Zona Intrusa 2 Kicks off its Tour!

2.10.08

This week we started the activities in the classrooms of the Escola FRETA, the first stop of the Zona Intrusa 2 exhibition, which will visit eight secondary schools in Mataró. Housed in the container you can see in the image, the exhibition includes works by Efrén Álvarez and Antoni Tàpies, and documentation on the Aulabierta project and on the figure of the Mary Sue. As we said elsewhere, the selected works aim to present in the clearest possible way works, forms of authorship and contexts of production, dissemination and reception of well-differentiated cultural products. The truth is that we are very satisfied with the way in which the coexistence between the different works and documents in the exhibition space encourages comparison, analysis and cross-readings.

The work sessions in the classrooms of Zona Intrusa 2 are organized in three phases: 1) the analysis of the field of art 2) the analysis of the system and educational processes (with special emphasis on reflection around the space and its uses) and 3) the design in collaboration with the students of an artistic intervention that provokes the crossing of both systems and the processes that are associated with them. You can download the pedagogical project in pdf format here, in the Zona Intrusa 2 wiki. Thus, the intention of the pedagogical project is not to “explain” the “contents” of the exhibition to the students, but rather to use these contents as devices through which to generate dialogical processes or “transductions” (to use the term proposed by Tomás Villasante) that revert certain situations that have to do, precisely, with the way in which art and culture are (re)produced in educational settings. In these, whether in schools and institutes or in the museum itself, it is common for the work of art to be offered to students as an object of contemplation and/or exegesis, which seems to lack a historical and contingent context of production and reception. As an artistic-educational project, Zona Intrusa 2 has the will to repeat a gesture that, in reality, art has been doing for a long time and that consists of directing the attention of its interlocutor towards the things, people and processes that allow its own existence as a cultural object and that give it meaning within a given society.

The activities in the classrooms of Zona Intrusa 2 were preceded by a workshop with teachers from several of the participating institutes held last July with the support of the
Moviment Educatiu del Maresme
. During the workshop, which included presentations and the active participation of Antonio Collados and María García (members of Aulabierta), Beatriz García (author of fanfictions), Rosa Eva Campo (member of the educational department of the Fundació Tàpies) and Efrén Álvarez himself, the issues we were talking about above were intensely debated, as well as ideas were launched and discussed for the design of the activities in the classrooms. Again, in the Zona Intrusa 2 wiki you can find information and images about the workshop and, very soon, about the activities and the works carried out by the students during the work sessions in the classrooms.

The project is scheduled to conclude with an exhibition in the Espai F of Mataró that collects all its development and that is also designed in collaboration with artists, teachers and students. But we will talk about this in due time.