An Example Of An Irreverent Art School In The Middle Of The Sea

Author(s):

Rita Rainho(presenting / submitting)José Paiva(presenting)Valdemar Lopes

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

29. Research on Arts Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

29 SES 13 B, Arts education in the limits

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-11

11:00-12:30

Room:

326.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Catarina Silva Martins

Contribution

The paper that will be presented has as its focus an artistic higher education school, located in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, in the islands of Cape Verde. This is a young country in which the inhabitants insist in gaining their lives in a fight against the hardships of a wild territory of winding mountains, in parallel with their own onflictualities of a people which became independent (1975 ) for the fight against the Portuguese colonial regime, and facing the aggressive policies of globalization of markets and the hegemonic narratives associated.

The authors of this paper belong to this space. It is here that the possibilities of distinct dynamics of arts education are promoted. These are different from the academic models that discipline and confine to compartments the knowledge and separate the artistic production from the reflection on the problems experienced by communities.

It is presented for discussion a critical discourse of hegemonic discourses - marked by Western modernism - and post-colonial relations in the higher education space in the area of Arts Education. We take ourselves as the subjects/political bodies of this research, the 'intercultural movement IDENTIDADES' and the M_EIA Institute of Art , Technology and Culture (Cape Verde). Our aim is to discuss the challenges of the political and pedagogical project M_EIA , - taking into account the recent definition of its policies and educational, cultural and curricular practices - from a confrontation that seek to take advantage of the tensions and conflicts in the models of thought, import and appropriation of Western hegemonic costumes, but also in resistance movements that define them .

As such, we aim to map the points, positions and relations of the questions in three different fields: subjects/political bodies,critical hsitory of arts education in Cape Verde and arts education in contemporaneity. More than to analyse these relations as efforts od post-colonial cooperation, to reflect about the implications of these relations within local initiatives, in the epistemological decolonization and, above all, about their contributes to a cognitive justice, determinant in a social justice.

Method

Considering be issues which are to discuss rare in European forums, it is considered to be relevant before the difficulties to meet critical understandings. The discourses that permeate the practices of arts education are mostly conservative and anchored in salvation models promoted since the late nineteenth century in the West. The presentation of the conflictualities of a small art school, lost in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, transports within its experience a marked irreverence for our debate. The analysis that results of the ongoing research , proceses, develop the reflections in relation to M_EIA, questioning the possibilities of connections between art and development. This research wants to make visible the dialogues, de conflicts, the discussions and the resistances of this artistic higher education school in Africa. Methodologically speaking, we start from anthropology but we also make use of sensorial etnography, and the use of multimedia. In this sense, the presentation will be accompanied by a group of images/documents that transport the reality under study, as well as the landscape that give meaning to it. Etnography is here understood as an intercultural space, which means that we aim not only make participative the methodologies used but rather to insist in a permanent dialogue, of confrontation and plural construction of the meanings of the realities in which we are involved.

Expected Outcomes

In this paper we have the main objective of confronting the hegemonic narratives through the study of a singular case outside Europe. We talk about an artistic higher education school and we work through the daily live of this school, through its fights and obstacles in constructing a proper narrative that is able to disrupt the common and naturalized senses of what is an art school or an academia. In the links between the subjects and their political bodies we find the terrain to explore the possibilities of disruption and questioning. However, to talk about this school without knowing the context and without imagining the lives and the landscapes is to loose the details that really matter. We will try to talk close to these details and, through the image, make present those that are far away of this north perspectives of knowledge.

References

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Author Information

Rita Rainho (presenting / submitting)

M_EIA Instituto Universitário de Arte, Tecnologia e Cultura

Mindelo

José Paiva (presenting)

i2ads/FBAUP Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto

Valdemar Lopes