Promoting expanded art education with MACBA

On March 13th, we inaugurated, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), the seminar ‘Allez! Traveling practices and dispersed museums‘. In it, we analyse collaboratively, with 34 art education and mediation projects, and for four days, the keys to this type of project. What are they structured for? How do they work? How do they transform? We closed it with ‘Allez! in the square‘, a meeting open to the participation of all audiences attended by more than 1300 people.

‘Allez! Travelling practices and dispersed museums‘, has been much more than the first international professional seminar on expanded art education, held in Barcelona, with the participation of more than 80 attendees from different parts of Spain and France.

Its power has been that for professionals it has been a space to address the current state of expanded art education practices, through round tables, workshops with artists and informal moments, among which there were six workshops carried out by different artists and collectives around artist protocols, construction of mobile artifacts and development of digital and analogue projects; a mediation meeting around the mobile device, and a reflection seminar.

Giving access to artistic

practices But in addition, Allez! has transcended the professional sphere, and has made other connections possible, as evidenced by the new activities programmed at the IES Moisés Broggi and at the Escola Segarra, the workshops between participants, the open seminar on Friday and the closing on Saturday, which we call ‘Allez! in the Plaza‘, and which turned the MACBA square into a public and playful meeting for the whole family with the programming of various artistic education devices such as the PUCK, the smallest cinema in the world), the COSA (Organised Centre for Travelling Sound), a mobile station for recording and sound experimentation, a storytelling space, printing laboratories and the creation of a collective fanzine, board games without limitsand many more.

Collective reflection for action

In the words of our director for Spain. Isabelle Le Galo, “Allez!” has managed to create a new space for dialogue of projects of great variety (educational suitcases, museums and mobile theaters, kits and games, mail art, APP and digital platforms) with funding organizations, hosts or operators that have shared with generosity, creativity, intelligence and passion their learnings in the field of expanded art education”.

In addition, we have taken the opportunity to bring together about twenty projects that we have been supporting within the framework of our call entitled Expanded Artistic Education in Spain and Outils innovants pour une mobilité de l’éducation artistique in France, because we believe that bringing together and creating encounters between universes also has an important added value, we hope that this will also lead to connections and exchanges of practices.

Shared

joy Pablo Martínez, head of programs at MACBA, stressed that “one of the main conclusions that can be drawn from our seminar is that there is a very rich landscape of institutional, para-institutional and autonomous practices that work on the development of learning tools in the arts, beyond any wall, and in terms of orientations, levels of experimentation and reach of both territory and audiences.”

Rethinking the current model

Our meeting adds to the increased demand, on the part of various agents, for the administrations to articulate means and tools so that teachers, educators, cultural agents, and artistic institutions can develop their work in better conditions.

During the seminar, the speakers agreed to rethink the space of education in museums, not as a machine that attracts audiences, but as a space for research with very diverse audiences, and that projects that put qualitative and not merely quantitative aspects at the centre should be promoted.

In this sense, the representatives of the participating institutions advocated a reflection on the current model and its transformation, and for practices that take into account the working conditions of the workers and the vital life of the projects.

In a few weeks we will publish the conclusions of “Allez!” on the seminar’s mini-site and we will disseminate them so that they travel, fertilize, and inspire without limit, because we have no doubt that there is an increasingly powerful and expansive energy in this way of making art and society.

Watch the streaming of the seminar on March 15 :

Photos © Allez! 2019. Photo: Dani Cantó MACBA and the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation