RESUMEN / The Educational Service is a large, informal space for meeting other people and building new ideas - a dynamic body that aims to offer transversal and transformative learning through different experiences involving the arts and knowledge in general. The learning concepts underlying the programme are focused on processes of self discovery and discovery of others, individually and collectively, emphasising experience and sharing. Based on the triangle SEE - DO - THINK, practical actions are encouraged, together with reflection, research and documentation.
The Educational Service’s programme is aimed at young audiences of all ages, not only children and young people. It encourages different modes of contact with artistic practices, tailored to the expectations and sensitivities of various audiences and communities.

 

Since the opening of the CIAJG, our Educational Services have collaborated on actions which have taken the concepts which underpin the Centers mission even further.

This presentation shares some of these actions, like the program entitled “Vai e Vem” (“Coming and Going”) that offers the schools in the County of Guimarães the opportunity to host artistic workshops in the classroom after or before a guided visit to the museum space, or the theater presentation A Beleza – pequena conferência / Beauty – small conference opening the museum room as a place for the theatrical act.

This presentation aims to relate these case studies with an idea of crossing the museum and the school space and always taking a point of view from the educational service, where I am integrated and in which I transform myself every day.
My proposal is to think this place – educational service – as a performative and disruptive space that can have a role in the public dimension, crucial to the understanding of what surround us.

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TRAS LA ACTIVIDAD, LA EXPERIENCIA / The approach for this text is based on the museum as a space of experimentation in contemporary art and how it expands out of itself, finding in schools, communities or other institutions the contact points where experimental practices happens and are transformed in another proposals from their origin.

 

The presence of performativity in the museum curatorial program is strong and one of the examples I want to share is a theater presentation that we presented during the Educational program of Guimarães European capital of culture 2012, which is, A Beleza – pequena conferência / Beauty – small conference.

 

How do you explain to children and young people what is beauty?

This was the challenge that the French philosopher Jean -Luc Nancy tried to a small conference that is now recovered by the artists Maria Duarte, Gonçalo Ferreira de Almeida and João Rodrigues inside a museum room.

Our work in the Educational Service believes it is vital to create times and places of reflection to and from the youngest. It is by reflection, by questioning and by sharing different points of view that children will be more aware adults of their place and their voice as active citizens and human beings more open to difference and similarity in relation to the other.

Therefore we proposed to explore, some of the questions inside Jean-Luc Nancy’s texts through some philosophy sessions organized with teachers and students that went to the museum to see this theater presentation.

Those sessions, where a perfect example of crossing between spaces of learning and teaching. They also showed us the natural prejudice we have, in particular by doubting the capacity for reflection and understanding of apparently complex and universal issues by young people.

The museum room as a place for the theatrical act is a crucial point of view for this relation between objects, forms, people and spaces, because it opens our perception for the unknown and as Dennis Atkinson (Atkinson, 2011) says, for the subject-yet-to-come.

Another example, is the program entitled “Vai e Vem” (“Coming and Going”), which is a two parts experience, coming to the museum and going to schools or other institutions.

Coming to the CIAJG, each group is invited to visit the museum from a different perspective, allowing for the construction of a special point of view as observer.

The educational team is a multidisciplinary team, with professionals from different backgrounds, from architecture, art history, dance and theater, writing and philosophy and visual arts. Each member of the team is encouraged to walk through this space as the first time, going from their own references to what excites most the group that he/she as to guide.

Before or after this experience of coming to the museum, there’s a going to the school or the institution that requires this program.

Here an artist and his/her work case will entice the students to embark on their own artistic experience and to respond to their desire to create something by establishing a space within the school where artists, teachers, and students can share their experiences.

As both of the parts of this program are related with some structural concepts of the curatorial program of the centre I will further explore four: - The importance of sculpture - The importance of drawing - The importance of lightness - On the darkness of darkness.