On the other hand, I also believe that there are many types of art, some of them that need to be more specific; what has to be done is to generate access to those in multiple ways. What I am trying to point out, is that many times in this conversation, it has been said, that art has to be understandable, at first, without mediation. The heterogeneity of those practices can’t be broken, and it is precisely here that the second problematic point enters: mediation.

Mediation is crucial but cannot be simply understood as a service therefore, platforms such as Invisible Pedagogies, a disruptive education group located in Madrid, are trying to promote it.

Why do we consider a curator as a producer of knowledge? Why do we consider the artist as an intellectual figure? Do we consider a teacher as an intellectual figure? No, usually the popular belief is that it is not an intellectual figure. There is where the big problem is.

We cannot think that a teacher or a pedagogue who selects, who orders, who works a content, is not generating and insight therefore knowledge. We must break these power dynamics and generate

much more grounded positions and more horizontal relations. As Miguel Lopez said, institutions must go from being places that tell you beginning to end narratives and that pretend to teach you what is history, what is art history, and so on, to establish governance processes to empower and to generate common spaces.

In that sense, it is an important debate, but it is also an area where there is a lot to be done and also, I think it has been done. For example, in October [2015], the group of Invisible Pedagogies inaugurated an exhibition at Matadero Madrid called Ni arte, Ni EducaciĂłn.

There are two theorists on this subject in Spain, and they are not going to make an exhibition but instead, they are going to have a sort of program that activates space, that questions the intersections of artistic production, especially the ones that relate to curatorial discourse. All through pedagogy or from pedagogical practice; yet thinking of it from the position of society and considering the impact.

- Claudia Segura: That practice is very similar to a process that we had with the NC-LAB. This programm tried to focus on that area; it was about rethinking the exhibition location as an art location, and have it introduced to the classroom.

- Yuly RiaĂąo: Last year we did an event called NC-LAB creative thinking laboratory, and we planned (it) as a four-day meeting space. We invited artists and teachers to create certain experiences in which they would not see an exhibition but they were going to work from artistic languages; to live collective actions in very wide spaces, in this case, an industrial space and from that space, we were able to generate other processes.

Although, from NC-arte´s Educational Project, we had already created some mediation programs, they are still inscribed within an artistic place. With this laboratory, we managed to go to another place. In fact, there were people that attended the event who did not necessarily know us, many did not even know what NC-art was, and they just came there by chance, and to have experiences of another type, but inscribed in an artistic context.

Mediation with an Expanded Audience Audience Intervention: I would like to know if from the institutions that you work with or from your own practices, do you see the border between the academic discourse and the pedagogical practice, with that purpose of bringing the audience closer to art?

Considering that it is possible to encounter an uninformed public, not interested in art that might no understand it or that does not want to understand.

- Maria Villa: The starting point is to realize that there is not an audience that cannot understand art. That is the first supposition that institutions have to acknowledge and understand. If there is an audience that can´t understand a piece, probably the problem is in the piece. There are layers of understanding and there are levels of depth that you can reach into the heart of a piece, and there are different ways of approaching a work of art.

For example, with Errata, the exercise has always been to disseminate a very valuable discussion, in terms of a reasonably understandable language. That is why there is an editorial team that is interested in topics that are not only focused for the art circuit but instead, annually, we have a curatorial exercise of subjects. There we decide which subjects we are going to work with on a committee; considering that the subjects are not only relevant for the art world, but also that are subjects that do not belong exclusively to it.

A nice thing about the magazine is that it has reached people from outside of the art world, people who are not only in the humanities and social sciences, but for example, people that work with environmental practices, or people who are working with archive policy, themes that today cross contemporary art.

This leads me to think that the same interdisciplinary character of contemporary art is what allows it to establish these types of

associations that are given by themselves, and without someone looking for them.

Now, at this point, what has to occur, is that now you are thinking for a very wide audience; you can not arrive with the most elaborated speech, you have to start from other places, and that is where you become creative as an educator but you also have to know that you can not come up with a speech for dummies.

One of the biggest fears of the curatorial area, is that the educational areas simplify or create silly versions of what is really happening with art. This is what is happening in the marketing departments of the large museums; as long as they attract the public, they will do anything and they usually adopt the “marketing� logic, which is terrible.

Educators are more conscious of what they have at hand; they have a reputation of being less erudite, but the truth is, that on many occasions, they are the ones who have the ability to mediate.

What I am trying to point out here is that there are a lot of mediations, starting with the museographic decisions, the decisions from what you are going to put on the plotter, to what the education team is using to study, or what kind of discourse you are going to use in the publication for people to understand.

But remember, the concern is never that the public will not understand. The concern, I think, is much more in the sense of, is this relevant? And for whom?

- Claudia Segura: Thinking about your question I remembered a mediation project at the Mardin Biennial. This event takes place in a small town between Turkey and Syria it is a secondary biennial that works with very different budgets, very different than other well known biennials.

All the projects that happen at the Mardin Biennial occur within the city area. The city is a place where there are Arabs, Kurds,

Syrians, a territory that before hand, might imply a complexity in its social context. The biennial commissioned Halil Altindere to design the mediation project of the event.

Halil was speaking for four months with the educational and curatorial team, but just right after the war between Syria and the Islamic State broke out. This situation generated an increase of refugees inside Mardin. That city had a lot of children in the refugee camps, an aspect that motivated Halil to ask those children to approach the pieces that were exhibited at the biennial.

They were asked to remember something when attending to the exhibition and afterwards, talk about what they saw. That was how Halil Altindere’s project was conceived and how the children were the mediators.

Most of the things that the children said about the piece, had nothing to do with what the artist was aiming for, but what was very interesting for me, was that the three teams had to communicate, had to discuss, and to rethink the mediation approach.

I also found very important, the fact that a Syrian boy was talking about what a piece was about. This situation placed the child in a position where it was necessary to question the context and the political situation beyond the moment of the biennial and also had to take into account, the political dynamics that occurred incidentally, at the same place.

Affection and Mediation Processes

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What is the importance of affection in the development of pedagogical and artistic processes?

Does affection have a potential as a generator of knowledge and critical thinking?”

