Education

In recent years, the department has been working together with the educational community at Federico García Lorca CEIP. This experience has allowed us to rethink the ways in which relationships are established between the school and the museum. We are aware of the importance of creating a working group to develop innovative practices related to demanding, committed and long-lasting art education.

This school year, we will continue to investigate together through the Artist at Work Here programme, in which artists carry out a project in collaboration with the school community: teachers, pupils and families.

Given the phasing out of art education in formal education, it seems essential to us to continue to carry out these projects in educational institutions as tools with which to confront the prevailing attitudes. One of the basic aims of this project is to reflect on the power of the long-term projects carried out by artists to affect us. In this sense, we are interested in investigating how artists can affect the educational institution and, conversely, how educational institutions, state schools in particular, can give back to artists and the very education department in terms of experience.

This year, Belén Rodríguez will be the artist invited to carry out a project with the pupils of Federico García Lorca CEIP in Móstoles.

Last year, together with the boys and girls who reside at the Móstoles Children’s Home, fantasised about making a home inside our own tree house. We imagined what its shape would be like, what we would do inside it and what would happen around it.  

Some time later, in a conversation with the teachers at the Pablo Neruda UFIL, we saw the importance of learning by doing, and we assessed the need to turn educational spaces into places where real-life projects can be put into practice. We then thought it would be exciting to involve the Carpentry Department at the college in the construction of the house imagined by that group of children. 

We at the education department like to think that we can all take part in the construction of the world around us, so in January we will begin a process of collaboration with both groups to conceive, design and make this powerful image possible. 

For this purpose, we invited the designer Curro Claret to activate and guide us through this process. A long-distance dialogue that aims to rethink the idea of home and expand the concept of home and family. This creative process will be completed in early summer with the installation of the little house in the garden of the children’s home. 

Curro Claret. As a designer, Curro Claret’s interest lies in how people can participate in defining and building their environment by making use of their circumstances in a balanced and respectful way. His work often involves connecting a particular project with different groups of people. 

First of all, we should explain that besides meaning ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’, the Spanish word loca from the title of this workshop “Volvernos Loca” is also used to describe “effeminate” homosexual men and is roughly equivalent to the English terms ‘sissy’ or ‘flaming queen’.

Sometimes when we are really interested or enthusiastic about something we say that we are “mad” to do it. This “going mad” is also a queer space where we stop being who we were and do what we have never done before.

It takes very little to make us go mad: a body, desire, to imagine how, what, when, and also a little bit of listening. To go out onto the streets together and run, run like mad. Go mad at school, in class, in the museum. Mad with joy, with pleasure, with longing to have a good time. Going mad so as not to end up mad.

A two-session workshop using action and performance to think from a queer perspective about ways of being that are beyond binary categories and fixed definitions of identity.

Final cycle of secondary school.

Schedule: the first 2-hour session to be arranged with the school. The second session from 11:00 to 13:30 at CA2M.

Maximum number of students: 30.

In this workshop the groups will work with art’s capacity to transform time and space. Over the course of the various sessions the class will be turned into a room and the museum into a house. The students will turn off the lights, remove the desks and dance. They will visit the most intimate corners of the museum and together they will build a shelter.

Last year, the performing artist Aitana Cordero designed this workshop in which we will discover how hard it is to work with intimacy in secondary schools and, at once, just how important it is to do so.

Times: the first two two-hour sessions at school and the third open-ended session at CA2M to be agreed with the teacher.

Maximum number of students: 30.

There are unused ceramic kilns in the storeroom for the sculpture workshop at the Europa secondary school. When we asked about them we were told that, back in the early 1990s, a group of teachers managed to introduce a Visual Arts course at the school. They spoke nostalgically about when the arts building was built and about the long teachers’ meetings to discuss experimental ideas they would introduce in the classrooms.

