ARTIST AT WORK

As part of our ongoing long-term policy, this school year we ran three artist residencies in three public schools on the outskirts of Madrid: María Jerez in CP Parque Aluche, the El Banquete collective in CP Juan Pérez Villamil and Amalia Fernández in CP Beato Simón de Rojas, these last two in Móstoles.

In the face of the growing disappearance of art courses in the official state curriculum, we believed that it would be an interesting challenge to introduce artists into schools with the purpose of developing projects which involve materials that, in principle, are not normally associated with art practice. We were interested in exploring how artists can influence schools and, vice versa, how the school can pass on its experience to the artists and also the education department here at CA2M.

Working in parallel to the educational project, Mercedes Álvarez undertook research into the potential of the working model developed by the art centre’s educational team with artists and teachers. On this occasion, the emphasis of the parallel research has taken various experimental approaches, questioning the very model of evaluation within culture. A publication with the results for last years’ course is available at Between the Museum and the School

In this seminar, all the participating agents in the project — artists, teachers, educators and researchers — will present the projects undertaken and we will evaluate their impact and contents.