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Fragment of a conversation with Claudia Segura

Affection and mediation processes - Fito Conesa: I think it is about affection and complicity. They are really linked. I say this focusing on my position as the director of a project that defines everything and defines nothing. I talk about mediation, especially when it comes to generating a network with entities that have nothing to do with artistic practices and that are linked more to the social area. I believe that passion, complicity, responsibility, involvement, and affection are fundamental.

- Maria Villa: In my experience, contemporary art –being one of the subjects that I have worked with the most– generates an immediate distance, a distance of experience that you inherit from the traditional museum- do not touch and be silent- from that imposition of discipline that you enter the art world, when you are at a young age, when the schools take you to a guided visit.

That reverential and distant attitude that is then reproduced at university, or when people are too close to art and feel that they can not talk about what they have in front (of them), because it seems very complex or simply because they are scared of being wrong. Then the conversation becomes supremely specialized, supremely cold, becomes competitive, and then, that is where I feel that art may have been generated from a place of affection.

Also from a very intense and interesting experience, that can also become a very extremely cold piece. Simultaneously, you have spaces like this that are full of life, but are separated from the exhibition space. My challenge as a mediator and as a coordinator of mediation processes, has always been to generate links between these types of spaces and the other controlled, hierarchical and cold spaces, where they are showing things that are not hierarchical neither cold.

Contemporary art has the pretension of “going down” to the everyday, of “going down” to the contextual or to the interpersonal, but not to the non-disciplinary or transdisciplinary, and that is where the question arises. How do you do make that happen again?

Then it is like, what I have worked on, guerrilla strategies within the exhibition space, because the parallel workshop is very beautiful but it becomes a craft workshop where the content of what is being discussed with children, or with people who participate, is sometimes disconnected from the critical nature of art. My interest is critical and postcolonial pedagogies particularly are from that point of view.

What is interesting is to break the magisterial discourse of the critic, of the curator, of the artist, and bring the street speech to the space of the exhibition space, with strategies that can work very spontaneously with people and that are based primarily on affection.

Not only on affection at the level of emotions, but also in how I move this work or, what moves me, from the story behind the work, to working with others at a time, during a visit or at a space or how I move from the debate or the collaboration that is triggered from this exhibition, or from being exposed to art.

For me it is like one of the most important ingredients that breaks that masterful place of the expert, who is as problematic an element within the context of contemporary art.

- Sofía Olascoaga: I think of affection in terms of mobilizing, in terms of the need to detach from those places from which we tend to reproduce a kind of public performance. I do not say this in an ironic or contemptuous way; I mean it in the way that we relate to others, how we inhabit that space of dialogue and what is it that sometimes allows us to move certain minimum elements and recognize ourselves.

Not from the expert’s place and to repeat ourselves ad infinitum, but from that which I don´t know and that element that opens the possibility of not knowing together with others or from sharing a spatial position within time. I think in the use of words and how they rearticulate or allow other ways of mobilizing internally that relationship that we have.

But one of the very important points that I think Maria mentioned before is the one in relation to the history of certain pieces at spaces of shared dialogue. It of shared dialogue. Is is about the relation with memory and the necessity to make an exercise of shared memory and not necessarily a historiographical work or historical reading. It is an invitation to remember the contexts that we share and to make that memory a learning resource and an exchange tool.

I believe that affection mobilizes a possibility of encounter with others; from allowing us to recognize personal experiences, a place of formation, a question, an experience, or a violent context full of ruptures. That learning space opens up important creative processes when we can procure ourselves with the complicity to share with others.

Users of the Museum, The Audience as Content Programmer

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Working with adolescents and saying that they are going to program the activities of the space does not imply that the figure of the curator or director disappears...

... First, we have been working for two years to get a stable group that understands that there is a space that the museum proposes in which they can do very diverse activities.

This group goes from being visitors to museum users and secondly, that they understand that they can also participate in the exercise of programming this space.

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Fragment of a conversation with Fito Conesa

Users of the Museum, the Audience as content programmer - Fito Conesa: I’m going to explain what is Habitació 1418, the project that I coordinate. As you my have already imagined, 1418 refers to the age group of users or roomers, -this is how we referred to them as, - that are part of the project.

This space is coordinated by MACBA and the CCCB; one is a contemporary art museum and the other one is a center for contemporary culture. They are quite similar but have different speeds, different activities, and different rhythms.

Museums have the need to work with teenagers since some studies have proven that adolescents, once they finish school, stop going to the museum. This project comes from the need to cover this audience deficit. But by all means, it is hard for me to talk about audiences, especially because I run a project where we have twenty teenagers.

The project happens every Saturday afternoon. We get together to have discussions, where we basically try to get the teens to collaborate and program with the content of the museum. How do we do it?

Another word from 2015 after “powering” is “prescriptores”; the idea is that through meetings every Saturday and program workshops that we organized, we get a group to participate in future activities and future decisions of the museum.

The Room is a space that is scheduled every two months. That requires a speed that does not exist in the institution. In that sense, I have been lucky because from that “no speed”, I´ve had freedom; it is not me who programs the space but instead these adolescents themselves (who) are the ones that propose the content.

That is the day by day of The Room. Every Saturday we meet, the teens start by doing a workshop, they begin by proposing activities and a program starts being created. It is a narrative line where every Saturday many things happen. It is a curatorial line too.

Now we are going to get into what I was talking about before the “prescriptores”.

What does it mean? The museum needs to know what is going on; the museum needs to be updated in relation to all the contents including exhibition content. Working with adolescents and saying that they are going to program does not imply that the figure of the curator –the figure of the director of activities– disappears.

Simply what we are beginning to organize, is that there are working groups that are going to get together every two months in which the adolescents meet with the directive team, with an exhibition coordinator or curator of each of the centers –in this case me– and we have a quiet and cool snack, to talk about a relaxed and crazy way about different issues that they propose.

All of this as an action to get information –this sounds like finding information on Google or something like that– but it’s more like to have a start and to know a little bit (of) where to go. Sure, (it) sounds great, it seems like talking to the Wizard of Oz at the Emerald City, but that requires work.

We have been working for two years in order to get a stable group that understands that there is a space that the museum offers in which they can do activities. This group goes from being visitors to museum users, understanding that they can also participate in the exercise of programming this space.

