A moment during the ‘self-guided tour’ of elementary school students in the Muncunill room of Terrassa
It has come to an end Intensities. Inconformism, incorrectness, and rebellion between art and the music scene ; Sant Boi has been the last stop of this traveling exhibition organized by the
Office of Artistic Diffusion
of the
Barcelona Provincial Council
,
curated by David G. Torres and in which we have participated as those responsible for the ‘educational service’, whose project you can consult, in a summarized version, here on our website.
The most visible element of the educational service we proposed has possibly been the MySpace of the record label
Intensities Records
that we opened as soon as the exhibition’s tour began and whose objective was not only to make the results of the workshops public, but also to establish a communication channel through which to share knowledge with visitors, their teachers, educational centers and also with the music scene, a regular user of the MySpace network. We can say that among all these agents, it has been the musicians who have established a more ‘intense’ contact; especially as a result of the edition we made, together with the netlabel
tecnonucleo.org
, of the album
intensities ((re)re)visited
, which was presented in
Can Xalant
(Mataró) in June 2008 and which you can download from the website of
LaFundició
or tecnonucleo.org. The album featured the collaboration of national and international authors of ‘experimental’ electronic music, who used and manipulated the sound material generated by the students during their participation in the Intensities workshop to produce their tracks.
The truth is that, as in other similar services and programs, we encounter a handicap that seems insurmountable: pedagogical activity in the museum/art center as a fast-consuming article. The times of the visit and the workshop do not allow to deepen in processes that there is hardly time to start, especially when these want to pass through the dialogue and the collaborative and critical construction of the discourses on the culture.
Perhaps precisely because of what we have just said, one of the resources of the pedagogical project that seems most interesting to us has been that of the ‘self-organized visit’ with which the school groups began their passage through the exhibition. We think that the self-organization of the learning processes -besides being in consonance with the nonconformist spirit of some of the exhibited works- is necessary and we value positively the reception that this way of visiting the exhibition has had among the school groups and also among their teachers. Sometimes, especially with the primary groups, the exhibition also became a noisy and playful space during the visit, a little out of the control of the educators (of ourselves and of the teachers); but during the self-organized visit and the subsequent sharing, it was appreciated that the students made a reading of the exhibition, that they had fixed points of interest, reading rhythms, interpretations of the exhibited pieces… All these elements configure the narration that the students construct about the exhibition and the use that they make of the exhibition space. We spoke in the dossier of this project of “dehierarchizing the voice” (and also the gaze, we should add now); this objective has been achieved in the first place in that the guide of the exhibition has inhibited himself as such: he has no longer directed or guided the gaze of the visitors towards certain works and has no longer determined the routes, the times and the attention that those would deserve.
The visitors, alone, in pairs or in small groups, have freely toured the exhibition halls, paying attention to what has claimed it, later, during the sharing, we have tried to reconstruct, through dialogue, the narratives that this “drift” through the exhibition build on the exhibition itself, contrasting them with the “official version”; not to try to level them, but to elaborate a new reading that takes elements of the curatorial discourse (for example) and that of the students to put them in relation, sometimes conflicting.