Working from diversity. Learning experiences through art of the present (2010)

Working from diversity Learning experiences through art of the present EDUCATION AND CULTURAL ACTION MUSAC

JUNTA DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN COUNCIL FOR CULTURE AND TOURISM

MUSAC. Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla y León

Councillor Dña. María José Salgueiro Cortiñas

Director Agustín Pérez Rubio

Edition and Coordination Belén Sola Pizarro

Secretary General D. José Rodríguez Sanz Pastor

Chief Curator Maria Inés Rodriguez

Copy Edicing Sara Rosenberg Silvia Zayas

Deputy Councillor for Culture D. Alberto Gutiérrez Alberca Director-General of Cultural Heritage D. Enrique Saiz Martín Director-General of Promotion and Cultural Institutions Dña. Luisa Herrero Cabrejas Director - General of the Siglo Foundation for the Arts of Castilla y León D. José Luis Fernández de Dios

General Coordinator Mercedes Pico de Coaña Administration Manager Andrés de la Viuda Administration Assistant Andrea Aguado Exhibitions Department External Curator Octavio Zaya Coordinators Carlos Ordás Helena López Camacho Eneas Bernal Registry Department Koré Escobar Press Department La Comunicateca Department of Education and Cultural Action Head of Department Belén Sola Pizarro Coordinators and Educators ANDO C.B. Library and Documentation Center Araceli Corbo Conservation Department Albayalde S.L. Maintenance Department Technician Mariano Javier Román Assistants AGOSA S.A. Supporting Service Dalser S.L. Eulen S.L.

PUBLICATION

Translation Kristin DeGeorge Marla Deborah Trusch Contributors Mariola Campelo, Antonio González Chamorro, Julia R. Gallego, Amparo Moroño, Belén Sola, Nadia Teixeira y Cristina Viñuela López.

Images DEAC MUSAC Printed Ingoprint Distribution ACTAR B Roca I Batlle 2 E-08023 BARCELONA T +34 93 417 49 93 F +34 93 418 67 07 Acknowledgements

To the individuals, associations, groups, educational centres and all others who collaborate with us on a daily basis, making the Museum a place for everybody.

A special thanks to León’s citizens.

To our museum colleagues.

To all our families and friends.

ISBN (ACTAR): 978-84-92861-28-6 ISBN (MUSAC): 978-84-92572-20-5 DL B-9512-2010

xxxxxx Xxxxx MaríaXxxxxx José Salgueiro Cortiñas Councillor for Culture and Tourism

MUSAC (Contemporary Art Museum of Castilla y León) has supported education and cultural activities in tandem with its exhibitions since its very conception; this is one of the pillars of its programming.

In its five years of activity, the museum has become a reference point in our community; not only does it receive visitors in outstanding number, but over half of these are regular visitors from the Castilla y León region.

The work carried out by DEAC, Department of Education and Cultural Action, includes not only workshops, seminars, lectures and film series, but also projects programmed for schools and associations, research projects on the myriad practises and intersections amongst all sectors of the community.

DEAC MUSAC has been successful in bringing art closer to all citizens regardless of age, education, social or cultural backgrounds. The department works toward promoting contemporary creativity based on citizens’ individual abilities, and has become the link between Castilla y León’s Contemporary Art Collection and the social agents of the city and the region.

The MUSAC education team: Belén Sola, Antonio G. Chamorro, Nadia Teixeira, Julia R. Gallego, Cristina Viñuela L., Amparo Moroño and Mariola Campelo, have written these texts as a way of sharing and reflecting on the work they do. They shed light on educational practises and their connections to art of the present, revealing the crucial role education and cultural outreach departments play and subsequently, the growing importance of the educator in today’s museums.

With this book, the Junta de Castilla y León continues its support for developing education within art museums as a way of promoting and disseminating contemporary culture.

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Agustín Pérez Rubio Director MUSAC

The role contemporary art museums have taken on in recent decades has been crucial to revitalising the cultural and artistic fabric of their communities.

Museums have thus revealed their true nature: in aspects ranging from the way they influence the documentation and re-scripting of everyday contexts, to how they have updated their strategies for engaging different publics.

A museum is for all audiences: from specialised to general, from formal school groups to participants in social projects. It is through these projects that museums become inextricably involved with their social milieu, as true catalysts for connecting coexisting realities. MUSAC is no exception to this trend.

From the very beginning, MUSAC, through its Department of Education and Cultural Action (DEAC), has been open to those real-life situations and diverse outlooks that pulse through the community. Backed by the museum management’s conviction that art is truly a vehicle for articulating and regenerating situations and contexts, DEAC has done an exceptional job of community outreach, making the museum a centre that is nourished and invigorated by its audiences. Not only have we managed to reach them, but they in turn have chosen us to serve as co-agents for their unprecedented endeavours. This ongoing and mutual feedback springs from a political and human conception of education and art; one that Belén Sola and her entire team pursue in all their educational projects.

DEAC MUSAC is a mainstay of the museum, not a passive or secondary element, but an active agent. This proactive stance has led the department to reflect on the role of education and educators within a museum context, as well as within cultural politics. It is for these reasons that our book opens a new direction for thought and research at the museum, alongside our seminars, lectures, workshops and other DEAC programmes.

This book is in itself a working tool for all professionals, students and teachers interested in new ways of teaching and educational and social projects: all those people who strive on a daily basis to explore production and knowledge-generating processes in specific fields. It is also an invitation for the entire artistic community to reflect on its focus for the future, on ways and means to equip our audiences with critical tools, since we ourselves are all part of these audiences.

