Mariló launching psychotronic rays at the unsuspecting guest
This weekend our friend Antonio Collados visited LaFundició headquarters to explain some things about Aulabierta, an experience of which he is one of the main architects; the talk was very interesting, we discussed some of the similarities and differences with projecte3* and we ended up talking about the life of the cultural worker… all this while we were having a delicious carrot cake courtesy of Mariló. The interview, which you can read below, will also appear in a fanzine that we are preparing about projecte3* and in which texts by students of the IES Joanot Martorell, Catarqsis, Santiago Cirugeda, Javier Rodrigo… will also be published and in which we will have the stellar appearance of Peter McLaren!!, but we will report on this in due course. The interview, after the link.
Francisco: Since this interview is for the fanzine, comment on what Aulabierta is and how the need to start Aulabierta arose, or is this too formal? For those who don’t know what Aulabierta is, right?
Antonio: Discuss the questions a bit if you want… Aulabierta is, I think, an experience of building a self-managed learning community within the University by the students themselves, and it arose three years ago in the autumn of 2004 as a result of some of the conditions of the faculty itself: the absence of meeting places, beyond those strictly programmed for regulated teaching; spaces where people who understand their learning in a more open way could meet, propose group projects and question what the model of regulated structure is and how they could intervene from within, with their own desire as a learning engine, which is one of the objectives of the project.
Mariló: There is no space, there was no space within the faculty that you could use?
F: Apart from the bar.
A: Well, we always talked about this, about how the cafeteria and the library were two meeting places, or two places that encouraged it, but we always said that what we wanted to build was an intermediate space, that is, an open place like a cafeteria but without the noise of the cafeteria and a place like a library, with the information of a library but without the silence of a library. There are no such places in the Faculty of Fine Arts of Granada, although in such chaotic facilities as theirs, some space of this type may emerge. There is none designed by the institution for this purpose. Originally, Aulabierta was rather an abstract space, a meeting space, it was not conceived as something physical, it was a space that could be given anywhere…
F: I also ask myself the question of whether it is really necessary to ‘build’ something to build Aulabierta or to build Espai3*, it is that maybe you can appropriate a space that already exists.
A: I think so, in reality we started, the project starts without considering self-construction, the meeting can occur as a result of the organization of a seminar or, imagine, in the form of a summer scholarship, or programmed or unprogrammed bar conversations, in a cafeteria; what also happens is that at that time we knew the work of Santiago Cirugeda with whom you are also working, and we saw many of the potentialities that architecture could have. The fact that we took the step of physically building the space is because this structure could become a sign of the project, we believed that through the self-construction project the initiative was going to be much richer and more visible.
F: In a symbol?
A: Yes, well, symbol is that…
F: Is it too much?
A: A posteriori. Sign is like the ‘tag’, let’s say “I can understand it, you are talking about space”, it is an immediate relationship “that is a space”. Apart from that, almost everyone in the association are visual creators or architects and there is a certain taste in the production, in the materialization of these things and although the wear and tear of building a space is brutal, it can even lead… well, I think we both know this quite well, it can generate moments in which it does not produce positive energy, what happens is that, after all, from the beginning we knew that betting on self-construction would help create community, this is a project that requires the participation of many people to make it possible, to get to build it and that generates relationships that in the end are very solid. I don’t know, as if in the end that physical work has dignified us [laughs] and has managed to link us as a group… There was also a lot of influence from Santi in this, from the beginning he entered the project and he is an architect who understands that architecture can modify the… that is, the fact of proposing or designing a different architecture can at the same time provoke different ways of living, that is, it also motivates unusual behaviors within the institution; you have already seen, Aulabierta is placed within a terrain that is university but there are things that the regulated does not foresee, the University itself, things that are happening from Aulabierta. In fact, this is the suspicion that the institution may have, about that project… suddenly self-management is suspicious, no matter how much it has it within its objectives. Everything that is not regulated and that is not predictable is suspicious.