Mediation in Context

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“Is not the institution that has to teach civil society, but instead, how an institution can learn from what is happening around (them), and build a space of permeability and transitivity, so that those things that are happening, can have wider repercussions and major echoes. “

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Fragment of a conversation with Miguel Lopez

Mediation in Context - Miguel Lopez : It is important to redefine research protocols so they can be more, far reaching; of course, this raises a number of far more complex questions, especially ones that have to do with what is an institution’s relationship with everything that surrounds it: with the communities, with audiences, with the people that work at the institution, along with the institutions the other institutions that have worked with and, taking into account, that the projects are more risky in terms of public programs.

I work with Reina Sofia in Losing the Human Form, which is a project that comes from the museum’s interest of rethinking stories, not only from a political commitment at a global level, but also from a perspective of redefining the role of the museum within the public space.

The necessary questions are: How can the museum collaborate on having a critical public sphere? What kind of ideas puts the discussion into the public domain? What kind of political effects or social effects can a certain discourse have? That also led me to think about my entry to TEOR/ética. TEOR/ética is a space founded in 19, San Jose, and is one of the most active spaces in Central America. It has a global focus and it has a collection along with a very large archive.

The space has begun to ask a series of questions since the founder, Virginia Perez Mouse, died in 2008, and the institution had to go through an internal reconfiguration. This reconfiguration questioned the type of relationship that the space had with the community, say with local audiences, with the university, with people who are working on smaller platforms- in order to understand how to redefine the relationships with them.

It is important to think that it is not the institution that has to teach

civil society, but rather, how an institution can learn from what is happening around it and can build a space of permeability and transitivity, so that all those things that are happening around (it), can have broader repercussions and greater echoes.

Well, the idea is to activate that series of points that are absolutely urgent. In fact, Carlos Motta is doing a very good piece/intervention on TEOR/ética´s facade that has the pink triangle along with a graphic piece, that comments on the sexual struggles in Costa Rica.

This piece activates a series of debates that have not taken place at TEOR/ética yet. We have to get rid of hierarchies; we have to decentralize the effect of the field of action with this type of interventions. Right now, we are also having a process of experimentation by not knowing exactly where TEOR/ética is going, but having the will to build a level of permeability and not being a guiding function, in terms of how to state, but rather, allowing other concerns to reorient our forms of action. .

Visibility and Registration

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“Why and how do the experiences circulate?

Why do they have to be shown or at what moment? “ I think that is more interesting- how error or conflicts are visualized. The mistake as something that also transforms, not only the happy faces of the children or the happy adults

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Fragment of a conversation with Sofia Olascoaga

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What did we experience? What did we achieve with the public? What did not work and was it a disaster? The writing process was an exercise of saying what did not work and what was definitely a disaster. I think that every educator’s process is always to understand mistakes and process them.

You can say this about every professional individual, but within education, mistakes are something that you must be constantly aware of. You have to be comfortable with errors, see the potential that there is in them.

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Fragment of a conversation with Maria Villa

Visibility and Registration - Tatiana Benavides: How do you manage to expose certain pedagogical experiences and processes that go unnoticed? I understand that, although the product is not the most important thing in the process and the purpose is not to reach that process. It is possible that the critical discussion stays just that.

Characteristics that make the processes mentioned before, to become difficult, to expose; that may detract from them, especially if you are trying to insert them into an established program.

According to the situation, which strategies or methods do you use to make the processes visible, without constraining a product and without leaving behind the importance that these processes deserve?

- Maria Villa: I was asking myself that same question all the time, because I realized that the processes that I was having with various groups, was very interesting, and although I was able to record the results visually by taking photos, I wanted to know other aspects.

I was always asking members of the team to give me feedback, to tell me how it was, what did they perceive in people, how did they feel that things wwere developing- but since those were always very immediate processes and very quick interventions, there was no way to register those critical dialogues that took place with the public.

During 2012, that led me to propose a laboratory program in which we invited people with some of the profiles that we have here today: educators, people working with art history, artists, and graphic designers. We met during a six-month process in which the idea was to think about the problem of appropriation of art; to think about how people appropriated the space of a museum and how people appropriated the art exhibition.

So, what is happening here? Which type of dialogue is taking place with the community? Not between artists, not those who are here for six months working, but what happens with those who came to the space for one day? What kind of experience happened at/ in the museum? What remained with them? And from that, can we create interesting pedagogical experiments in the classroom? What is happening with these experiments?

The results of the process were various investigations that took place at some of Bogota spaces. Each space was awarded with a scholarship from IDARTES. The program had theoretical, practical and experimental sessions, in addition to having participants presenting their project to a different space in the city, where there was some kind of contemporary art practice.

They were totally free to work with ephemeral things or to use a traditional museum. The result was that they developed the guerrilla strategies that I mentioned earlier, and implemented them several times within different groups. The best way for them to make visible what was happening there was keeping a very clear, detailed and long journal, describing the results of every experience working with the public.

They recorded people´s opinions on video or in writing and we created a publication. This material is about to be published and is called Tools and Experiences. What did we experience? What did we achieve with the public? What did not work and instead was a disaster?

The writing process was an exercise of saying what did not work and what was definitely a disaster. I think that every educator’s process is always to understand mistakes and process them.

You can say this about every professional individual, but within education, mistakes are something that you must be constantly aware of.

You have to be comfortable with errors, see the potential in them.

It was like an interdisciplinary dialogue; we were always in the laboratory and in the end, we did this publication where each person describes their own process and then tells what did emerge from each of those experiences with the various groups.

Again, we return to social science methodologies: the journal, the field diary, and the testimony. Those are the most valuable things that we have. I do not want to have to translate it into numbers (that is equally important), but we also have to convert government heads; the mentality of those that decide who get the scholarships or who are hired to do the processes. The most valuable and irreplaceable aspect of these projects is the qualitative feedback.

- Fito Conesa: For me, there are two types of visualization and two types of speed. One thing is a visualization of specific events that happen. For example, in my case, there is a physical and real around social media, but for me the important part is the invisible.

Let me explain this: we were commenting on the MACBA independent studies program (the program in which I work, is also part of MACBA). There are topics such as the figure of the genius, post-colonial issues and many more that are key points for debate.

In the project that I coordinate and manage things are calmer but I think that the most important visualization or the most important visualization for me comes with time. You can’t see it but you can feel it or, as I see it, I feel it, especially when the point is to make a connection and generate critical thinking with adolescents.