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10 DEAC, MUSAC’S DIGESTIVE TRACT Olaia Fontal Merillas University of Valladolid

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MEDIATION, INCLUSION AND LEARNING EXPERIENCES AT DEAC MUSAC Belén Sola

COMMUNITIES I Amparo Moroño / Belén Sola 1. Building Collective Project Networks: The Responsibilities of a Museum within Local Systems. A. M. 28 2. Collaborations with the Juan Soñador Foundation. A. M. 39 3. Collaborations with the Red Cross. A. M. 44 4. Collaborations with Social Guarantee Programmes. A. M. 48 5. Collaborations with Social Integration Centres. A. M. 55 6. Collaborations with León Prison. B. S. 58

66 COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira / Amparo Moroño / Mariola Campelo 1. Museum Projects for the Inclusion of Persons with Different Abilities. N. T. 66 2. Collaborations with ASPRONA Centres. N. T. 67 3. Collaborations with Autism Association. A. M. 74 4. Collaborations with the State Centre for Persons with Disabilities. N. T. 78 5. The Hearing-impaired in an Accessible Museum. M. C. 83 6. People with Mental Disabilities as Museum Visitors. N. T. 85

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MUSAC SCHOOL: Possibilities for the Museum in the Classroom Antonio González Chamorro

PEQUEAMIGOS PROYECT: Synthethis of Experiencies Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina Viñuela López

PRAXIS AS A DEPARTURE POINT: A Two-way Journey Belén Sola

134 LIST OF ACTIVITIES 2005/2009

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DEAC MUSAC’S DIGESTIVE TRACT Olaia Fontal Merillas. University of Valladolid

DEAC MUSAC’S DIGESTIVE TRACT Olaia Fontal Merillas From its very conception, MUSAC has been characterised as a participative entity. I recall the meeting we held in the winter of 2004, attended by several professionals from the museum sector (in my case from museum education).

Months before MUSAC was to open its doors, there we were, inside the nearly-finished building, surrounded by immense cement walls without a single piece of artwork on them. Among those crowded around the enormous round white table were Rafael Doctor, the museum’s Director and Belén Sola, Coordinator of the Department of Education and Cultural Action. From the jumble of ideas and enthusiasm generated at that table, I particularly recall something the director said, something like – he hoped that education would be the very spinal column of the museum – I don’t know the exact expression he used or if the metaphor is mine, but I do clearly remember the meaning of his words and in what sense he stated them. I have no doubt that he was emphasising the vital importance of education in museums, of its irreplaceable presence from the very conception of a museum. I will never forget that moment because it was the first time I had ever heard this idea stated so clearly by a museum director.

That after half a decade has passed (if we count the process leading up to MUSAC, in itself a process) that DEAC has been more of a digestive tract than a spinal column.

The circulatory system of MUSAC, as in many other museums, is made up of a lymphatic and cardiovascular system – whose most important and central organ, the heart – is without a doubt, the museum’s directorate.

MUSAC’s heart is young, capable of many heartbeats per minute, of constantly changing its rhythm, engaging in all sorts of sport and spanning many types of terrain; even reaching non-existent places, places where impossible combinations occur, future places or, as Marc Augé would say, no-wheres. This museum has, however, always been a possible place (p.23).

The blood of the museum therefore, is its collection: adolescent (just over a decade old) but very mature. MUSAC’s heart pumps the blood to the lungs as well as the other bodily tissues to provide them with oxygen. The museum’s lungs and respiratory system as a whole are key to connecting it to contemporary reality. They show us that the museum should breathe the same air we all breathe; never should this air be taken only from within, as it would end up being tremendously toxic. There are museums that suffocate themselves by only breathing in their own breath. The museum should open its doors, let the air circulate and even blow out – little by little first, short exhalations, then deep ones, exhaling as strong as the heart will allow – in order to share with audiences, visitors, citizens (p.19) the same oxygen; then exhale together, rhythmically, carbon dioxide.

Breathing in the same air as other human beings, we invariably share many things in common. We become oxygen partners or one might say we share identity references. These lungs are, at MUSAC, undoubtedly the Communications and Press Department.

DEAC MUSAC’S DIGESTIVE TRACT Olaia Fontal Merillas

As for the immune system, it protects the body from illnesses and although it reaches all the other organs in the human body, it is primarily located in the blood. We can see how it represents the role of conservation and restoration of the museum as a whole. Without this system the body would be so fragile that it would fall ill and die. But restoration and conservation do not only take place on a physiological level but on a psychological one as well: a museum’s ideals, principles, positions and vectors of thought and action must also be preserved and at times restored.

But MUSAC, like any other body, cannot live on air alone. It must be fed to carry out its intense level of activity. The audience is precisely this food.

Just as an apple provides us with different nutrients than a steak, there are different audiences that provide the museum with various types of sustenance; for without an audience, it would not survive. MUSAC understands this need for the public, not only to ‘feed on’ it but also to be nourished along with it. The public, for its part, inhabits the museum; learns, understands, interprets, relates with, exists...is.

We can also eat proteins separately from carbohydrates, however, we nearly always combine foods. Insofar as an education department is well nourished, so will the museum be. Any food is valid, any food should be tried at least once, although some are much more difficult to digest – which is why many museums never even try them. If they enter the organism, they may be expelled in the exact same state...sometimes they even rot along the way. MUSAC’s DEAC has been able to understand that the publics who enter the museum have different aptitudes. Belén Sola explains this in the first part of her introduction: The central idea of the concept of diversity lies in fully harnessing the potential of heterogeneous groups, diverse in terms of sex, age, race, ethnic background, nationality, sexual orientation, physical characteristics, etc. The criteria of diversity emphasises inter-individual variability in such a way that each person is valued for what he or she is, needs and can contribute, no matter his or her origins or personal characteristics may be (p.19). In an introductory text, what we choose to express and the meaning we convey are not just random. In fact, these words are a selection – a sampling of thought – archaeologists could use in the future to infer our particular understanding of audiences. But just as with any institution with an educational vocation, words are not enough. What is carried out, the designs, guidelines, action plans and educational curricula must confirm it: collaborations with the Juan Soñador Foundation of León, the Red Cross, social guarantee programmes, intergenerational groups, the Social Insertion Centre of León, the Mansilla de las Mulas Prison, Asprona of León (for persons with mental disabilities), the León Autism Association, the State Centre Referral Agency for Severe Disabilities and Promotion of Personal Autonomy and Dependent Care, the hearing-impaired, the Santa Isabel Psychiatric Hospital, students of all educational levels...

