All Art Can Get When It Enters School

From the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation we promote the PLANEA Network with a clear conviction: art is not an add-on in education, but a tool capable of transforming the way we learn, think and live in society. PLANEA is one of the most important projects that we accompany, a network in which educational centres, mediation nodes, agents and cultural institutions converge to place artistic practices at the centre of school life. Through collaborative and situated processes, art becomes a way to activate critical thinking, generate new imaginaries and strengthen a more conscious and committed citizenry.

Last March, Infinito Delicias hosted the public presentation of the notebook What PLANEA can, within the framework of the PLANEA 2026 state meeting. The publication collects learning, methodologies and experiences developed during the last five years, in which art has been integrated as a transformative practice in public schools. The meeting brought together teachers, artists, mediators and cultural institutions around a shared question: what can art achieve when it enters school.

Pepa Octavio de Toledo, director of the Foundation’s Citizen Art axis, Sofía Coca Gamito (ZEMOS98), Eva Morales (Invisible Pedagogies) and Pepe Campos (Consortium of Museums of the Valencian Community), participated in a conversation moderated by Pepa Ortiz. After the presentation, the meeting became a space for experimentation and collective thinking in which, through workshops, attendees were able to investigate and debate central issues for contemporary educational practice.

The PLANEA notebooks were born from the need to collect and share the knowledge that emerges from these practices. More than closed publications, they function as open tools that document processes, systematize learning and make it available to other educational communities. They display fundamental questions about the role of art in schools, as well as frameworks, methodologies and experiences that allow this field of work to continue expanding.

After five years of experience, PLANEA has established itself as a network that works from collaboration, mediation and the long term, promoting lasting changes in schools and their environment. Its approach, based on networking and connection with the territory, contributes to strengthening public schools as a space for equality, experimentation and construction of the commons. The notebooks are part of this impulse: an invitation to share, adapt and activate practices that place art at the center of education. Because what happens in schools matters, and sharing it is also a way of transforming them.