M: But they did give you permission to build there, on that land.
A: This is very conflicting. [general laughter] This is a question…
M: I don’t know, like us.
A: Let’s see, this is complicated: if you have to do a project of… a first step… we are talking about physical or more complex activities, such as the dismantling of an industrial warehouse to obtain materials with which to later design and build the classroom. For this there was a very large legal requirement to prepare a dismantling project, a safety plan and all this, all those documents were made, delivered, supervised by the University and approved. When assembling the classroom: the assembly project is done, the safety project is done and delivered.
M: Delivered to whom? To the University?
A: To the University, as we are working within a public institution, our project does not need to go through the College of Architects, because the University itself can approve it, there is a technical office that can supervise it. You also have to analyze what we are assembling and both yours and ours are demountable, transferable spaces, so there are certain gaps and legal advantages that you have to know very well and defend them. As they are not permanently fixed to the ground, you can move them without damaging the real estate on which they are deposited, that is, our spaces would fall into the category of movable property, I think the installation of a module like yours is equivalent to the deposit of a cabinet in a lot, but Santi is the specialist in these things. So, there is no other… Aulabierta you can take it away, give it time and desire to disassemble it! that the land is undamaged. And about the permits: what has been very important and we have been talking about it a little before too, is to do things well, that is, this is a self-learning experience and therefore you have to know very well who your interlocutor is, in this case it can be the administration, from a civil institution to an educational center, and they are going to have demands on you, that is, what you have to do you have to do very well, attending to formalities, to legal issues. That has worried us a lot from the beginning, we said: let’s know what are the usual procedures to carry out any type of project, what are the requirements and we are going to fulfill them all, one by one, so that for us, for a failure of ours, the project does not go ahead, that it is by a decision of another type. Even wanting to do things well there are things that go wrong.
M: You don’t know them either, sometimes.
A: Well, in reality, the attitude always, from the beginning, with this project and even today, and that is what I like the most, is that we face it in a very naive way, that is, we didn’t know anything about this, nothing, nothing. It could have been done in a more agile, more effective way, but no one had the experience; only Santi, but as far as the ways of negotiating or intervening in the University are concerned, I think we were quite virgins. The project aims for the participants in it to acquire the potential to design the way in which they want to know what they do not know, in our case looking for a way to insert ourselves within the educational system itself, of the pedagogical ‘design’ itself, of the management of programs. As you can see, it goes beyond self-construction. We have tried to make each step of self-construction, each of its phases, into a training activity, in courses, and that the University recognizes and legitimizes them as academic activities granting credits for free configuration. That is, our activities are incorporated into the academic record. All this has to be experienced and learned to do. Our own shortcomings, what they have done… which is what these projects have, that with them you analyze your weaknesses and they help you solve them, that is somehow happening. Obviously, the grace of everything, and I go back to the beginning, is that of naivety. If you know what the path is, first: it has little interest, and the second: you don’t end up getting to anything new, now if you go a little with an attitude as we say of… well, you have no choice, you go echao p´alante, you are making decisions that in many cases are reckless and risky, but that is the fun and interesting thing.
M: But the fact of building didn’t start to generate problems around security, that an accident occurred… or…? because I suppose there would be a lot of movement there in the faculty: you building and nobody… or not?
A: I have never had the feeling that the project, from within, is followed or valued, I think it has been rather belittled.
F: That is sometimes an advantage.
A: Now people who have not followed the project are coming and they are starting to ask very suspicious questions. A professor, Jesús [referring to Jesús Pérez, another of the people in charge of Aulabierta] told me recently: “Hey, is this well legalized, do you have a project and all this? Because I am very concerned about the health, the safety of the students of Fine Arts and I want to know if this is going to fall on us”. Suddenly people are surprised that we have raised it and say “damn, what is this?!” (obviously we have made sure that it does not fall, as if we were not concerned about our safety!) but we already see certain misgivings and suspicions about the classroom.