MUSAC has been, then, well fed: a diet made up of nearly all existing nutrients, experimenting with combinations. MUSAC does not eat the food raw, however. It often cooks: it stews, boils, bakes and fries, depending on the circumstance. It uses creative cooking in this process – one not necessarily for a large number of guests. In this creative cuisine, it is

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DEAC MUSAC’S DIGESTIVE TRACT Olaia Fontal Merillas

understood that sometimes a recipe may not be completely successful, calling for modifications in its content or scrapping the whole thing entirely and starting again. This is what we educators call research. This digestive tract, besides feeding the museum, transforms the food and integrates it into its bodily makeup. This is what we have defined as a heritagemaking museum (Fontal, 2007), one able to leave its visitors feeling that they are impregnated with it, part of it and that MUSAC’s content is part of them and their identity references, the way they think, criticise, inhabit...

All of these references differ depending on the audience. This brings us directly to the most important responsibilities of the museum within local systems (p. 26). This bodily system whose job it is to feed and transform, research and contribute formulas to its work, is MUSAC’s DEAC. Having established that, we cannot speak of formulas or recipes as if they were fixed and repeatable in the same way they were originally created.

Each page in this book gives living proof of this. Educators won’t give us recipes but rather speak to us of their ingredients, what made them decide to combine them, what their highly creative cooking processes were; always in an innovative and investigative spirit. They tell us of their performative praxis (p. 21). The results are undoubtedly of great importance; but cannot be understood without the process and, above all, cannot be measured in terms of quantity but rather in quality. The aim is very clear: to programme according to the special characteristics of each group (p. 33).

There is no one way of managing DEAC, just as there is no one way to eat or to cook. There are healthy eating habits, more or less balanced diets, binges...one can even have a toxic or harmful eating habit. We could address pathologies in museum digestive tracts in another chapter...but what is of greater relevance here is that MUSAC’S DEAC is without a doubt healthy, coherent and sees itself as an entity involved in a continual learning process. It will experience difficulties along the way – perhaps even some nearly impossible to overcome – but if it does not lose the intermediary, inclusive and empirical essence of its cooking, it will be able to prosper and flourish, nourishing along with it the body of which it is a vital component, MUSAC. Only then will it satisfy the desire for being a 21st Century Education Department for a 21st Century museum (p. 17).

MUSAC’s body works through a series of systems of associated organs that are coordinated to carry out an overall function. These systems are made up of tissues and cells.

As tiny as a cell may be, it is still of vital importance to this museum.

MEDIATION, INCLUSION AND LEARNING EXPERIENCES AT DEAC MUSAC Belén Sola

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MEDIATION, INCLUSION AND LEARNING EXPERIENCES AT DEAC MUSAC Belén Sola

Notes 1 DEAC. Department of Education and Cultural Action.

MUSAC. Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León.

2 Listed in order of starting date at DEAC.

MEDIATION, INCLUSION AND LEARNING EXPERIENCES AT DEAC MUSAC. Belén Sola As educators, we must be conscious of the social significance of our work and intellectualise our profession.

Henry A. Giroux*

In the museum context, I would like to expand on Giroux's idea by adding: and we should make what we do visible to our colleagues at the institutions where we work and to the art world in general.

The traditional polarity between constructing and transmitting meaning still prevails in many museums where the curator's dominant discourse is the only voice legitimised by the institution to disseminate information and teach, while the educator's profession is relegated to a role of transmission – or even more unfortunately – of merely livening up the museum space.

For those of us working at DEAC1, the publication of this book signifies a new space for our educational work within the museum, a place for reflecting on the pedagogical praxis that has evolved at MUSAC since its opening on 20 April, 2005. It also serves as a progress report, listing the programmes and projects carried out to date, containing a brief description of each and the concepts behind them.

It is our hope that this book provide information to other art education professionals at other museums, given the current scarcity of publications disseminating this type of work. We also hope it serves as a tool for those interested in educational and creative practices.

Above all, it is our desire that this book spark the interest of all those who believe that social practices and policies fostering transformation can and should be applied to each of our particular working contexts.

I would like to extend my gratitude to Rafael Doctor for the opportunity I have been given to create, direct and head the programming of this department. My motivation for working is both personal and professional.

Through the years I have created a team of professionals with whom I share the enthusiasm of learning from day to day: Antonio G. Chamorro, Nadia Teixeira, Julia R. Gallego, Cristina Viñuela López, Cristina Viñuela García, Amparo Moroño and Mariola Campelo2.

My gratitude goes out as well to the rest of my colleagues at MUSAC who have collaborated with us, greatly facilitating our task: exhibition coordinators, maintenance personnel, gallery assistants, security guards...even when the building itself has at times hindered our daily activity.

* Henry A. Giroux. Teachers as Intellectuals: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Learning, 1988.

Granby: Bergin & Garvey.

MEDIATION, INCLUSION AND LEARNING EXPERIENCES AT DEAC MUSAC Belén Sola

MUSAC: A MUSEUM FOR THE 21st CENTURY. DEAC: A 21st CENTURY DEPARTMENT?

