As in other projects, we propose using cooperative learning, teamwork, shared knowledge, and the collective construction of that knowledge as tools for the self-organization of one’s own identity and culture.
Canal Canatun does not want to limit itself to the celebration of difference or the knowledge of other cultures, but rather wants to encourage the emergence of what Peter McLaren called “trans-border identities”1.
Canal Canatun is structured as a collaborative investigation around cultural identities, based on representation and research around the daily use of public and domestic spaces. Part of these representations and this research process are carried out through graphic and textual work on a blank book edited by LaFundició, which is accompanied by “instructions for use” that structure it into various sections. Within the conceptual framework proposed by these instructions and divisions of the blank book, participants are free to creatively address the proposed areas of research.
The result of this analytical work carried out with graphic media should serve to think about, define, and create the content of a television channel that is hosted on www.canalcanatun.net. This channel will collect and relate the videos made by the children of the Artellewa art center in Egypt with those recorded in Ripollet by the students of El Martinet.
Through this channel, we want to establish a trans-cultural dialogue between two neighborhoods in two countries located on almost opposite banks of the Mediterranean and framed in the East/West polarity.
From LaFundició we found it necessary to address in an interrelated way, through a collaborative artistic practice integrated into pre-existing educational dynamics in the territory, two phenomena: the construction of the cultural identity of communities stigmatized for social and cultural reasons and the use of audiovisual media. In addition, we understand that these processes should serve so that school-age children propose other representations of reality, closer to their desires and in this sense, that they can be active agents in the creation of their environment.
As we said, we propose as the center of interest of Canal Canatun an analysis of the respective cultural realities, understanding, in line with the thinking of Michel de Certau, that reflection on our daily practices gives us power and room for action to act and subvert constructions that are imposed on us.
The participatory research is carried out with the collaboration of educational centers and the students themselves. In the case of Egypt, the weight and scope of informal education is much broader than that of formal education, which suffers from very precarious conditions; thus, in this case it is in the Artellewa art center where we find a group of children who regularly participate in the cultural and educational activities that take place there.
The methodology used in the design of the contents of Canal Canatun aims to promote awareness about the ways in which representations of one’s own cultural identity are constructed. To structure the contents, each of the participants will have a blank book accompanied by a series of indications and suggestions to organize the information that will be poured into it; these books will be shared periodically in order to establish the interests and discuss the contents that will later form the programming of Canal Canatun.
The book is divided into two large blocks: one that will deal with the public and another that will deal with the domestic.
Each of these blocks corresponds to one half of the book, but these two parts are not located linearly, that is, one behind the other, but occupy two blocks of pages located next to each other. This arrangement of the pages aims to encourage associations and comparisons between one conceptual block and the other.
Likewise, each of the two blocks (upper and lower) are divided, now sequentially, into four parts, one behind the other, marked by a red, green, yellow, and blue page: As can be seen in the book’s instructions, each of the colors corresponds to a subsection within the main blocks (the four subsections are the same for each block): blue for the ‘People’ section, pink for ‘Routines’, yellow for ‘Spaces’ and green for the ‘Dreams’ section. The instructions explain what type of observations can be made in each of these subsections applied to each of the blocks. Again, the division of the book into two blocks allows combining and finding relationships between diverse elements that apparently did not have them and thus see what type of actions the same character or group does in different areas.
The first exhibition of the Canal Canatun project was inaugurated on December 24, 2009, in the Artellewa space (Giza, Egypt). In the exhibition, you could see the works carried out by the children of Ard El Lewa during the previous two months: the books, a series of cartographies of the neighborhood and of the domestic spaces that were exhibited drawn on pieces of fabric that simulated small tablecloths, the videos that can be seen on the Canal Canatun website, and photographs taken during the investigation around the neighborhood.
The exhibition was organized as a small apartment, a domestic space, although on the edge of the public space. More images of the exhibition here.
Ard El Lewa is one of the most representative “informal areas” of the Cairo metropolitan area. In the Egyptian capital, “informal areas” are known as those districts that were built illegally on land previously dedicated to agriculture on the outskirts of the city. These neighborhoods were built during the 70s and have since welcomed immigrants from very diverse areas of Egypt. In this context, the Egyptian artist Hamdy Reda, himself a resident of Ard El Lewa, opened the Artellewa art space in 2007, with the support of various cultural agents, where exhibitions, residencies, and cultural activities are organized.
Can Mas is one of the neighborhoods on the outskirts of the small town of Ripollet, in the Vallés Occidental region, and therefore, at one end of the Barcelona metropolitan area. Like Ard El Lewa, Can Mas was formed during the 60s and 70s to receive the large number of immigrants who came to work in the industries of the area from various areas of Spain. Currently, a second wave of immigrants, this time from outside the Spanish state, is settling in the neighborhood, which faces the gradual dismantling of industrial production. The El Martinet public school is established in this neighborhood as a unique pedagogical project, especially open to interaction with the social context.
________________________
1 The proposal does not try to place itself in the place of the other to know or try to experience their identity – whether it is their culture, their ways of life or even to obtain an experience of the racial and/or cultural conflicts that affect them. On the contrary, we want to approach what Peter McLaren called ‘cross-border identities’. We refer to the possibility of ‘putting oneself in the situation of the other’ understood not as a simulation of their conditions of existence, but as a real exercise of decentralization of one’s own identity, which would then be understood as an ‘other’ identity for the other. It would be about ceasing to see one’s own identity as the “normal” one, that is, ceasing to understand one’s own cultural patterns as the established means that regulates and values other identities. This does not imply a renunciation of any critical exercise regarding the mechanisms of oppression and social inequalities that the cultural practices of the other may generate, although it is necessary to avoid establishing this criticism from a position that assumes its own inequalities as the norm.