The Metaphor Of Darkness

Author(s):

Lara Soares(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

29. Research on Arts Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

29 SES 02, The Construction of Knowledge and Pedagogical Practices within Museums

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-23

15:15-16:45

Room:

NM- J114

Chair:

Fernando Hernández-Hernández

Contribution

To think about artistic creation or the history of art in the negative, not based on light, but on darkness, not based on the day – the history – but on the night – everything which was left out of the historical narrative or which appears in it as being an exception. (Faria, 2013)

This is how the text for the exhibition Lessons of Darkness, which was open to the public from January to December 2013 in the José de Guimarães International Arts Centre, in Guimarães, Portugal, begins.

Taking this exhibition as a case study, and 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.

A possibility of an up-to-date research within the PHD would be a macroscopic approach, referring to its organization, management of resources, budgets, positioning and theoretical approaches, dissecting the schedule of activities, pedagogical and artistic contents, all in one, focusing on the ‘what?’. I am, however, more interested in the ‘how?’, in a microscopic perspective on the practices of contact between education and art. On the classroom, the theatre stage or the museum room, the garden or the private house which gathers stories by the fireplace.

I am interested in thinking how the participants (teachers, students, artists) act and experience these places and times where proposals become events. Thinking about how the contents are worked upon in the inside of these places and which relationships of transferibility are created.

‘More than an exhibition, Lessons of Darkness is the motto for the new and broader assembly of this Centre. Just like the exhibition which was previously presented, based on the collections of José de Guimarães, which form the assets of the intitution, we project towards summoning a set of interventions by various contemporary artists and pieces and objects of popular, religious and archaeologic heritage of the region.’(Faria, 2013)

During the daily confrontation with this place the idea of a crossing throughout the history of these objects and the shapes inhabiting the 13 rooms of the centre became more and more evident. The unexpected reactions from the audience confirmed the strangeness with which our bodies felt this place, where the religious and the popular, the scholar and the contemporary lived together side by side, where distant times and places would get closer and where the deconstruction of a linear, hierarchical and preconceived history, which we all know from school learning, was immediate.

‘…the configuration of the exhibition space has suffered deep changes in the physical and conceptual structure. While the previous assembly had the configuration of an atlas, just like geography, like cartography, structuring itself on cores with a narrative logic, this assembly functions as an archipelago, which consists in various Islands, more or less close to each others, sometimes completely autonomous, gathered around a broad idea of darkness.

…what does bringing objects from the darkness to the light, from invisibilty to visibility, from the level of shadows to the level of bodies mean?’(Faria, 2013)

With this metaphor of darkness, I invite us to reflect on this space of practices of contact between education and art. Far from the traditional white sheets, the truths by which we are led, this is a place, open for reflection towards the unknown, towards the profound discovery, where still shapeless objects, with voices which were never heard before, live along with each other.

Method

To think the ‘place’ of events between education and art was the proposal for this text. To open up the discussion to what happens inside and outside of these places, which are, due to their transforming nature, places of events, of unrepeatable actions and, thus, performatic places. To try, through some projects / examples / case studies, to understand how they can be search engines for these places and broaden the way we understand practices of artistic education. The approach for this research 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 starting point is always from the proposals of the educational service team and here I will focus on workshops and oriented visits to exhibitions. In a first part, expanding on the relationship between a journey and the traveller as reciprocal ways of contamination and change, an analogy is created, with the researcher and the researched object. Here we go deep in Francesco Carreri(Careri, 2013) and the ideia of walking. In a second part the idea of a potential place, a performative one, which is in constant state of unawareness is developed. A place where disruptive practices form themselves, a place of events. Here, I introduce the notion of performance formulated by Diana Taylor(Taylor, 2003) and which will help us understand the field in which I stand and this ‘performative’ space I want to explore. The third part begins with the analysis of the concept of ‘experience’ from Dennis Atkinson in an attempt “ to disrupt normalized and essentialist understandings and classifications of experience and practice in the field of art in education in order to show their constructed, and by implication, their contingent nature.” (Atkinson, 2002) which allows us to think the transposition of certain schemes which underlie the field of artistic practices to the field of educational practices, seen as autonomous experimental practices. In other words, try to understand how far outside of themselves experimental practices of both these fields of study are transported.

Expected Outcomes

With this paper I wanted to see if the group of actions/ concrete proposals which have been experimented in this exhibition by the team of the educational service could be, by themselves, practices of production of knowledge, of new meanings and readings of the world. I started from the relationship between the journey and the traveller, versus, the researcher and the object to be investigated, where the production of knowledge is made inside and outside of research and is part of the object as well as of what is strange to it. Based upon this connection between research, education and art I hope to arrive somewhere to think a little more about the spaces between them, the empty spaces, about the way they transform themselves and acquire new meanings, when relating to the others, iniciating, thus, a reflection on the learning/teaching practice. Thinking that the places of learning, like school, but also the garden, the museum, or a story session around the fireplace are places withholding potential, where memory is built collectively and in depth, through layers which keep a dialogue throughout time. Thinking in learning in the centre, but also in the periphery, learning while transforming what we learn, while walking. Learning while risking or how to get lost, to let us go without knowing what awaits us and what we will find. Understanding how emminently experimental proposals create a relation between the doing, the thinking and the feeling and what their nature is. Understanding why there have been detected problems for so many years in the practice of artistic education, why strategies have been discussed, why intervention projects are repeatedly put together and today we still look at what surrounds us from a full space, not wanting to see the emptiness which shapes it.

References

Atkinson, D. (2002). Art in education identity and practice. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Careri, F. (2013). Walkscapes: O caminhar como prática estética. São Paulo: Editora G. Gili. Faria, N. (2013). Lições da Escuridão. In C. I. d. A. J. d. Guimarães (Ed.), (Faria, Nuno ed., pp. 17-18): A Oficina, CIPRL. Taylor, D. (2003). The archive and the repertoire : performing cultural memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.

Author Information

Lara Soares (presenting / submitting)

University of Oporto - Faculty of Fine Arts

Arts Education

Vila Nova de Gaia

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