There is also a point in which you notice that many of the processes that occur are not tangible. However, they become evident in relation to the specific actions and in the participation of individuals.

An aspect of that for me is much more important and thanks to that, there are institutions that contact you and want to donate to your projects. That is a very good way to give credit and present the work that has been done.

Then suddenly, the institution that works with young people located in your neighborhood says to you, “Hey, do we know that you are in this? We are going to do this”. Those are little gestures that usually the institution is not very generous with, when it comes to recognizing them and generally, does not have feedback unless you ask for it.

But in effect, it consolidates as a positive and real visualization, but I insist the important visualization is that one that comes later on, and that you can´t see but you can feel and that facilitates change and the work that is being done.

-Sofía Olascoaga: The subject of visualization has several angles.

On one hand, I think there is a tendency to document participatory, exchange and workshop processes, in a way where it seems that there are a couple of very interested people faces, a couple of happy children with dirty hands, as if that was some kind of testimony or document of an experience.

On the other, I think that it helps a little because if you don’t have the context and you put some of those images together, it is the same as if they would have been done at MACBA, or at a community in Oaxaca, or in Mexico City, or at the art fair. There is a kind of inertia and code of visualization that has very little to do with the structure of affective mobilization and learning, to which you hope for on those projects. So, one part has to do with why and how you make those experiences circulate and the other one is asking why do they need to be shown or at what moment. When is it important to show them and in which way, that too is another important point.

I think it is more interesting to think about how to show the error, the conflict, and the failure as something that is also transforming not just as happy kids faces or the faces of happy adults. The other angle is that I believe that in the case of why and when to visualize, there is a tendency to have a physical division at the museum´s

public and visualization spaces. That sometimes is more linked to how the museum´s departments are organized and that is the internal structure of the institution.

It is as if this territory belonged to education and that other one to the curatorial department, and the one here is where those two things do not touch or communicate. It’s as if a museum was not in itself a pedagogical structure, was not crossed by different elements and learning experiences, that often have nothing to do with what the museum’s educational team does, and at other times, yes, and there is an exchange.

What interests me in creative and personal terms regarding this, is to think of spaces where certain classifications or categories are broken between what is art and, what is not. It does not mean that we have to question why the drawing of a child or an amateur artist in a workshop does not occupy the same place in space as the piece in the museum’s collection.

It has nothing to do with questioning that, but with how to think from the experience of those who are in these spaces or in those museums, from experiences with more organic logics where suddenly, not all art corresponds to the white cube.

There are spaces and ways of meeting with art that often have no relevance in a museum or gallery space. So, rather we must think about how these different practices coexist and communicate as part of an ecosystem, where obviously, we have to take care of technical conservation issues.

This is not an anarchical proposal that does not recognize categories but rather, try to think why are they separated, what is this separation about, when and how small adjustments can be made in order for things to occur in a different way.

I think it is more important then, to try to open spaces for dialogue and exchange instead of being committed to visibility records that on many occasions, may or may not be relevant to the public.

Audience Intervention: I would like to ask about registration and how it circulates throughout the system of museums, galleries or collections. I would like to tell you about an anecdote that may be a bit harsh.

The Art Museum at the National University (Bogota), had a very well established school for guides during the eighties and nineties, until the year two thousand. That year, they hired a new curator that was part of the communications area of the university and the first thing that this curator did was to erase the whole museum guides archive.

They eliminated the entire archive where people that are and were very relevant to the arts in Colombia began. Those people had studied and participated as guides. Names such as Jaime Ceron, Miguel Huertas, Marta Combariza, among others, were part of that initiative, and all the physical memory was lost; the only part that still survives is the oral histories. This story starts to be inherited only through words or from that traditional teacher´s practice. This situation worries me and I ask myself many questions about what we are doing with that record and whether we are elaborating enough or, not on it or up to where we keep an elaboration on it and whether it is important or not.

-Maria Villa: There you are mentioning a problem that is not exclusive to the arts, that problem is institutional memory. I see two things: there is a problem and there is an opportunity. A problem because, clearly there are people working on incredible things and it is also terrible not to have access to that memory. But I also see an opportunity.

I think that what is natural within the art context is to discover itself all the time. It is the institution´s responsibility to keep a memory of its processes and learn from them but sadly, this does not happen as often as we would like.

It is necessary to have more researchers trying to track down those processes and make a record using tools such as interviews or document archives. Institutions usually don’t have time to collect that memory and the employees’ rotation in the cultural industry is so big, that you don’t have time to have the information transmitted as you would like.

-Fito Conesa: I totally agree with Maria in relation to the archive. I think that it is a knowledge generator and an ideas conservator. For example, as is the case of the project I manage, where it is crucial to keep an archive and a memory, especially when the entire project depends on a study that started as an experiment, when there is a necessity to economically justify the project.

It is very important that within its construction, the education department is involved. This makes the project a case study for other institutions that are not related to the museum, for example, universities. As is our case that other entities are taking the project as a case study but more so in processes that it requires, in which to obtain some type of information.

However, it is necessary to be very delicate with the registration and archive processes. On many occasions, they are more linked to text, because the photographic archive is very dangerous, especially when you are working with children. Sometimes the photographs sell ideas that have nothing to do with the project and, at the same time, it contaminates the project’s purpose.

Many times, it ends up being a tool that harms the project.

Nevertheless, this does not subtract the importance of the archive

for the existence and life of some projects that start from a memory of a past study and that can continue year after year within the museum and people that have that interest in theorizing.

-Sofia Olascoaga: In Mexico, for example, there isn’t an institutional memory. I think the situation is very similar to many of the things that happen here and it is that there is a tendency to get rid of the information, or institutions do not understand the need to file information or to generate that type of recording. Sometimes there is an explicit decision to erase or to eliminate information periodically, especially because the institutions do not have the spatial or structural conditions to store them.

When I began working at the Carrillo Gil Art Museum, located in Mexico City (2007), I had begun working with the new director, Itala Schmelz, and due to an administrative change, that was going on at that moment, the museum had the resources to have a renovation of certain areas of the museum that were falling a part.

That circumstance allowed, that as a team, most of us were new to the institution and we were able to create a project that later on, Itala articulated as an inventory. Then she asked each department to conduct a kind of research or inquiry about what had occurred in each area in previous administrations, in order to create an exhibition based on that research.

This exhibition was not about the official history of the museum. It was about what happened behind the scenes; it was about telling what had happened in years past, behind the white walls or, in the education spaces. The exhibition was about displaying information that could be interesting to share within the museum´s space.

This was one of the most important and formative experiences that I could have. Then having the idea of collecting a human

resources inventory, I decided to try to trace who had gone through that museum in its thirty-seven years of public existence, a kind of genealogy of the teams that had worked in that museum.

It is one of the first museums in Mexico- The National Institute of Fine Arts- where they began to show more experimental languages of contemporary art. The first video installations, projects commissioned to very young artists, performance festivals; the first place that had a place in art institutions in Mexico was Carrillo Gil, as one of the references, but it was also a place where almost all curators, art critics and artists who are part of the circuit in Mexico, is a stage of formation, because there was, in reality, a space for academic training, and much of the formation of curatorial, museum and academic practices occurred in the practice itself and not in academic space, most of the time.

That was one of the most important formative experiences that I could ever have. Then with the idea of making a human resource inventory I decided to try to track all the names of the people that ever worked at the museum during its thirty-seven years of existence.

This exercise was about making a genealogy of the work teams that worked at the museum. This institution, along with the Fine Arts National Museum are where more experimental languages of contemporary where first shown; the first video installations, commissioned projects to young artists, performance festivals, and many more happened at these spaces.

The Carrillo Gil Museum was a referent for the Mexican art circuit. It was also the place that hosted almost all of the curators, art critics and artists. It became almost like a formative institution because at the time, Mexico did not have institutions for academic experiences.

Many of the curatorial and academic practices only occurred on the exercise of the profession and not at the academic spaces. Then a great variety of artists, like Pedro Reyes, showed at the museum.

He was an artist that was twenty-three years old at the time, and was using graphic design.

Many of the most recognized Mexican curators were there in their very early stages and based on that, I was very interested in showing the museum as a training laboratory. This implied not only the visible part of the museum, but also what happened behind the white walls, as well as the offices.

Tracking those files was impossible, as there were no physical documents. I looked in the archives of the museum to see if I could locate the moment when they hired Paola Santoscoy or Cuauhtémoc Medina and at some point, I thought, that perhaps that on the payment cards those names would be registered. But in the National Institute of Fine Arts, there is an area where everything that is considered a dead file is stored and about every two or four years, that space incidentally has small fires and parts of the archive just disappear.

The information did not exist so that forced us to go and call people, one by one and ask them, “Hey, when did you start working? when did you leave?”. Everything was reconstructed from the stories of the people who had worked at the museum. Then when charting a kind of chronological genealogy of each period and the workers, we could clearly see the difference between teams that had unions based at the museum.

Usually there were those vacancies that were lifelong and usually got inherited by a family member, even though that person did not have technical preparation or the capacities to take over the job.

Then we found kinships among workers- cousins, siblings, sons, and a lot of repeated surnames within the base team, then all this frequent flow among the trusted teams of each museum director.

We set up a kind of “family” photo album in which we retrieved records of the coexistence that existed between those teams.

We included birthday celebrations, camp trips and more, all this to try to make those anecdotes visible for the museum visitors and reminding them that behind the white walls, there are and were, people working to make those spaces function and that normally, not even from an art criticism exercise is that presence acknowledged. We made that human resources inventory visible.

From that exercise, one of the things that I did was to leave a complete copy of the file, the diagram, and all the data that we got from the museum´s library.

Finally, we attempted to make the inventory available for consultation, by including it into the library as a volume and not, as an administrative file. On the one hand, we must demand the need for institutional conditions in order to generate archives and memorie that can remain and be available for studies, research and socialization exercises.

But on the other hand, I think that the need of keeping a memory and archives is personal. You have to think when during certain projects of keeping a memory, how are you going to be responsible for generating a record of your work. Another thing that we must consider is to take responsibility not only for what you leave as a file, but also to ask yourself when starting at a new context or at a museum or at a research project, what it has done before and how are you going to interact with what happened before in that place.

Instead of using this logic of arriving and saying what will work best.

This tends to happen with each new team that, when they arrive, they start to propose a project that does not know anything about what was done before. That is a gesture that loses the possibility of learning; not to repeat what has been done, but to recognize the faults or the accomplishments of other people who have passed by that project.

-Fito Conesa: In my case, as a result of my cognitive anxiety and ignorance, I decided to start researching similar processes at other places, and my question was: does something similar exist

in another place? I found some projects were registered on the memoirs that were written; this memoir is quite detailed. They not only mention the need that existed, or why they’d come up with the project, but they also mentioned the previous situation.

For example, the Tate has a similar project, but within an AngloSaxon context, that not only entails a search but also an analysis about the context, the population, etc., that I insist arranges a memory that is an accumulative process and necessary for the writing exercise at the museum or even thinking about the museum as a pedagogical process.

Teaching and Pedagogical Curating

“

Why do we consider a curator a knowledge producer?

Why do we consider the artist an intellectual? Do we consider a teacher an intellectual? Normally not, and there is where the big problem lies. We can not stop thinking that a teacher or a pedagogue who selects, orders and works a content is not also generating a sense and knowledge.

�

Fragment of a conversation with Julia Morandeira

Teaching and Pedagogical Curating Trilogy Emerging Study Project (Gimnasio Campestre School) - Sandra Barrera: The Gimansio Campestre is a school with its own pedagogical model, based on research. The school has departments on astrophysics, ecology and art, among others.

Particularly, I focus on working on research processes with students and teachers, in addition to creating both internal and external events. One of the events that we have been doing for many years is the Experimental Art Salon. During this event, we used to invite several schools to show the work done by their students during art class.

After a while, we realized that we had to change the approach of our event and we decided to turn it into an experimental art workshop, where students could have an experience of creation, rather than just showing a sample of their work done during class.

This new project was developed in collaboration with the Art Department.

In order to have a better understanding of our project we would like to tell you some aspects of Gimnasio Campestre School’s context.

It is a confessional school, Catholic, just for males, and therefore quite conservative. However, it has an art department that has always been at the “vanguard�, with a very solid program that receives a lot of support from the school.

But because of the characteristics of the families, that are very conservative, it is difficult that students have a different vision or a vision that is closer to contemporary art. That is why we believe that it is important that the project is strengthened each year and that it becomes an opportunity to create links with other institutions.

