Last Wednesday, January 14, the first meeting of the “third phase” of the
Zona Intrusa 2
project took place at the Centre de Creació i Pensament Contemporani
Can Xalant
. The meeting was attended by teachers and students from the Escola FRETA, Escola Pia Santa Anna and IES Miquel Biada institutes, which are some of the centers that have participated in previous phases of the project.
As we already said here, Zona Intrusa 2 is an initiative of the Institut Municipal d’Acció Cultural of the Ajuntament de Mataró that aims to “bring contemporary art closer to the institutes” of the municipality; this is done, literally, by bringing an exhibition inside a container to the centers. Based on the revision of this initial premise, the team in charge of the second edition of Zona Intrusa, formed by Oriol Fontdevila and ourselves, proposed a working model that sought to establish, as far as possible, a collective process that would include the participation of both the artists present in the exhibition and teachers and students; for this reason, a first workshop was organized in which the conceptual and methodological basis of the activities that would be developed later in the classrooms once the exhibition was installed was worked on.
Within this model, it seemed especially necessary to us to establish tools and/or platforms that would allow us to assess and communicate the process during its development and finally as a whole, and that would facilitate the inclusion and participation of all the agents involved in it. In this sense, the wiki of Zona Intrusa 2 has allowed collaborating artists to publish information about the works they contributed to the exhibition. The wiki was also offered as a channel for communication, opinion and construction of discourse around the project for teachers and students, however, for various reasons that would take up too much space to argue, it has not been possible to establish this dynamic. In the design of the project, a final exhibition was proposed in the Espai f of Mataró that would offer a global vision of the entire process; in this third phase of Zona Intrusa 2 we have indeed begun to work effectively with teachers and students in the design of said final exhibition, so we hope to be able to offer an account of the project built in a horizontal way and that includes the experience and vision of all those who have participated in Zona Intrusa 2. The work sessions have started in Can Xalant and will continue in the exhibition hall itself as a work in progress. A very important part of this work will be the production and exhibition of the artistic intervention projects in the space of the institutes that have been developed as a result of the pedagogical activities of Zona Intrusa 2; in the development and production of these intervention projects, teachers and students will have the support of the Zona Intrusa 2 team and the technical resources of Can Xalant. The exhibition in the Espai f will be (pre)inaugurated on February 27 and will be completed towards the end of April when a public round table is planned with the participation of artists, teachers, students and the Zona Intrusa 2 team.