Notes

If postmodernism means putting the Word in its place in this way, if it means the opening up to critical discourse of lines of enquiry which were formerly prohibited, of evidence which was previously inadmissible so that new and different questions can be asked and new and other voices can begin asking them; if it means the opening up of institutional and discursive spaces within which more fluid and plural social and sexual identities may develop; if it means the erosion of triangular formations of power and knowledge with the expert at the apex and the "masses" at the base, if, in a word, it enhances our collective (and democratic) sense of possibility, then I for one, am a postmodernist.

Dick Hebdige*

MUSAC has been characterized as a museum of unprecedented audacity, an enterprise never before seen in Spain. It is a self-proclaimed museum of the present3 born with a shell whose contents have not yet been defined.

It sets excessively daring goals by breaking with museum tradition, a tradition that bases its value on art history and lays its foundation on the legitimate and the sanctified.

MUSAC was born accepting its unfinished, incomplete nature, in a state of constant growth. Its aim is to create an art space that collects, exhibits and disseminates turn of the millennium artwork, art that has not yet appeared in books.

At first, this presupposition generated a certain amount of insecurity in the context of creating an education department because pedagogical activities were forced to follow different guidelines than those normally pursued. Even the word education brought up certain contradictions for us. We weren't meant to educate but rather be educated in a context foreign to us, a city whose history is centuries old and whose heritagesteeped values are difficult to mesh with a new space whose trademark is ambiguity4.

This was our departure point. This lack of reference5 was precisely where the question marks surfaced – and over time this proved to be the correct place to start. What do we want to do with this museum, in this city? How do we conceive of educational praxis in an art museum and how can we carry it out in the particular context situated somewhere between MUSAC, as a museum, and the city: the people to whom the space is supposedly dedicated?.

Our task was to create a space for mediation, but not only that. This was the first step, but others would follow: include all audiences equally and in the end, allow for their true participation in the museum. The idea is to give these audiences a voice by allowing their intervention in the decisions and practices at the museum. This is certainly the most complicated goal to achieve if we as educators do not valuate ourselves in our professions and if the rest of our colleagues, especially curators, do not incorporate us into their work with due importance.

* Dick Hebdige. Hiding in the Light: On Images and things, London: Routledge, 2002, p. 226.

3 Rafael Doctor. Colección Musac. Vol. I. Actar.

4 In the end it was decided that the tradition of national Spanish museums would be followed, and the department would be named: Department for Education and Cultural Action (DEAC). Adding the extension Cultural Action left open all sorts of possible actions.

5 When we speak of references, we refer to real places: other museums or venues with similar characteristics in terms of museum concept and public context, institutions that had to face the challenge of creating an education department.

This does not mean that we had no concr ete pedagogical references. These references, just as the centre's own, promoted by the directorate, are based on the belief that art and culture need to be democratised and that pedagogical tools and practices must be used accordingly.

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Free rein in creating this department has been one of the keys to DEAC MUSAC. The slight degree of uncertainty...and mostly the emphasis on the practical and the experimental, have decidedly been the pillars of our department. Critical pedagogies; those emanating from Paulo Freire's thinking – a museum study that came about during the crisis of these very institutions and their subsequent renaissance – have been our guide.

These are ways of teaching that propose a continual engagement amongst art, education and an activism based on generating critical thought. The search for these relationships, experiences and reference points – in our most personal surroundings as well as in our practical work experiences – brings us to essential sources: readings, seminars, lectures...the museum environment itself is the best place from which to generate educational activity.

Working with art of the present means working within the parameters of an art that negates itself, one reborn in its tireless references to the Situationists, Beuysian Social Sculpture and the post world, with all its intrinsic disjunction and deconstruction. This is a favourable spot in which to situate our own pedagogical action, to ponder on these unfinished, open relationships that exist between creative practice and individuals.

We know why and for whom. The how to do so is one of the greatest tasks we have before us.

Workshop Bandas y Gente Aparte. Jon Mikel Euba. 2006

MEDIATION, INCLUSION AND LEARNING EXPERIENCES AT DEAC MUSAC BelĂŠn Sola

AUDIENCES, VISITORS, CITIZENS...

Notes

The application of strategies for diversity management6 is the working policy adopted by DEAC, conceived as a mediating instrument between the museum and the public. It focuses its greatest efforts on divining its audiences and discovering potential target ones; in short, citizens.

6 The central idea of the concept of diversity lies in fully harnessing the potential of heterogeneous groups, diverse in terms of sex, age, race, ethnic background, nationality, sexual orientation, physical characteristics, etc. The criteria of diversity emphasizes interindividual variability in such a way that each person is valued for what he is, needs and can contribute no matter what his or her origins or personal characteristics may be.

Diversity management assumes that all individuals contribute value to society in general and to organisations in particular. Thus, the mission of institutions is to include them in both what they call internal clients (workers) as external clients (visitors), addressing their specific needs. (Maite SarriĂł. 2008) Working under this assumption demands precaution that the tools not be used in a servile manner. Angela Davis speaks along these lines of diversity management as: a means to preserve and fortify relationships based on class, gender and race... (Angela Davis. Women, Race and Class.1983).

We take on the theoretic contributions made in the past century: theories of multiculturalism, post-colonialism and gender, convinced that diversity is a value. Transposed to studies on audiences and the museum, we must work from the idea widely accepted in critical museum studies that a normal audience does not exist, and likewise, that people are individuals and not representatives of standard groups of visitors.

Clearly that which is diverse and different is enriching. Working from this thesis involves valuing difference. In this new scheme, educational work in a contemporary art museum becomes a challenge involving agents traditionally foreign to the museum domain: social, political and cultural agents that now take on a predominant role in educational praxis.

The traditional profile of a contemporary art museum visitor that comes to my mind may be an adult white male with no financial worries and an interest in the art world. However, audiences are plural, there is no one typology, nor can one person fit into one sole typology, quite the contrary: there are as many typologies as there are people.

