The first edition of Intruder Zone took place in 2007 as an initiative of the Municipal Culture Board of the Mataró City Council (PCAM), which aims to bring contemporary art closer to the city’s secondary education institutes by installing a temporary architectural element containing an exhibition in the courtyards of these institutes, while also proposing a series of related educational activities to the students. That first edition was curated by Oriol Fontdevila, an independent art critic and curator.
In Intruder Zone 2, Oriol Fontdevila has teamed up with LaFundició to design and carry out the curatorial/educational project. It must be said that this team is intentionally transdisciplinary, and we have completely erased the separation between the tasks related to curating and the pedagogical ones. Our intention when approaching the project has been precisely to critically review this approach of contemporary art to the educational context and formulate a series of questions for collective debate, especially with the students themselves: who is this approach useful to? What is it for? What consequences does it have for the artistic sphere? And for the educational one?
Likewise, one of our concerns in the design of the project has been to ensure, as far as possible, that Intruder Zone 2 is a collective process in which the teachers of the institutes and the participating artists and cultural producers have tools and contexts with and in which to contribute their knowledge; this is why Intruder Zone 2 includes a workshop with the participation of teachers and artists/cultural producers, a wiki site (which is at the same time a tool for work, communication and dissemination of the project) and a second workshop to plan the final exhibition in the Espai F of Mataró that will collect the process and the experience as a whole.
We want to understand Intruder Zone 2 as a device that raises a series of questions for collective debate, including in that debate the students themselves who will ultimately participate in the experience, as well as the process of negotiation sustained with the PMCAM on the initial proposal. We must insist that we understand the project as a collective process and not as a ‘service’ offered by the administration to educational centers, for the execution of which a ‘provider’ would have been hired. At the same time, we want to avoid an ‘illustrative’ approach, according to which we, as experts, would approach the institutes, teachers and students in possession of a ‘valid’ knowledge that must be ‘learned’.
The main objective of Intruder Zone 2 is to analyze the mechanisms of cultural production so that students can acquire tools not only to make a more complex reading of the works exhibited, but also to establish a map of the processes, structures and contexts that intervene in the valuation of cultural productions, so that they are able to position themselves critically. It is not about giving keys to understand and enjoy art, but about thinking together why it could or should be of interest, without ruling out, from the outset, that students may have reasonable reasons for not being interested, among many other possibilities. Thus, Intruder Zone 2 wants to raise questions such as: What cultural productions are valued? Why? Who gives them value? How is it done? Which of these productions are considered to be part of or excluded from the official curriculum? And again, why? Who decides? What role do students play in this decision?
Thus, the “contents” of Intruder Zone 2 have not been chosen by the curatorial/educational team based on their own criteria of valuation (their formal, historical, conceptual value or for being more or less “close” to the experience of adolescents) on the contrary, the selected cultural productions constitute a device to initiate the debate around the questions formulated above, insofar as they represent in the clearest way that has been possible for us four examples of works, forms of authorship and contexts of production, dissemination and reception well differentiated. It is intended to promote a comparative analysis that reveals the ways in which culture is constructed through contingent social and historical processes, and how its value is not something essential, universal or given in advance. The selected authors/productions are: Efrén Álvarez, Aulabierta, Mary Sue and Antoni Tàpies.
More information about the project and about the exhibition here.