- Alejandro SĂĄnchez: Two years ago, we encountered ourselves with a particular situation with the school. As Sandra said before, the school, from its conservative position, did not show any interest, exchange or link with artistic practices, despite the fact that the school has very interesting facilities and resources. This is private school.

Then we tried to develop the Emergent Study program. With this program, we began to affect the community and the school audience a little bit. We have to keep in mind that we are talking about very conservative male students for whom football and the school band are the center of everything and that other cultural expressions do not work or do not have the weight they should have for them.

That is when we decided to create this program that takes over the school’s physical space and the arts classrooms that are not conventional, to transform them, not only into laboratories, but also into exhibition spaces. The decision to work in trilogy arises from the problem of how to bring the community to something that they recognize and that is familiar to them. Based on that, we decided the colors in a very particular way: yellow, white and red and the three school spaces.

On the other hand, it allowed us, as a team to problematize our own practice and the place that we would occupy in the project.

We asked ourselves, what was our position as teachers, if we were active artists, teachers (?); or whether we were only teachers and our profession as artists was relegated or not (?).

We decided to work together to present a project due to that on a previous version. We invited an artist to work and it was the first inclusion of art at the school in that in that sense. In this version, we placed ourselves on a creative role and we decided to position ourselves as artists and not only as organizers.

Then we decided to work with yellow, which was the classroom´s color from the object itself. We asked the whole community, students, administrators and teachers, to bring a yellow object with certain dimensions and from there we began to develop a whole concept of yellow through the object. The red was worked through the sensory concept and white from the ephemeral.

Through this strategy, we wanted to get closer to the audience from a color perspective, opening a possibility of multiple meanings or readings of colors and distancing from the school reading. The school TV circuit that is presented every Thursday morning served us to make a campaign of expectation, so that the students started to get evolved with the event without knowing what it was.

Through a video made by ourselves that started to be played three weeks earlier, we began to generate the doubt of, ‘what is that’?

That year, in a week, we convened people to participate and to go observe during break and class time. The interesting thing was that the three spaces each had very different positions. We wanted to link students in different ways and not just by participating with the object itself but with different activities.

- Sandra Barrera: This event lasted a week. During one of those days, we had the experimental art workshop that was held for students between eighth and eleven grades from other schools and also for some of our students. For that day, we designed a series of activities in which the students could be creators as well, and make that sample of objects and spaces that we had worked on mutate.

For example, in the yellow space we had activities related to curatorial practices. The organization was like a type of curiosities cabinet with objects displayed on a certain way and the activities that we designed for that space had the intention to make the participants to rethink the display, classification, and categorization systems.

In the red space, activities were focused on reaching the senses, awakening other things that were not usually related or understood as art. Through invitations to experience the space that on this case was complete, the audience had tactile, temperature, olfactory, taste and sound experiences.

The white space focused on ephemeral art, including works that could only be kept, thanks to photographic or video record. It was a space in which they could make zen drawings on flour, make live paintings with flashlights, take pictures of light threads that are being created, all of these experiences accompanied by moments of socialization that were very interesting. The rest of the week involved the students and other people that worked at the school, to perform similar activities to those that had been made during the experimental art workshop.

- Alejandro Sanchez: The white space was one of the spaces that was more connected to the school, especially through the music band, since white is a very significant element for the students. The color white is related to the sublime. It reminds them of the globes used by the band players. Additionally, it is the (drum)stick that is used to play the main drum.

We decided to have a video installation that used that concept. We contacted an eight-grade student that is a very talented musician and is part of the philharmonic at Javeriana University. This student made the soundtrack for the video installation. I think that this event allowed us to change the school paradigm. The fact that we opened a different space, in which the students could face different experiences that link artistic and curatorial practices and that they had the possibility of asking what was going on.

This is not a project, it is a program, that every year includes different strategies. We are thinking that eventually, every two years, we can have an artist residency for university students that are about to complete their degrees and with this, we can generate new links.

L a Brecha Project Juan Ramon Jimenez School - Maria Teresa Devia: At the Juan Ramon Jimenez School, we decided to establish a program or a marriage, as I like to call it. We talked to the students to ask them about their emphasis subject (only for 11th and 12th grade students), if they wanted to have a space to explore art and writing, where they could experience other creative areas that, until that point, were unknown to them.

In the school, there is a very large space for artistic practices, and this space is taken over by the students themselves. Their efforts have come from the student’s representatives, who have always asked for bigger spaces. This dynamic has generated that, at the moment, we have two areas for our work, a laboratory and another space, where they can experiment with what they learn.

The students that enter this program are all close to completing school. They are between fifteen and seventeen years old. The possibility of participating in this laboratory or workshop is for one or two years, is a voluntary decision and they enroll because they want to. Not everyone who gets into the program will be a future artist but the great majority that have taken it, are now artists. We have had this program for over three years.

Other students are only interested in knowing what art is from a very personal and intimate point. The counterpart to the workshops is that they must submit a research on a final work in which the strength is to implement the two disciplines they have been following. They have a presentation with curating and they choose the space where they are going to be.

Everything that they’ve seen behind the scenes at NC-arte, is a very good example to know how they are going to present or make their display and then they have to do a writing from a more experiential place. They also have a piece of art that is a space where they have expressed in a very intimate way.

For some of them, this encounter has been a trigger from the passage of their childhood to the new path that they are going to live; for others, it has been about surpassing the fears of recognizing aspects of their personality. Other times, it has been about their gender and many other things. We have really understood that this program/space has been a major transformation for them, and of course, for us as teachers.

-Adriana Tobon: The interdisciplinary practice, which is one of our fundamental axes at the laboratory (La Brecha), has opened up for us, the possibility of reflecting and experiencing from a philosophical point of view, as from a creative point. We are interested, not only in the final products, but also everything that is thought out as a process; that students are aware that after that experimentation, they are living a transformation of themselves.

The exhibitions at the school are very important because they have been another element for them to think what they are going to show, for who they are going to show, how are they going to show it, how they are going to hang it. Thus, they become not only the creative artist, they also become the mediator doing the exercise of educating others to see, to feel, to express art. Finally, that process of assembly has been another mechanism or another way of thinking. We have seen that at this point, they develop other ways of thinking.