It strikes us as incredibly important to try to bring back this passion, especially at a time when art is being pushed out of the curriculum at schools. This year we want to start a project together with José Luis, Mercedes and Carmen (art teachers at the Europa secondary school) so that the students can create their own space for creativity. A place where they can turn on the kilns once again, increase the number of hours in creating, and defend the importance of art.
 

PHASE ONE: collaboration project between the CA2M library, Education department and IES Europa secondary school

A box of fanzines published by women, a shelf of books classified by weight or by colour, an envelope with minimum publications... A library can be almost anything.

This school year, along with Sonia and Andrea, the librarians at CA2M, we will begin a collaborative project to create an archive of art publications with art students at IES Europa secondary school: a strange, unsuspected library created from holdings discarded from the CA2M library. Students will take discarded books, catalogues and fanzines on a journey to the art classes at IES Europa. Once they find themselves in their new emplacement, we will start to think about and construct a collective archive where we will bring into question the conventional logic of a library in order to create a new archive narrative from materials which were initially rejected and which therefore are situated, from the outset, against the grain. The project seeks to develop new possibilities from creativity and resistance, to bring students into closer contact with contemporary creation and to create new bonds of collaboration between departments and institutions.The first activity will be a three-day workshop to create furniture in which we will jointly design and build an artefact or piece of furniture that will serve as both transport container and display case for the publications.

PHASE TWO: publishing with nothing

During the recent confinement we wanted to continue developing this project, even at a distance. For that purpose, we invited Andrea Galaxina to come up with a proposal to send to students. Taking the form of a tutorial, Andrea prepared a fanzine to explore the creative possibilities of self-publishing.

“In these strange times we are going through, when you cannot leave home to buy things, or perhaps you cannot leave home at all, it is important to realize that the materials we have at hand can open doors to fascinating worlds that perhaps, during our everyday lives, we don’t pay any real attention to. To create with nothing is a political and transformative action. And so too is publishing with nothing. The most subversive way of publishing in history is the fanzine. Furthermore, publishing fanzines allows us to expand our creativity. But we can also turn it into a vehicle to connect with others. Now that our interpersonal relationships have been seriously affected, we can take advantage of this state of emergency to introduce new ways of expressing ourselves and communicating with one another. That’s why in this guide I am going to show you how to make a fanzine with things that you probably have ready access to during confinement: ordinary everyday stationary materials with which we can nonetheless do extraordinary things. I will also give you a brief recap of the history and philosophy behind it and how to distribute our creations without leaving home".

Read Editar con nada. Una pequeña guía práctica (y un poco teórica) para hacer fanzines.

Art. Education. Pedagogy. Learning. Unlearning. Critical exercise. Political imagination. Wet knowledge. Visionary fictions. Counter-pedagogies. The one thing that we cannot deny, or escape, is that we are contemporaries of our pedagogic processes. And pedagogy, understood as a model, is at once a project for the privatisation of thinking. There are still words that are battlegrounds, and these, more than associated with reason, speak from bodies. Inappropriate, untimely, improper, inconvenient, displaced and angry, they dwell in unease and malaise and are like flows that leak out of all pores.

In this workshop Mônica Hoff, through experimental games, actions and readings, invites us to dwell in the unease we feel with our pedagogic processes and perhaps from there we can boost our individual and collective potential for political and poetic action.

THU 9 JUN 2010. 19:00 H. SHARING COUNTER - EDUCATIVE MATERIAL & PROJECTS

In this session we will examine materials and strategies used inside and outside of the classroom.

27 & 28 MAY 2010. 10:30 – 14:00 H. WHAT CAN WE DO? EDUCATION AS AN ACTION AND MOTIVATION. SEMINAR WITH MARINA GARCÉS, SANTIAGO LÓPEZ PETIT, DIEGO SZTULWARK AND VERÓNICA GAGO FROM COLECTIVO SITUACIONES

In this session, we will work on texts written by our guests so as to lead the discussion as a critical workshop in which these ideas are related to our own educative experiences. The texts deal will very important concepts, worthy of an in-depth study such as the construction of community, learning process and affects, citizenship, thoughts as an act of resistance…These texts allow us to think and they encourage a collective reflection on emotions, conflicts and uneasiness as well as the necessity of constructing a new kind of autonomy intertwined with other subjects, rather than with individuality. This workshop is the continuation of one of the main line of works of las lindes consisting of a reflection on education from different perspectives and experiences.