In short, the DEAC programme must cater to all possible audiences and is thus a programme in perpetual evolution, since everyone is part of the community we engage.

Workshop La expresiĂłn amplificada del cuerpo.

Rui Costa and Manuela Barile. 2009

Workshop Liebre, liebre quiero ser. Nilo Gallego. 2006

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Notes 7 It is important not to interpret this structure as an attempt to inflexibly lock the visitor into using the variables expectations and conditioning factors, since individuals - as well as programmes - infect each other, cross and interchange constantly.

If we were divide the DEAC programmes according to audience groups, taking into account the aforementioned considerations, we would have five large blocks corresponding to the different degrees of expectations and conditioning factors of the audiences7.

- Programmes designed according to people's interests: those who want to learn, enjoy themselves and do something in their spare time – introductory courses, culture and leisure workshops – and those with professional interests – seminars, courses and specific artist and professional workshops.

- Programmes designed according to people's physical, cognitive or intellectual abilities: Educational programmes in collaboration with associations like the León Autism Association, Asprona, Aspaym), etc.

- Programmes that address the problems of physical accessibility to the museum, where programmes outside the museum are inevitable: mainly at the prison and the hospital.

- Programmes where accessibility is limited due to political and/or social reasons. Migrants and other collectives represented by associations attending to the needs of those in situations of social inequality, The Red Cross, etc.

- Programmes defined by the context in which audiences come to the museum: exemplified here by the programmes for formal learning groups MUSAC Escuela (MUSAC School).

Diverse voices make up MUSAC's public interweave; it is like a tissue in which our work takes root and grows. As I have pointed out, this meshlike structure is infinite. There could always be other audiences out there, and at DEAC it is our job to be constantly on the lookout for them and learn from them.

Workshop Ven a mezclar música. Nerea Tascón. 2007

Workshop Dialogos Imposibles. Mujeres Creando. 2005

MEDIACIÓN, INCLUSIÓN Y EXPERIENCIAS DE APRENDIZAJE EN EL DEAC MUSAC Belén Sola

DEAC MUSAC PERFORMATIVE PRACTICE

Notes

Knowledge, it is often claimed, can only be gained and enjoyed about what is in some sense over and done with... This formulation rests upon a sense of the inherent division between experience and knowledge, a belief that, when we experience life, we can only partially understand it, and when we try to understand life, we are no longer really experiencing it. According to this model, knowledge is always doomed to arrive too late on the scene of experience.

Steven Connor*

8 Judit Vidiela.

Actos indocentes: hacia una pedagogía de contacto. http://www.aulabierta.info/no de/785

As I have previously pointed out, DEAC works within the realm of the experimental and practical. We conceive of artistic practice and pedagogical practice as one in the same: any creative act or expression that carries with it critical cultural production, subverts models, proposes alternatives to the official and materialises in the production of objects as well as processes from which emerge other narratives and new ways to relate to art.

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9 The main task when working with audiences is to give them natural participatory status within the museum.

This has been complicated by the years of hierarchical practices that have rendered us as visitors, receptive—not productive—end-users.

We can say that we apply a model for practices presenting a transformational rather than a transactional stance. While in a transactional model, the position of the subjects/agents involved is polarised and reduced to an exchange of values which neither implies nor favours transformation. The transformational model, however, presupposes an on-going transfer at all possible intersections; a catalyst for the creative process.

In an education department, this translates into a desire to make the public active participants in the museum. It implies participative, dialogical exercises and horizontal project models where we all learn from each other, giving constant rise to new working possibilities.

In this sense, Judith Vidiella8 defines contact pedagogy as one that "strengthens more ephemeral and agreeable forms of knowledge based on oral communication, dialogue, physical experimentation, recycling, sampling and performance (as a practice for escaping from the rigid gravity of knowledge), etc.; one that is less concerned with legitimisation and citing authors and more concerned with a viral-type diffusion..."

We could say that we are currently situated at the real training of individuals, one which makes them autonomous participants interrelating with new models, processes and practices in museums and other centres for art and culture9. For this reason, we can speak of certain strategies that encourage an initial state of peer equality, strategies which focus on action from and for the audience in practices of reassignment and restitution of the word, as guidelines for training ourselves to be museum-goers.

Workshop Contact Improvisation I. Daniela Schwart and Eckard Muller. 2007

This concept of museum pedagogy, where the subject declares herself an active agent in any learning experience, is what I denominate a performative proposal.

Workshop El cuerpo próximo II. Olga Mesa. 2008

* Steven Connor. Postmodernist Culture: an introduction to theories of the contemporary.

Oxfordshire: Blackwell. 1997.

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Notes

THE STRUCTURE OF THE DEPARTMENT

10 This section is perhaps the most difficult to define and demarcate, as it functions as a higher category than others.

All the work performed at DEAC involves community outreach that interrelates and develops the rest of the programmes.

The programmes created at DEAC are done so within a non-hierarchical structure. bent on synthesising and divulging educational experience from within the museum out to the community and from outside in, as well.

There is no non-porous programme. An example of this is the studentfocused programme MUSAC School. It exists within the framework of formal education programmes but it also becomes a bridge to the children’s and young people’s leisure programmes. At the same time it reaches out toward other audiences at the museum: the student's family and teachers.

As a consequence, all DEAC programming takes on meaning when it becomes a project of true and active mediation evaluated as successful when it becomes autonomous. This is achieved by and large through our efforts of removing ourselves from paternalist, protectionist museum behaviour patterns.

For practical reasons, DEAC structures and de-structures its programmes within three basic categories; but I would like to stress that at the same time, there is an active attempt to bridge these categories and create spaces for them to interrelate, where different connections and interests may arise which favour the exchange of learning proposals amongst the programmes as well as an exchange amongst the diverse audiences involved.