Maria Teresa Devia: The way of presenting, is a very important aspect that has made the exhibition a very special moment. It is not only the moment of opening the doors to the process, but is also the moment where students feel they have something to show to the community.

They have shown it in a different way that has allowed us to separate from what is established at school exhibitions. This experience has opened the door for other coworkers to consider this experience as an influence on the rest of school life.

We have also felt very transformed from having always been the ones leading to seeing other people that have gotten involved in the educational process. In this way, the collaborative practice is fully evident, not when the teacher is teaching, but when other active people from society, become part of the educational process. This has been very valuable and has greatly empowered the students.

Adriana Tobon: Another important point of our workshop has been the relationship that we have with NC-arte. We travel quite frequently, although our work is annual. I say, “we travel�, because our school is located in Cota. It is a school outside of the city and what implies a trip; it also supposes that the student relates with places of the city that he or she has not seen before.

What has attracted our attention the most and that has been very important for this workshop that we do with Maria Teresa and NCarte, is the encounter that students have with the art world: the curators, the producers and even the artists themselves.

We have seen, on the one hand, how students end up going to the exhibition space, not only to see, but also to create, and on the other hand, at the exhibition space, they also face that the artist him/her-self sees the creations that they have made based on his/ her. It has not been about listening: children saying what they think of them, instead, we hear them [the students] speaking about their

own works created from what the artist has previously detonated.

Maria Teresa Devia: Students have come to a point to understand the exhibition space as a space of interaction where they can have a conversation with the artist. A space where they can establish numerous dialogues that were not on the hard disc of what they imagined as an exhibition room, an artist or a piece.

Then suddenly, the whole picture turns completely, and that detonates into another way of approaching knowledge, emotions and the aesthetic sense, that they are on a more direct on approach. We have seen that this process is not short and that it has some moments of gaps.

For example, in the first semester, they take a while to understand what the process is about: if it is just that you go and see an exhibition, only as part of the audience, then, when they beginto interact, you see that something is happening and that it works, that it will improve their lives and the lives of all us that are around them.

Travelers Gimnasio Los Andes School Adriana Pelaez: Travelers is a project that comes from two particular needs. One of those was a teacher wanting to link the students to new contemporary artistic practices using a didactic unit. This unit wanted to review artistic practices that developed during the sixties until the nineties and how these practices began to dismantle certain notions of art, that even up to today, we have deeply rooted in our minds. So, the idea is to debate and revise these notions about art.

Together with the kids, we began by watching a chapter from The Simpsons, a wonderful chapter. I wanted to show them how Homer

from building a barbecue, approaches art in a very particular way and how a critic arrives and asks him “Hey, I love this project, come on, let’s move it “.

Then from that popular language used by The Simpsons, I began to lure students to contemporary art projects and see what particular interests students had in relation to contemporary art. One of those interests was the numerous topics that contemporary art approaches and the way in which it approaches or touches them.

Starting from that place, many topics started to arise, especially those associated with the body and others a little stronger in my opinion, such infanticide. This particular topic for them was a subject that they wanted to talk about. They also mentioned the nutritional problems that we suffer at educational spaces or the problems associated with the environment. Based on the student’s inquiries and their particular interest, we began to review and articulate how the practices of the sixties to the nineties made it possible to create or look at these themes from the aspect of the image.

The project focused on creating mural proposals that included their themes of interest but then a problem came up: kids at the workshop did not have skills such as drawing or painting, and that made possible for them to see the workshop as a form of exploration and to see which processes help us to construct the images that we want.

Also, to question whether we are a society where technology is a tool that allows us to permanently construct images. How can we, using technology make our images stronger? Those questions led us to work with a software edition that introduced us to collage and overlapping images; Questioning how overlaying allowed them to create a much closer image of what they wanted.

Then eight murals were made in which the design process was one of the most interesting aspects. They did not start from individuality but from the collective. The students grouped into eight teams.

They designed their images and from that exercise, they realized the artist is not just a genius or a creative character.

The project started to be structured from the collectivity and from the look towards the other; from the possibility of doing the work with the community. This idea of the collective, brought us many more possibilities for discussion, such as that each of these eight groups had members who also had a particular interest which implied thinking about how they integrated those proposals. To do that, we did several workshops; we talked about certain topics, we looked at how proposals of contemporary art had made certain approximations to these subjects, we reviewed some artists.

One of the most striking artists was Boltanski and his non-traditional way of working, using elements such as clothes, portraits and objects that obviously have a historical and very strong memory. Although the result was a traditional image, its construction responded to another type of processes that allowed them to deconstruct their idea of how an image is constructed from art.

Along with this creative process, we reviewed, how from the sixties the piece starts to dismantle from the space where it used to circulate, such as museums, galleries or alternative spaces, and that it can also operate on the streets, in a sort of nomadism.

This traveling aspect grabbed our attention and motivated us to think about how this project was going to circulate. From this notion, we named the project Viajeras, and we noticed that what the work does, is to travel, to circulate. How do we make that mural move, travel or get recognition? So, we began working with a content manager to document the entire process of the work. This process what not only drawing or using technological tools but also writing.

Writing was a very important element for the students because it was closely linked with artistic processes. The artist is not only someone that has a skill within the artistic disciplines, but also has a sensibility to write. The idea was to explore that with the students so in the catalog, several of them wrote some observations about how they made that mural, what were the particular interests of the mural and how was the working process with all the classmates.

The content manager allowed us to document the whole process of making the mural and highlight the, ‘how I started’, ‘what references did I use’, ‘how I recorded the process’ the change in a piece that had a beginning and then had an ending.

The content manager allowed us to review everything that was done to reach that image which in itself, had a series of complexities, such as that mural´s walls were two by two and that the project was designed to occur in three months, very little time, considering that my academic load with them is (was) two hours a week.

These conditions were an interesting thing, because the students began to construct collective extracurricular spaces to go to paint their murals. They went during breaks or in the afternoons. This allowed us to see the project leaving the margins of academic constructions and become a project from which I could spin the interests of my students within fine arts; even I took advantage of some student´s desires of studying art.

This allowed them to explore and make a life decision in some cases. Subsequently, the content manager offered us a free application that was wonderful to use because it permitted us to address that trans media context in which the trans media students live today and to fulfill our goal of moving the murals.