MARINA GARCÉS (Barcelona, 1973)  is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Zaragoza. She is author of Las prisiones de lo posible (Ed.Bellaterra, 2002) and is regularly published in magazines such as Archipiélago, Zehar, Daimon, etc. She has also participated in collective publications: Por una política nocturna (Debate, 2002), the report Barcelona 2004, el fascismo postmoderno (Ed. Bellaterra, 2004), Las luchas autónomas en el Estado Español, 1970-1977 (Traficantes de sueños, 2008) or La humillación. Técnicas y discursos para la exclusión social (Ed. Bellaterra, 2009) and El arte en cuestión (Valencia, 2010), etc. In 2003, she started Espai en Blanc (www.espaienblanc.net), a joint initiative dedicated to collective experimentation with thoughts. In the frame of this project, she coordinates the magazine Espai en Blanc. Materiales para la subversión de la vida (Ed.Bellaterra) and participates in different research projects. She is currently actively involved in the Master in contemporary performative arts (Institut del Teatre de Barcelona) and other research processes. www.marinagarces.com

DIEGO SZTULWARK Y VERÓNICA GAGO DE COLECTIVO SITUACIONES

Colectivo situaciones defines itself as a Buenos Aires-based militant research collective. Militant research is an elaboration of thoughts in contact with social experience. This practice intends to contribute to self-representation of society through a constant, flexible and equal work with all parties to the conflict. They set up the independent publishing company "Tinta Limón". They were already involved with some of the most active social movements and initiatives before the 2001 popular uprising: Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (unemployed workers’ movement), Escuelas Libres (free schools), Trabajadoras del Sexo (sex workers), Trabajadores precarios del telemarketing (precarious telemarketing workers), GAC (Street Art Group), H.I.J.O.S. (organization of the children of the disappeared during the dictatorship) etc. They also participated in educative experiences such as the school "Creciendo Juntos" or "Universidad Trashumante". In our lindes session of December 2010 we discussed fragments of Un elefante en la escuela, http://blip.tv/file/4600758 (from 26.15 on). 

Diego Sztulwark and Verónica Gago are holding a residency in Madrid as they are supported by the programme for researchers, El Ranchito (Matadero Madrid).

Activist of Workers’ Autonomy during the 1970’s, SANTIAGO LÓPEZ PETIT (Barcelona 1950) worked as a chemist in a firm which was taken over by its workers. He was involved in resistance movements that followed the crisis of the Workers’ Movement. He currently works as a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He participated in the project Espai en Blanc since the very beginning (www.espaienblanc.net). Among his books: Entre el Ser y el Poder. Una apuesta por el querer vivir (Ed. Siglo XXI, Madrid 1994); Horror Vacui. La Travesía de la Noche del Siglo (Ed. Siglo XXI, Madrid 1996), El infinito y la nada. El querer vivir como desafío (Ed. Bellaterra, Barcelona 2003), Amar y pensar. El odio del querer vivir (Ed. Bellaterra, Barcelona 2005), La movilización global. Breve tratado para atacar la realidad (Traficantes de sueños, 2009). He has likewise contributed to a number of collective books and has been published in journals including El Viejo Topo, Archipiélago, Riff Raff, Futur Antérieur and Posse. His main working line is the relationship between life, politics and art from a critical and activist perspective.

Download reading folder

14 APR 2011. 19:00 H. READING ANALYSIS VI. HE THAT HAS LITLLE AND WANTS LESS IS RICHER THA HE THAT HAS MUCH AND WANTS MORE

In this session, we will discuss education related to public or private fields, as well as advertising and mass media as a factory of consensus and its role in the construction of hedonism.

