Aquí trabaja un artista

Throughout this academic year we have developed a new, long-term line of work with two schools in the periphery of Madrid. In the face of the gradual disappearance of art education from the school curriculum, we posited the idea of a residency project, based on the work of an artist in a primary school during school timetable, and in all the possibilities such an initiative would generate. The artists are Pilar Álvarez and Alejandro Simón, and the schools are Beato Simón de Rojas in Móstoles and Trabenco in Leganés, respectively. In parallel to the project, under the guidance of Aida Sánchez de Serdio, Mercedes Álvarez has produced a research project on the possibilities of the work model developed by the Center's educational team with artists and teachers.

On the 25th of June we will hold a work session with all parties involved in the project, in order to share the experience.

For the 2015-2016 school year the El Banquete group and the pupils from sixth year undertook the collective construction of a pyramid in a corner of the Juan Pérez Villaamil public school in Móstoles. Its mission was to generate a space that would afford other ways of inhabiting and rethinking utopia. The pyramid was built as a possibility for establishing other orders, a space of fluctuating collaborations in which to build and rebuild.

For the current school year of 2016-2017, a new group of pupils from sixth year will be in charge of the construction and deciding on its use. Once again this year, El Banquete will carry out a project at the school in which play will be given a transformative role, giving students an opportunity to adopt roles that will open up processes of reflection on identity, territoriality, the public sphere, autonomy, power, negotiation and disobedience. The project is underpinned by an interest in generating an autonomous and self-managed pedagogy from a position of conflict, at once creating a space of friction within the educational institution, where pupils will take decisions collectively for the self-construction and self-management of the space.

LAlejandría Cinque, Raquel G.Ibáñez and Marta van Tartwijk are the members of the El Banquete research and creative group which develops projects related with everyday experience as an artistic value. Their projects are addressed as playful appropriations and subjective experiences that wish to act as triggers for reflection, critical thinking and individual empowerment.

During this school year María Jerez, accompanied by an artist who does not speak Spanish, will attend the school with the intention of getting the children to teach the language to this “illiterate” individual; as such, this process will turn the usual logic and roles of teaching inside out. For this project, the artist and her companion will explore along with the children how a language can arise from the encounter between people who do not speak the same language. During the process, the wish to break down the distance separating them will make it possible to communicate between different worlds. This artist’s residency will seek to develop a “third language” derived from the impossibility of immediate communication, and to this end they will explore the inefficacy of language in situations where translation does not exist, where teaching and learning take place at the same time, where nobody is in control of the teaching process, where there is an exploration of fragility and roles are reversed, in order to discover things within failure and to make the most of and enjoy mistakes.

María Jerez is an artist who uses a borderline language in her practice because it allows her to be more mobile. In fact, she likes speaking through others. She builds like Lego and takes a kamikaze approach to rebuilding. In her first piece she turned her back on the public in order to see reality from a different angle and be able to position herself in many places at once. In the second piece she built a space where everybody could fit. In the third she appears in two dimensions. In the fourth she disappears. In the fifth she is expanded. In the sixth she is transformed into Alma de Rímel.

Following the experience during the 2014–2015 school year, this year we will continue and expand the Artist At Work program in which the artists develop an art project in collaboration with the local community in a school, including teachers, students and families. In the face of the disappearance of art classes within the official school curriculum we believe that it is an interesting artistic challenge to bring artists to schools with the purpose of developing multidisciplinary projects that work with materials that are not generally associated with art practice. One of the main goals of the project is to think about the possible long-term effects of projects developed by artists. In this regard, we are interested in researching into how artists can affect schools and vice versa, how educational institutions, and more specifically public schools, can return the experience to the artists and to the CA2M education department.

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.

4 minutes and 300 metres is all that separates us from the nearest public school. The closeness with the art centre means that its teachers, students, and parents are part of the very fabric of the museum itself. Right from the beginning, we believed that it was critical for us to work with the schools in our area of influence in the development of projects that would lead to a shared space of research. And so, for the third year running, we are continuing to strengthen bonds by collaborating with the Beato Simón de Rojas public school as part of our artist-in-residence project. The proposals will conceive other forms of productivity removed from those which schools are used to. For the first year we invited Pili Álvarez to come up with an audiovisual project that would rethink the school’s immediate surrounding environs, the experiences that take place there and the relational problems that arise in its classrooms. For the second year Amalia Fernández worked with the body to explore issues related with identity and desire both inside and outside the classroom. This year we wish to continue investigating how artists can affect the educational institution and, more specifically, how this public school can return its experience to artists as well as to CA2M’s education department.

This school year we are beginning a new long-term relationship with the Manuel Núñez Arenas public school in Vallecas. The artist-in-residence project will be based on dialogue with the school’s team of teachers and the parents who are actively involved with the school. The artist will first take some time to get acquainted with how the school is run and its people and then connect it with his/her own artistic research. For this reason, the residency project will address issues of social justice, the core theme for the activities at Nuñez Arenas this year.

The project will involve the whole school, focusing on the work of two different years in primary school as well as the parents who wish to be involved. Together we will all imagine new forms of functioning and of intervention in the space in a primary school.