We have always taken into account, and we have also been very aware that we must have solutions prepared for any problem. If any tension arises, if there is any type of requirement, we have to be very prepared to act immediately. If a professor comes to us with stories of “is there a technical project here?” he quickly has it available. In the end, naivety is what has made us train, and in the end it has generated the opposite, foresight, that is, being prepared for any type of problem that may arise. In fact, we have called an interview with the vice-rector and as you already foresee her reaction.
To me, in the three years that we have been working in Aulabierta, since 2004, the truth is that we have come to have a training that the studies themselves did not offer us at all; I am talking about the case of architecture for example, that is, a legal knowledge, for the fact of having to carry out the practice, or a knowledge that seems anecdotal, of security measures, that you see in a passing way during the career, here damn! in a certain way you are risking that a hammer will fall on you, you have to be prepared for that. And for example, in that case we have designed training courses, security and health and all this. What these types of activities do is complement the teaching that the University gives or, in fact, cover its gaps, its shortcomings, this should be easily understood, we must be agile and be prepared to know how to explain it well, with clarity. I have not been afraid at any time for the security, if much respect.
M: More than anything that it could have been one of the reasons that someone could have used to stop you, to stop the project. Well, of course, the fact that indifference is cool, we have also done many things from the area of artistic education because nobody pays attention to it and as nobody pays attention to it you are doing.
A: As if it were a residual area. I tell you, it is not that nobody had supported us, on the contrary, but well, you know. Insisting on the issue of security, as I have already mentioned, both Recetas Urbanas and AAABIERTA have prepared any type of dossier, any type of technical project that was needed. And also in a creative way which has helped to always go a little further. For example, it was necessary to prepare a safety project for the dismantling of the industrial warehouse and then for the assembly of the classroom, well, Santi’s studio prepared some very clear and useful graphic manuals for dismantling and assembly, a kind of instruction manual or didactic sheet, which served to enhance our interest in safety much more. That, for example, has managed to convince the institutions with which we have worked, the seriousness that we have demonstrated in all this type of procedures; if they considered that security, for example, is important, we demonstrated with what we delivered that for us it was even more. We have demonstrated a maximum concern in that case and we were even proactive, that is, you raise a problem and we always gave options to solve it, formulas that the institution had not thought of.
M: For us, of course, saying that I think: if for me when they put obstacles to the space it is raised that it is a vulnerable space, or that it is an unmonitored space… I could never put measures like to super-monitor the space! To you, I suppose that because of the indifference, they have not come to require it.
A: There are security requirements.
M: Yes, but of surveillance of the space, that it can be a space…
F: Of course, one of the problems is “What is going to be done there? What is going to happen there? And that has to be supervised, controlled and monitored” and that you can’t… how do you give it back…?
A: Well, with foresight. I remember from the first technical projects that they, in addition to insisting on the technical issue, asked us about the uses: what was it going to be used for, what was going to be done inside. Ángel Avidad, architect of the University, when we gave him the technical dossier told us: “Well, our doubt is what is going to be done inside”. But well, given that doubt: a program. A program of use, a program of activities. The uses of the classroom will not be proposed from the direction of the faculty, but agreed upon by the students.
F: But that they have academic value.
A: Yes, let’s see: they have training value, academic value is that there is a legitimation by the faculty, that is, that they give credits. We have always explored that path (also others), we dedicate a lot of time to this project and what you want is to make it profitable too. It falls within the objective of designing part of the curricular branch of the free configuration of your academic record.
F: That is what is not understood that secondary school students can do. It is understood that they are not able to design their own curriculum.
M: But there’s also, beyond whether or not they’re capable of designing something, I think there’s you can’t… because it’s a very subjective perception, but there’s a very objective thing which is the ‘legal responsibility’ of a 16-year-old, that’s where the axis revolves around all the time…
F: Yeah, but well, that’s the legal argument to deny them the capacity to do it.