Teenagers editing video

1. Community outreach programmes11 This section refers to all the work done with collectives from the community.

To date, they are open to all types of organisations: NGO's, university departments, the León prison, the mental health hospital, the Red Cross, primary and secondary schools, associations, etc.

2. Programmes for educational centres 2.1.Formal school systems from preschool to university. Vocational, technical and art schools, Social Guarantee Programmes, etc.

2.2.Non-formal schooling, mainly those whose participants come to the museum as part of an educational curriculum within their centres -Persons in situations of social inequality.

- Occupational therapy centres for physically or mentally disabled persons.

Cinema chats

Antonio and Cristina organizing a group

3. Leisure and free time activity programmes 3.1.Children: Pequeamigos (Littefriends) MUSAC. 3.2.Adolescents: Masdedoce (Overtwelve) MUSAC. 3.3.Adults: workshops, lectures, cinema and all specific educational programmes: Mirar para Hablar (Look to Speak) and Tertulias de Cine (Cinema Chats).

MEDIATION, INCLUSION AND LEARNING EXPERIENCES AT DEAC MUSAC BelĂŠn Sola

THE MUSEUM, A POSSIBLE PLACE As I see it, then, the teaching of art is an important part of the production of art.

In many ways it is the tableau where society, in practical terms, makes visible the limits of its conception of art as it attempts to regenerate the institutional forms that depict its self-conception. When our view of art is limited, so is our view of society.

If questions aren't asked in art schools, (...) where then?.

Joseph Kosuth*

The museum is proving its potential, as no other social space has, for applying educational theories and practices that fail or are simply hampered in other educational contexts. At variance with practices of moulding our work to fit a school curriculum, transposing formal schooling to the museum environment or promoting disjointed learning experiences, our goal is to generate a particular pedagogy associated with art and discard any prejudice surrounding its proper locus.

The contemporary art space must stop being a symbolic setting in order to become a meaningful setting. Constructing tools and potential spaces for this new experience is the direct responsibility of all of us working in these centres and especially those of us associated with education departments.

In my opinion, museums must be reborn and resituated in their new context, now that they are open to working with new strategies that include diversity as a force for transforming potential problems into advantages.

Only in this way, without inherited complexes, will we construct possible and autonomous spaces; ones that foster critical practice and dialogue, the pillars of constructing a pedagogy that macrostructures cannot provide.

Seen in this light, the museum becomes a potential space for resistance, a social instrument where society as a whole maintains, debates and projects a place for on-going transformation.

A place that is alive.

Workshop El cuerpo prĂłximo I. Olga Mesa. 2007

* Joseph Kosuth. Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writing. Cambridge: MIT Press. 1991.

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MEDIATION, INCLUSION AND LEARNING EXPERIENCES AT DEAC MUSAC Belén Sola

THE ESTRUCTUR OF THIS BOOK It is not easy to define categories in which to organise this department’s work; it is a department in an on-going state of expansion, characterised by the constant branching-out of programmes. On the other hand, I would like to present it to the reader in a certain order, thus the decision to discuss each programme in a separate chapter.

In COMMUNITIES, we refer to educational programmes designed in collaboration with other institutions, associations or collectives. In this category there are two important divisions marking: I. The coordination of groups with different social or cultural references (Amparo Moroño).

II. The coordination for groups with different abilities (Nadia Teixeira and Mariola Campelo).

The work with formal education systems lies within the MUSAC School chapter. The programme organises the school visits to the museum throughout the year. Antonio G. Chamorro, Programme Coordinator, will present an evaluation of it.

The leisure and learning programmes are structured by ages: the Pequeamigos MUSAC programme was debuted for small children in 2005 – a friends of the museum group with more than 1000 members currently enrolled. Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina Viñuela López, directors of the Pequeamigos programme since the summer of 2005, offer their thoughts and evaluation of it after four years running.

Cristina Viñuela García has written a LIST OF ACTIVITIES instituted at DEAC: Mirar para Hablar, Tertulias de Cine, various courses and workshops, film sessions and lectures that have taken place in the museum since its opening.

An entire listing of activities and other programmes currently underway, such as the weekly radio programme MUSAC Abierto (MUSAC On the Air) or cinema, music, training sessions, seminars and other events related to DEAC, can be found in detail and up-to-date at our DEAC MUSAC website www.deacmusac.es.

This book can be started in any chapter. The exhibitions, programmes and workshops related to the text appear with a brief description in the notes and are then referenced in subsequent appearances within the book.

COMMUNITIES I Amparo Moroño / Belén Sola

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COMMUNITIES I. Building Collective Proyect Networks. The Responsibilities of a Museum within Local Systems Amparo Moroño

BUILDING COLLECTIVE PROYECT NETWORKS. THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF A MUSEUM WITHIN LOCAL SYSTEMS. Amparo Moroño The range of possibilities for education in the context of museums and contemporary art venues is infinite. If we interpret the didactic role of a museum in simple terms of supply and demand, we could expound upon the myriad of activities a museum can offer its interested visitors: school activities, adult discussion groups, workshops and instructional programmes, to mention a few. However, if we analyse the nature of these activities, we see that one differs little from the next. The majority of these experiences last for a previously stipulated, limited period of time which precludes any real opportunity for parties to become acquainted nor does it encourage the negotiation of interests. Most unfortunately, this model generates hierarchical situations that do not allow for a space where participants may question the voice of the cultural institution personnel.

Joint projects between the museum and local collectives have offered us a new way to experience art education, fruit of a multidirectional, horizontal dialogue using the cultural concerns of each group as a point of departure.

This can be seen most vividly in those projects of longer duration. This alternative process, far from following the old beaten paths, has also proven to be extremely nourishing to the department's other programmes. These programmes benefit from these new points of convergence, contributions and most remarkably, the changes they produce in us every day.

