Another Roadmap School for Arts Education

Place: Floor 0
Mornings: Research group sessions (closed)
Afternoons: Workshop and sessions open to the public from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Collaborators and producers:
ArtEduStiftung, Another Roadmap School international network and local team at Barcelona (LaFundició, Fermín Soria, Transductores, Col·lectivaccions/Judit Vidiella), Institute for Art Education - Zurich University of the Arts (Switzerland), Fabra i Coats – Art Factory, Intermediae, Matadero (Madrid) + Tabakalera - Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporánea (San Sebastian).

Introduction and work frameworks

The international platform Another Roadmap School (Escuela Otra Hoja de Ruta) researches and activates other ways of generating stories, practices and policies on art and education from epistemologies from the south, popular education and situated practices. It is a platform that has been active since 2011 as a counter narrative to the UNESCO’S roadmap for arts education, a euro-centric document, based on creative economics and a folkloric and instrumentalising view of cultural difference.
The group from Spain is formed by Intermediae, Tabakalera Donostia and Living In-between, Col·lectivaccions and Fermín Soria. This group forms part of the Latin American Popular Education node: Re-updates, Artistic Education and Social Movements, made up of interdisciplinary groups from the cities of Barcelona/San Sebastian/Madrid (Spain); Brasilia/Sao Paulo (Brazil); Bogota (Colombia); Ljubljana (Slovenia); San Juan (Puerto Rico); and Quito (Ecuador).

The key questions which we will use as a base are the following:

What limits, paradoxes and difficulties are faced today by the practices of mediation and education in culture, and what potential do they offer?

What traditions and other spaces of education and mediation represent transforming practices and new institutionality?

What alliances and commitments can be made through artistic and educational practices regarding the regeneration of local know-how, forms of collective learning and the reformulation of educational and cultural institutions?
 

During this meeting, the first day will be structured around the workshop “The Educational Turn and Mediation”, a space where different perspectives and experiences can be shown and exchanged in relation with the city of Barcelona’s cultural, educational and mediation policies in diverse spheres and sectors. The workshop is a practical study for the exchange of knowledge that helps us to situate tensions, lines, other traditions/stories, paradoxes and vanishing points of the expanding field of mediation. This field includes a host of practices (community art, applied arts, art and education, cultural or artistic mediation, informal education, etc.) and can be seen in relationship with the so-called educational turn. This turn introduced – into the field of the visual arts, preferably – discourses on popular education, artistic-educational practices and strategies, social return and ways of constructing horizontal knowledge, as well as a reflection and space for resistance with regard to the standardisation of regulated and higher education within the neoliberal framework. In this sense, the workshop aims to overflow the traditional segmentation of the cultural sector, of conventional formats of education and development of audiences and of ways of understanding mediation, where conflict, tensions and institutional transformation are work horizons.

On the second day, based on a series of presentations and on a final debate, it is aimed to introduce some of the country-wide experiences of the Another Roadmap School work group and debate on the sense or not of mediation at art centres as a field in expansion with numerous paradoxes, thinking about their limits, paradoxes and possibilities for institutional transformation.

Timetables and work plan

Friday 4, from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Introduction to the sessions and to the Another Roadmap School Network
4.30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Workshop: “The Educational Turn and Mediation. Complexity, Networks and Potentials”
With Agost Produccions, Col·lectivaccions and Fermín Soria

Saturday 5, from 4 p.m. to 7.46 p.m.
4 p.m. Introduction to the sessions
4.15 p.m. How to Dance Together? Presentation of the Mediation Area at Tabakalera (San Sebastian)
5 p.m. Collaborative practices in mediation. Presentation by Nora Landkammer, of the Institute for Arts Education from the University of Zurich (Switzerland)

Break

6.15 p.m. Own Rooms: Demediated. A-Pre-project-For-Against-Without-About Mediation · Conversation from the cycle: “Own Rooms # 3 - Demediated: About, For and Against Mediation”, with Oriol Fontdevila, Nora Landkammer and Martí Peran