M: It’s to deny the power of decision. But not just to decide on the curriculum, but to decide on anything. If I have to be in a space for I don’t know how many hours, watched and unable to leave because I’m 16 years old, it’s like… it doesn’t matter anymore, it’s not just that I can’t decide on my curriculum, I can’t decide where I am. For me, that’s very heavy within the system.
A: I don’t know what the system is like in secondary school, but we have taken the trouble to study the statutes of the University, what its objectives are, and in relation to the students it says: “we positively value and will promote the participation of students in teaching work”.
F: Yes, this is already a commonplace in educational policies.
A: We were talking about it before, is it fulfilled or not? In our case, at the University, I think that, although it is promoted, at an academic level, if we talk about the curriculum, you can’t participate at all. We know that, but in the face of this situation, what we said: “let’s look for creative solutions”. We already know that for them, in this aspect we have no decision, beyond participating in a council and so on, but we can’t get to propose, well…, yes we can get to propose How can this be done? Like-minded faculty. None of our courses could be signed by us as directors, we as students cannot process the granting of credits for any of them, but if a professor appears in the direction, yes.
F: That’s something I see clearly with projecte3*, that we have to look for like-minded faculty and when we say co-management of the space I mean that ‘the professors’ have to co-manage that space, because if not it’s impossible, it won’t have academic validity, it won’t have…
A: And one of the things that worries me the most and that may worry you too is the durability of the project.
F: Yes, because the moment we leave there, projecte3* is over, we have to look for that support.
A: When the group that forms AAABIERTA leaves the University because they have finished their studies, who continues with this? We have had a problem and that is that the student delegation of BBAA was a bit unstructured although now, it is starting to work, the objective is that this becomes a joint project of all the students. Obviously the association has made a very big effort to build it and to design it but we have realised that who is going to last is going to be the faculty and the student delegation (whoever is inside) are going to be the ones who are going to be in this faculty, then, obviously, they have to make that space and that project their own; the space both physical and digital, facilitate all the tools that we have designed as self-learning, explain them, teach them and say: “let’s go…”
F: Regarding that, they told us that not everyone saw it so clearly and people who had participated in the project wanted to take it over for themselves, as if it was something exclusively theirs and not let the rest of the faculty participate. There are times when the kids from projecte3* also have that reaction: “No, this is ours and nobody else is going to enter here”.
A: Not in such an exaggerated way, but even I have felt attached to the chair, as they say in political management, …of course, you say “Damn, I’ve been in this for two years…” but you have to recycle yourself and say “Dude! what project have you been working on? what is this about?, you have decided to work in a group and encourage participation”. It may be that Aulabierta is still an “half-open” classroom, which has not communicated well. I think what we have are communication problems of the project.
M: We have them too.
A: And we make a tremendous effort to find out what is the best way to open it, but I don’t think we are trained in it… the university education we have has not favored the creation of group projects. It gives a lot of satisfaction to say: “I have made this classroom”, but at the same time this closes… “well, okay, we have done this, but what interests us is that this one that comes on the last day can get hooked and give it continuity”.
M: Regarding making the project public, for example, for us it was super important that the whole center knew what was happening and we tried to do it when María and Ppda [María García and José Daniel Campos, members of Catarqsis together with Carlos Gor] came in that meeting in the hall and, for example, the faculty doesn’t know what is happening and for us it was vital that everyone was aware and could contribute things to the process and the process has remained very endogamous and you don’t know what tool you could have used to open it. For example, not only to the center, because one idea was to open it to the neighborhood, because the idea was that what happened in the school was known outside. Now, when we are doing the drift, it is a tool to know the neighborhood and for them to know you, that is, you act on the sides and you ask who are you? where do you come from and what are you doing? and then you explain to everyone what you are doing. And we have started now to do the drift but I realize that it is a quite powerful tool to know and to be known.