Collaborating with educators from local entities unrelated to contemporary art has allowed us to come face-to-face with new ways of understanding and addressing our praxis. It grants us the privileged opportunity of seeing ourselves through the eyes of others, making us conscious of our responsibility as cultural agents within a complex system, one that goes far beyond the museum walls.

This is precisely the place we found ourselves three years ago. Today we are an integral part of that system – the social and cultural life of the city of León – fully conscious that our obligation is to act with sincerity, offering our labour as a tool for communicating with the multiple realities existent in this community. DEAC's relations with institutions, local associations and individual visitors have evolved and matured, yielding many enriching experiences. At the core of these experiences, the participants have gone from being passive audiences to active agents who see themselves reflected in every project and can exercise their decision-making power over their learning experiences.

Just as personal relationships grow stronger and transform over time, inter-institutional relations and on another level, those between museum personnel and their daily publics, can evolve toward common ends. These are spaces where possibilities for collective projects blossom naturally without being previously defined.

Building Collective Proyect Networks. The Responsibilities of a Museum within Local Systems. COMMUNITIES I Amparo Moroño

This process has given way to projects such as the collaboration with the León Autism Association; another was the intergenerational learning experience called Mil historias por obra between the León II Senior Citizen's Day Centre and the Diputación de León (León Provincial Administration) youth integration programme. Many experiences have been similarly created in conjunction with the Juan Soñador Foundation.

This collaborative model coexists at the museum with another type of project that at first glance may appear to be similar. Here I refer to those projects initiated by our department, often by contacting collectives with a concrete proposal for joint collaboration. This is how the collaborative project Contrastes (Contrasts) came about between the León Red Cross and photographer Ángel Marcos. Other programmes were proposed by local entities themselves, such as the cooperation initiatives with the Social Integration Centre of León, Cáritas León and the Asperger Association of León.

We have given these projects the following names: collaboration projects, local community projects, social intervention projects and local collective collaboration projects. In each case, however, the type of collaboration, the notion of collective or community, the educational perspective and even the concept of educator may differ. These definitions can vary with each programme, even within the same museum, the same department or with the same educator, which motivates me to approach my work in these projects from this complexity, from this network of different meanings.

I shall attempt to analyse each of these aspects by presenting real projects, either finished or currently underway, to examine the notions surrounding collaborative practices between a museum and the different collectives that make up a local community; in this case MUSAC and the city of León.

In this essay I shall address the manner in which this particular understanding of education in art museums and museums in general has lead (one could say organically) to what can be called collaborative practices (or projects in collaboration) with other cultural or local social agents.

Filming the documentary Parkour

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THE MUSEUM AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION AND “COMMUNITIY WORK” The reinforcement of museum education departments in recent decades has fostered an attempt to challenge the concept of a museum whose walls function as barriers and whose praxes are strictly related to exhibition content. This, hand-in-hand with new critical approaches in art education, has modified the way we perceive the museum's role in relation to its local context and the community to which it pertains. It is not easy, however, to define what we mean by local context or a community or even further, define what constitutes a collaboration between two institutions on a cultural project. The term community has a series of connotations that are frequently linked to the idea of marginalisation and social exclusion, especially when we refer to specific projects for educational intervention.

In the Contrastes project undertaken in the summer of 2007 in collaboration with the Red Cross, we worked with a group of people from different countries. The Spanish language classes these individuals take at the Red Cross in León serve as a meeting point for them. It is within this context that they made their first visits to the museum. In this case, what has shaped them as a community is an element foreign to them and we, at the museum, used that as a pretext for proposing a specific action. The immigrant collective and immigrant community are labels that only partially correspond to their daily reality, within the framework of their family life, their jobs or their places of study. This is a concept of community bound to cultural questions, in a geographical sense as well as in terms of habits and traditions. In this first joint project, we faced the risk of turning this into something homogenizing, perhaps distant from each individual's own reality.

Workshop En torno a Hansala. 2008

Teenagers at the Juan Soñador Foundation

On the other hand, in our experience with the Juan Soñador Foundation, the idea of community was linked to the idea of marginalisation, as it dealt with a centre for adolescents at risk of social exclusion. The young people participating in the project are used to participating in cultural and leisure activities specifically programmed for them and under the auspice of some local institution. This premise can be extremely dangerous as it reinforces the chasm between these young people and society; in fact they have shown to be aware of the way they are observed by others while engaging in activities at public institutions. In our programme, once the initial phase of mutual acquaintance was established, we started working bi-directionally with the Foundation educators in order to connect these boys and girls with other young people from the city – a connection based not on common contexts but on common personal interests.

In the project Mil historias por obra, (A thousand stories per piece) we concentrated on bonding two different collectives: senior citizens and young people, using group discussion dynamics to arrive at an exchange of viewpoints. In this case, what moulds these communities has to do with a strictly generational phenomenon, their difference in viewpoints is not a factor. These differences surfaced (as was to be expected) during the project and we were able to see, in repeated documentary filming sessions, how there are many ways of being young and old and of course, many ways of building relationships between the two.

Building Collective Proyect Networks. The Responsibilities of a Museum within Local Systems. COMMUNITIES I Amparo Moroño

A notion seen much more frequently, especially in the context at hand, involves special educational needs groups such as the children in the collaboration project with the León Autism Association and the groups Nadia Teixeira has worked with, described in another chapter.

A local community or collective of local citizens is not a homogeneous entity, but one that is built or that we build from numerous collectives and communities in which we include individuals that often have little in common beyond the label they share.

Through the collaboration projects with these collectives and the individuals enrolled in them, we attempt to reflect upon these labels, exploring further ways of understanding our place in the city we inhabit. Mine is not a theory on the idea of community, but rather an analysis that attempts to identify, using my practical experience as an educator, the complexity enclosed in this term. I strive to expose some of the connotations the term ‘community’ may have, connotations we have worked with thus far in our process.

