This work is part of a research project that intersects the fields of design and arts education. ‘Reenactment of Materials of Arts Education’ draws on an archive of past pedagogical materials and seeks to update them. It aims to critically reinscribe such body of practices in the field of arts education, starting from the Portuguese territory of the second half of the 20th century and looking at it from the present. Design methodology is used to study the materials and propose revisions. Educational issues and the revision of materials are intersected, in terms of the critical intentions of this proposal, by a feminist perspective. 

The work we now present contextualizes and initiates one of these studies of materials. Emerging in a secondary context in a peripheral European country, at the hands of two female educators, Elvira Leite and Manuela Malpique, little known at the time, Jogos Visuais (Visual Games) constitutes a unique case in the panorama of Portuguese arts education, receiving increasing media interest in recent years. The visual grammars and discourses contained in these materials will be problematized in our paper, as we believe they continue to inform conceptions of arts education in the present. How should we consider the modern expression of visual purity, solid colors, and formal minimalism in Visual Games? How can we review these and other aspects conveyed by the sociopolitical inscription of design practices and how can we use design as a critical tool to reformulate the premises that in 1974 translated into these devices? Which school of thought should we stick to? The usability-driven modernists and their “form follows function”; the attention to detail and craftmaking, of arts and crafts, por example, aiming to slow time; “the art of looking sideways” Alan Fletcher brought to us or the “fuck logic, bravo to instinct” both Björk and David Carson live by?

The paper considers the notion of archive, firstly, as an effort to record and catalog proposals, solutions, and objects and, secondly, as a possibility for questioning their subjectivation effects, while reinterpreting and updating these same proposals, solutions, and objects. This implied subjectivity production that occurs in the configuration of the archive is also at stake in its re-activation. The re-activation gesture will be supported by Andrea Fraser’s reflection on reenactment and performativity, as she states that every enactment is directed towards a body that is invested and at stake, and such enactment “(...) performs itself and in so doing structures a recognition of and reflection on the relations produced and reproduced in the activity and, above all, on the investments that orient them” (p. 127). 

The feminist gaze operating in the reactivation of past pedagogical materials will call on a large spectrum of gender issues. The authors start with the work of two female educators, Leite and Malpique, and intend to appropriate their work and use it nowadays in educational contexts to develop themes like female labour, sorority, rummage and attentiveness in everyday flow

into reviewed versions. The conviction is that anti-dicriminatory themes largely surpass personal interest and are a social and political duty towards a more equal and fair society. As teachers, the authors of this investigation are also interested in revisiting and recontextualizing these archives from a perspective of resource ecology and dilution of authorship: do we need to always be closed in our classrooms, presenting proposals that have not been tested, discussed, or thought out together? Or can we make use of the experience of those who came before us and those who accompany us, look back at their proposals in a critical way, use them, and update them?

This research relies on the configuration of an archive of practices, collected through literature review and interviews with educators and cultural mediators. The authors support their archival impetus in the notions shared by Giannachi (2016) and think the archive as “an apparatus [that] consists of a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and guide—in a way that is intended to be useful—the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings.” (Giannachi, 2016, p. xv). This proposition locates the work to be done: when we recover archives to think about them and activate them, we must also reflect on the practices and histories they carry and what it means to revisit them. Based on this reflection, and given that everything can constitute an archive (Giannachi, 2026), we accept the suggestion to “design the archive as the apparatus by which we want to be produced” (Giannachi, 2026). In particular, this paper will focus on developing further insights in the case of Elvira Leite and Manuela Malpique’s set of Visual Games, read through a critical lens which intends to question their modern heritage and subjectivation intentionality, while, at the same time, recognizes and seeks to experiment on the very potentiality they offer. This potentiality will be, nonetheless ‘hacked’ by a feminist perspective of the authors that might have been less prominent on the original conception of Leite and Malpique. Visual Games, which are a set of books and games produced by Asa Publisher in the 1970s, will be primarily analyzed by the authors of this investigation, and framed within the proposed lens. Interviews and informal conversations with cultural and education agents are expected to enlighten on how these materials have been used and appropriated, bringing additional insights on the flexibility they also promote. Afterwards, these educational objects will be tested and discussed with invited guests—teachers, students, and other researchers—in scheduled sessions. These sessions result in jointly produced knowledge, accounting for advances, setbacks, challenges, mistakes, and inflections. This collective practice adds to its initial reflective purpose also the pursuit of a set of updated versions of Visual Games, reframed from a feminist perspective that will likely align with derivations related to attentiveness, analogue techniques and social activism. At a later stage, and held by design expertise and material experimentation, updates to these objects are tested in a laboratory setting and then taken into the classroom.

The project ‘Reenactment of Materials of Arts Education’ and this paper lead us to a tensional state previously experimented in another research project named CREAT_ED - the historicization of the creative child in arts education (in which one of the authors participated). We share conflicting feelings regarding these pedagogical objects: their materiality plays a seductive role, while we admittedly recognize an ongoing reproduction of modern patterns with direct impact on the subjectivation of the creative individual. In the face of this tension we purposely want to stay with the trouble, and thus to look back at CREAT_ED: “We struggle not to subject ourselves to the naturalisations operated by the archive of the creative child/the archive of arts education, while we regard them as acts of governance, as fields of force of violent effect (Stoler, 2008) with and against which we want to strive. Whether reenacting certain materials as an interpolation is reinforcing or interrupting such fields of force of violent effect, is a disquiet that remains with us so far.” (Almeida; Midori; Guimarães & Boavista, p.131) As teachers we have strong views on the school culture of individualism and seek to promote modes of collaboration within school contexts, also as part of the sorority we often find among feminist peers. With a stronger community teachers are more likely to share and discuss classroom practices and debate their positioning. Besides reviewing the modern influence playing through arts education past objects brought into the present, our update also aims to interrupt hegemonic trajectories, by resorting to less visible issues through them. The actualized pedagogical materials are intended to circulate and lend a critical trigger that unsettles current aspects of school culture, and offer the possibility to instigate a more attentive relationship with the world mediated by arts education.

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