A: Yes, in our case it is also an interest to make the university a permeable, porous place in projects such as zonachana that unites this space that we have created inside but also with the neighborhood that welcomes the Faculty of Fine Arts, La Chana. We have made efforts but we have also realized that in communication there is a code and that code, ours and that of the people, is not shared either, a specific case, when we presented this AAA project at the beginning to the department of visual pedagogy… it has a strange name now I don’t remember well, to ask for a grant, a support, he told us that he really didn’t see what relationship the Aula Abierta project had with his department. Then on the one hand you say, well either they are blind or I am the one who can’t speak, there is a communication problem here because obviously our project does work in its field, proposing a revision of the forms and contents of Fine Arts or Architecture education and other disciplines.
M: Yes, I think that in our case it is also that the codes, the languages are different and then we can’t…
F: In our case, the faculty of the center is not an organism, but each one is autonomous. So it is quite difficult. In centers like El Prat de la Manta, you talk to the director and then the director is in charge of making it public to the whole center because for them it is important that everyone is informed, and a normal center is not.
M: But the same thing that happens with the students, who are individualistic and find it difficult to work in a group, happens with the faculty who only take care of their class, give their hour, prepare their subject… but they are not used to working in a group, I teach language and you teach English, and I don’t know what you do and you don’t know what I do.
F: However, the professors are convinced that they are very united and that they work as a team.
M: That there is a union in that they are all teachers, but each one carries their subject and their history and there are no hybrids and interests are joined or.. I don’t know, that they are not used to, maybe it would be necessary to do projects with the teachers working together; that all the teachers, the language teacher, the history teacher, design…
F: A space [laughs]
M: Or that they help each other for I don’t know what.. so that they give a class for example, something so simple. but they are used to every day … there is no…
A: Yes, it’s like the staging. In our case, you know the fine arts building, don’t you? You see the structure it has, don’t you?: Well, I’m sure Pablo explained it to you, it’s a former psychiatric hospital and its design is labyrinthine, its function was to disaggregate, not to unite, watertight cells scattered in long corridors. The fact is that it becomes the Faculty of Fine Arts, and the departments, the areas of knowledge, painting, sculpture… are implemented but each one occupying a very different place from the rest, they are separated again, you say well today the arts tend to converge in no case to separate, right? The whole concept of art is hybrid by nature and look at what metaphor our BBAA building gives us for the academy. I say this, because of what you were talking about a common project, in the Faculty of Fine Arts of Granada, one of the sensations that I have had from within is that it has never had a common project, other faculties do seem to have it, even if they have their internal tensions and all this. but there are some that you say, this one is about this, this one pulls from here. Granada never, I think there is so much internal tension that there is no project that excites and unites forces. Aulabierta wanted to be a project that supported the center and served to create a space for communication, debate and meeting of all sectors of the faculty, also to infect other centers, but it is difficult.
F: I don’t know if we should… well our case is different, we can choose where we go. I think we should select a little bit where we are going to do things, there are places where it is possible and where it is not possible because of the internal dynamics, although all the centers are very similar but… it also depends on the people in charge.
A: And also the project, that is, organizing a film seminar with popcorn is much more feasible, easier to manage than rethinking the structure of the center itself.
F: Even within this, maybe there is some center that is more predisposed to question itself, for whatever reasons. But it is true that if you do a natural painting course, everything is easier…
A: I think that in the institutional there are few possibilities to interact.
M: Well, I think that piece of classroom is a pretty powerful interaction.
A: Yes, but after all, look at the problems we are talking about is that again it is as isolated.
M: Yes, but you have materialized a student initiative, I mean, if that has been done, it means that other things can be done. You open a door, many times the problem is that this cannot be done because it has never been done, well no, it has already been done. For me it is a lot even if then it has all the problems at the level of being able to structure itself or that many of the lines that one has marked have not been achieved but there are others that are there.