When we ended the project and completed the infographics, we made catalogs, banners, buttons, postcards. Additionally, we were interested in having the students telling their experience, changing the role of the teacher as mediator of the process. There is where the student empowers to participate and makes others participate.

We had the children invited to a hall where the murals were and where they could download the application, do the exercise and see all the content associated with the murals and enter into a discussion by asking them about their thoughts on the project, the perceptions that the murals had generated on them or about the expectations that they had towards the murals.

Whether it was about going and simply doing a contemplative tour of the murals or, if it all, those project components generated something more.The diversity that emerged during the process ratifies the idea of dismantling what we conceive as art and prepare to generate openings for other views that schools have forged in very particular frames, which conceive the artistic discipline as a space for crafting, but not as a space to think and rethink from.

For example, that group of girls decided to talk about infanticide and about how to make that subject visible, or how to click with the community in such a simple way that was absolutely important.

The mural showed coffins made out from adhesive paper and the response from some of guests that decided to participate was impressive. The children began to lie down on those coffins and we began to talk about those subjects that were also common through what an image generated. The project had some other very interesting answers within the community, because the community was expecting another kind of image and that is where I see the articulation between curating and pedagogy.

It is about thinking how to show, how to articulate students interests. This articulation has radically changed the results of exhibitions and has allowed people to create spaces for the experience, the interrelation with other people and for knowledge.

In that sense, I believe that pedagogy and curating can go hand in hand, since they allow us to rethink many aspects, especially the ones related to the school environment.

Finally, students were able to show the project at Expociencias, another space that has nothing to do with art, it was wonderful, because the students crossed the institutional barrier to be in other areas and share their project.

-Audience intervention: You observe through the artistic practices, but have you validated that intersected position with other practices?

-Adriana Pelaez: We nurture the project through interdisciplinarity.

An example, the inclusion of a content manager and and app, were a suggestion from another teacher that said to me, “What you are working on is very interesting because it has to do with trans media so why don’t we review these platforms?

The project is built through that relationship with other people, in my case, it was the math teacher. Later on, I talked to the technology teachers and I said to them “Any of you know the application?” In fact, now there is a teacher working with that augmented reality application. So, let’s say, that without that extra information of interdisciplinary exchange, perhaps the project would not have the scope that it has today.

-Maria Teresa Devia: For us, it has been possible that those students who have been “rejected” in other disciplines, have been able to have the opportunity to be seen through our laboratory.

Our project has had several stages and now is the time to show it, because it is very well constituted and is beautifully accompanied by philosophy. In our teacher´s meetings, we have been able to say that the student that did not have an outstanding performance in math, at the laboratory, had crossed borders and showed another way to approach the subject. We also have noticed that the students that are part of our program, in the beginning, are not the most outstanding, they are students who need a space to flourish.

There was a student that teachers asked us “Can he/she write?”

That student was able to write a text in the most wonderful way and put together an exhibition. He did a very forceful performance that is quite related with his future life. I do think that these spaces show results and the school is trying to combine subjects, something that did not exist before.

Our school, when it was created during the sixties, had some very innovative proposals and now again, is opening up to the possibility of transgressing and not having borders.

-Audience Intervention: I am a photography teacher. I would like to know when as a teacher, do you have to teach technical aspects during a photographic exercise. It is very easy for students to get lost and end up doing a very simple exercise and not being able to understand a subject that motivates them to do something that surpasses their expectations. I would like to know more about your strategies on how to handle subjects without imposing one instead, letting the subject come from within the classroom.

-Alejandro Sanchez: At the Campestre School, we have a very particular program that focuses on competences. This program doesn’t concentrate on technical themes, because we are interested in creative thinking or a complex thinking.

We have focused more on workshops for creative thinking that use specific tools and we try to guide people that place importance on certain techniques, but we do not teach photography’s technical aspects. What we do is push students towards solving problems using their immediate experience.

-Adriana Tobon: When they ask us something very concrete because they are searching and they need it, the first thing that we say to them is to keep looking, keep experimenting. I believe that as far as they are experimenting, they allow themselves that thing that you mentioned before, about astonishment and it is probable that in that path, he or she will discover how it is.

I am using an example “well, if I use this aperture, then I get this photograph, but if I use another one then I get a different photo...�

It is probably that when that student achieves what he or she is looking for, he or she is going to be very happy and that is very different from when we in traditional education, just continue to say to get it done. That way of teaching is very annoying because it cuts off the whole process, the path to research, experimentation and that is why the students are certainly bored of classes.

-Adriana Pelaez: At Gimansio Los Andes, we use an approach called Teaching for Understanding, which means, that as teachers, we enter into a process of re-evaluating our own artistic practice, starting from the students needs and interests, and understanding the constant trans disciplinary effect to which they are constantly exposed; considering this implies not only learning within the institution environment.

For example, at the department, this was very particular because Teaching for Understanding starts precisely from understanding how artistic processes or practices within art, generate reflection and thought. This type of teaching has a lot to do with how you get to know your students their interests or needs.

At the school, there is a photography teacher, and at this moment, for example, he is reviewing which needs and interests respond in particular to photography, how it can promote exploration for that discipline and how you can fall in love, as our advisor says, to provoke or generate that capacity of wonder that you seek.

So, I think it is in that doing, in that exploring, in that review and how, even that exercise of trail and error, opens new doors, which is something very interesting in our disciplines, because failure is also chosen as that possibility to continue doing. I think that from there, you could explore many things.

[Intervention] How to manage a project from poverty and from wealth? And I have seen it not only from working with recycled materials, but more so thinking about the student´s condition, from having some sort of knowledge of their context.

In my case and it used to happen to me that I will to tell them: “Look, this is the Mona Lisa” and they would say: “Oh yeah, last year I went and saw it, what do I do with that?” or the child who says to you “And where is that?” Those are two different worlds.

-Adriana Tobon: I teach a class that teaches students how to research by using art as an excuse. From that perspective, there is a point in which you have to teach them how to plan things. You ask them a question and from there you start planning an art research project; after that point, they need to have a calendar and know all the resources that they are going to need.

Eventually they by themselves start thinking, “Well, what do I already have to develop my project? How long do I have to do it? What resources do I need? How do I get those resources?�

Therefore, it is about making them conscious rather than teaching them. It is about those needs and simultaneously about learning to be creative, finding the resources that they need.

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