Chapter “Construction the Romantic Utopia” in Illouz, Eva, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Berkeley, 1997.

"On Democarcy and Education" pp. 294-295 Noam Chomsky
And the following videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvd9NeW6zfc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPTC4XlYm2s

10 MAR 2011. 19:00 H. BUT PROF, WHAT'S THAN ALL ABOUT? 2ND INTRODUCTORY SESSION

Double session on unbiased educational material, experimental practices and other liberating entertainment. This session is the continuation of last February gathering. We invite all of you to bring materials and strategies that you may have used in your educative practice and that you'd like to share, discuss and experiment in Las Lindes.

10 MAR 2011. 19:00 H. BUT PROF, WHAT'S THAN ALL ABOUT? 1ST INTRODUCTORY SESSION

Double session on unbiased educational material, experimental practices and other liberating entertainment. During this session, teaching resources and strategies used by participants were presented in their educative contexts: a session in which objects, ideas have been brought up so that they can be shared with all participants.

13 ENE 2011. 19:00 H. RETHINKING LAS LINDES 2011

In this session, we discussed topics related to practical issues of las lindes and we reflected on this year's project and its development until now.

9 DIC 2010. 19:00 H. READING ANALYSIS V

In this session, we will analyse some of the aspects put forward by various authors in different contexts. Nevertheless, they all conceive education as a utopian project.

Ferrer y Guardia, La Escuela Moderna, Barcelona, 1912. Chapter dedicated to the education of the future

José Val del Omar "Sentimiento de la Pedagogía. Kinestésica", June 1932.

Francisco José Cuevas Noa, Anarquismo y Educación, Madrid, 2003. Chapters dedicated to Paideia School (Merida) and unschooling:objections to conventional education.

Colectivo Situaciones, Un elefante en la escuela, Buenos Aires, 2008. Chapters "Hacer escuela, estar en banda" and "¿qué puede una escuela?"

11 NOV 2010, 19:00 H.

Se  crearon dos grupos  en los que se compartieron las observaciones realizadas en las actividades educativas individuales desde la última sesión. Tras esto se hizo una puesta en común de las conclusiones de los dos grupos de trabajo.

Uno de los grupos expuso que las observaciones que se habían fijado en la sesión anterior les habían dado mucho que pensar, y se propuso  continuar el trabajo de observación intentando sistematizarlo y experimentar con ello.  Se propuso la posibilidad de observar nuestros prejuicios, los que tenemos desde hace tiempo y los que se van generando en relación a grupos con los que trabajamos un poco más a largo plazo… Por último se habló sobre estrategias relacionadas con los silencios vinculados al género. El otro grupo estuvo hablando de sus experiencias personales y no expusieron conclusiones al grupo general.

14 OCT 2010, 19:00 H.

Si en el curso anterior de Las lindes se había intentado reflexionar en torno a unos textos para facilitar el lenguaje en torno a unos referentes comunes, el propósito de este segundo año se define como un intento de bajar desde la teoría hasta la práctica.

Para dar este paso se decidió dividir al grupo en tres partes, para operativizar las sesiones de trabajo, generar lenguaje común y analizar lo propio a través de lo ajeno y a la vez, nutrir la práctica educativa a partir de nuestras experiencias.

Tras la división en grupos, se pusieron en común las propuestas de observación:

- Los silencios y las dinámicas que puede generar cuando el alumno no responde al diálogo
- El miedo, desde el punto de vista del miedo a la libertad, cómo reaccionamos ante los proyectos libres o que no nos marcan líneas claras de actuación
- Dinámica espacial y relaciones corporales. Analizar el lugar del cuerpo en el espacio, tanto el del profesor y como los de los alumnos y como se distribuye el espacio en el aula.
- La dirección de las preguntas que se hacen, que intención tenemos con cada pregunta
- Relación entre la toma de la voz y el diálogo con las situaciones de igualdad/desigualdad.

Documentation and further information

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Educational Programme 2010 - 2011