A: Obviously the case of Aulabierta is a precedent, in the university, in our faculty, of course, even that transcends a little our scope. The objective was to acquire potential and it is acquired by force and by the desire to do, not because you have either the training, or the preparation, or because you have the means. None of these three things we had, we were not prepared either mentally or physically and we did not have the means to do what we have done, material and even human means, because the project starts from scratch, from some people who meet, but that soon begins to grow, that is magnificent, but nothing was had. In fact, it did not start from a budget, which is one of the things that I love about this project, there is no budget that you have to spend to do a project, no, there is a project that has to come out at all and that you have to find a way to find funding step by step, as a problem requires or appears. A need arises, we look for a solution. The specialist in this is Santi.
M: Ours is like that, he [Francisco] criticizes that way of acting.
F: Yeah, but the context is also different, because they are a group of people who have some circumstances and undertake an action…
M: But for me that way is one of the ways that ensures that it is not a closed project, that it is not a closed thing. Because when you look for, when you have money and then you already…
F: Yeah, but there are margins too. We get to work… we are not a…
A: I want to understand what Francisco says…
F: We have a way of life, a means of life through our work, they don’t…
A: No, no. Directly not.
F: They even want to make it profitable at an academic level ‘at least’, because they are doing a huge job and effort, we have to make it profitable and of course, launching a project that the funding is going to cost you 24,000 euros, for example, without having zero secured, of course, is a bit of a suicide. You can do it once, but not always!
A: And in fact I have been able to be very close to the project because I have a scholarship that covers me, and I have been able to dedicate a lot of time to this project because my research project starts from there, which is that if not…. If I faced this as a professional project it would be different for me. … but I think it is interesting that the project is done in the conditions in which it is being done, what we have just talked about. I may not be in the circumstances or conditions to be able to remain in something like this, because well, life falls on me, reality falls on me…
F: We can’t have it fall on us… [laughs]
A: I now have my scholarship but it ends in a year and what do you think will happen? I can’t even think about it… Now I am taking projects from which I do not obtain economic benefit… but it is that the next ones! Now I can manage what I want or have fun, but in a year I will not be able to afford to dedicate so much time, from which I will not get remuneration, to this; for now I am looking for other ways to make my work profitable. Of course, it’s what you told me by mail the other day, what we were talking about… this [refers to LaFundició’s express purpose of remunerating, modestly, the collaborators of the projecte3 fanzine and the need to modify habits of precariousness and exploitation of cultural workers widely extended in the industry] that is obvious to many people, it should be clear.
F: Yes, many people.
A: The thing is… it’s the typical thing that in an expo everyone gets paid except you, for you the public repercussion, they say; but what are you telling me!?; what happens in my town: “Bring some paintings for an expo in the Center” and they don’t even realize: “Well, I’m not bringing you paintings (nor do I have paintings, I explain what I do badly), because you as a culture technician are charging for the programming that I do and I however what?”, conform to appear in the press and see if someone buys me something, no?. So no, that’s not how things work. Obviously the Aulabierta project has other circumstances…
F: So the inheritance was a lie.
A: Completely. [laughs] I am absolutely poor and it weighs on me, what I am doing is looking for an inheritance, in fact my girl, Marta, doesn’t have it either and we are thinking of breaking up, because the two poor people don’t pull ‘palante’. Luckily there is affection.
M: Like Truffaut who married a ‘posh’ girl to be able to make the films. The father put a production company on him.
A: No, it’s very good, of course [laughs] capital has to be moved and transformed.
M: And on top of that he explained it in his films.
A: I’m a bit like that, to be honest, in that story. It can’t affect us… we are the most precarious in the whole system, we are the last even though we generate everything… I mean, all this moves because there are some men and women doing things, contributing creativity and knowledge to the world, and precisely they are the ones who don’t… the last in the chain: that falls down there, it falls on us [laughs].