It is true that the initial relationships maintained with all the people involved in these projects must first address the social label assigned to them or the legal structure (associations, foundations, public centres, etc.) that organises them into a group. Lack of addressing this challenge from the outset can lead to superficial and stereotyped practices. In our case we have learned to understand it as a way, certainly not the only way, to weave this first bit of the fabric.

Initially it was DEAC who contacted the Juan Soñador Foundation, the Social Integration Centre or the Autism Society of León. Today it is Sofía getting in touch with Antonio at DEAC; Iñaki and Guillermo calling Amparo eager to tell her their story; Nacho and Nadia having a coffee while they design the next session; Belén and Henar, Julia and Héctor... the list goes on.

Mil historias por obra. 2007

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SHIFTS An education department's first approach toward the townspeople usually follows a modern model, thus adopting instructive, transmissive, and unidirectional practices. An example of this would be guided tours, instructional workshops, and in many cases, artist-led workshops. These first contacts come from, among other things, the need individuals have of understanding unfamiliar phenomena in order to comfortably relate to it in future situations. This shapes the expectations of the visitor in relation to the museum and at the same time, for the educator, draws a stereotyped profile of the complacent museum-goer, hungry for knowledge.

These collaborative practices do not simply appear from a void and therefore, one must be fully cognisant of the roles each of the agents has in the relationships existing prior to the project. If to date the relationships established have taken place through guided tours or educational courses, it is easy to see how the group would be affected by the position of power situating the educator's voice over that of the rest of the participants. The participants, used to listening and learning from the teacher, they may not assert their right to decide on each of the topics in question1. This tends to be the initial reality we have had to work with, which in itself, has ultimately become an essential learning experience.

At the beginning of the relationship, each agent creates his or her role within the project framework that he will adopt throughout the process.

In our praxis, we have learned the importance of dedicating that first moment to take a look at these roles together through group discussion.

This initial step makes these positions more flexible, allowing us to shift them easily according to the circumstances.

I like to see my work as an educator as a continuous succession of shifts.

Each project unexpectedly rattles my scheme of things and my way of working, forcing me to step into another space, the place the context demands I be in. But it is not a permanent one since the events move me from one place to another during the entire process, until I find myself nowhere near where I started. Then, a new project commences in that last position I was left in, but it is not the ideal place for the new circumstances and so I am forced to shift again.

1 It is commonly found in our praxes for educators to be labeled as teachers by the participants in different activities; this builds a student / teacher-based model.

Building Collective Proyect Networks. The Responsibilities of a Museum within Local Systems. COMMUNITIES I Amparo Moroño

LEARNING FROM THE MUSEUM COLLABORATION PRAXES. MY EXPERIENCE AS AN EDUCATOR As I mentioned before, each of the projects carried out to date in collaboration with local institutions has provided me with new knowledge that, far from becoming dogma, has become useful to my praxis; but not useful in the sense of revealing formulas or infallible methods – quite the contrary. Each project has made me re-situate myself, redefine what project and collaboration mean to me; rethink art education theories, re-situate the art museum in its local context, deconstruct and reconstruct my me as a teacher identity over and over again.

Across the years, DEAC MUSAC has carried out numerous collaboration projects with local institutions and specific collectives. I shall not dare to make a value judgement of them here. I feel they demand a joint evaluation, since they have been joint projects. Instead, I will take this space to offer my observation of it all. This is not a conclusion nor a final reflection since it is not the end of any stage; nor is it a lesson. My intention here is simply to share a small part of the vast trove of learning I have gained during this time.

1. Programming within Each Collective’s Particular Circumstances I recall my first visit to the Juan Soñador Foundation (FJS) to hold an initial programming meeting. I remember the fresh-brewed coffee and the plate of biscuits in the middle of the table. Each of the centre's educators had prepared a document with the educational objectives sought by FJS regarding the young adults in contact with the centre. Another document contained the things they thought a museum could contribute. I had a camera with me and a document that like theirs listed all those things which from my point of view, a museum could contribute to the boys and girls of the FJS. During the meeting, we pooled together, on the one hand, their objectives and possibilities as a social centre and on the other, ours as a museum. We compared our ideas about art education with those of social education and were able to agree on certain elements that would work as a starting point. These meetings, phone conversations and informal get-togethers led to what Beatriz, one of the foundation educators, remembers in this way: Our main focus was on the welfare of the boys and girls. Throughout the whole interaction there was a tightly woven complicity that wasn't driven by temporal factors but by the style...

It is clear, however, that at that initial meeting the voices missing were those of the boys and girls. Afterward, I thought they should have participated in these first acquaintance and programming meetings. Perhaps we had fallen, as often occurs into an easy excess of paternalism. Perhaps we felt the need to offer them a previously established reference point that would help them to better understand the experience. We realised this and in the follow-up meetings, the coffee, biscuits and conversation were shared among the educators and the boys and girls as well. Sometimes they are held at the Foundation, other times at the museum. The girls and boys were later incorporated into the decision making phase and continue to be involved.

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The projects we have currently underway with the LeĂłn Autism Association have taught me quite a lot in this sense, as conflicts of interest within a group are multiplied when working with a collective lacking in the oral skills necessary to articulate them. Since this was an unfamiliar field to me, not often explored in art education spheres, a lot more time was required for this one than others, especially during its initial phase. Once we became familiar with the working circumstances and educational intervention lines followed by these professionals, we decided to work in the direction they suggested. In this case, the museum functions as a reinforcement tool for their school education. A museum's art education concepts are thus shifted to those pertaining specifically to the collective and the way their educators work with them. The museum becomes an ideal stage for the programming to take place. The department does not always work this way, but in this case, we made a consensual decision that it was best the museum be used to support their particular learning process. We interwove our ideas, methods and objectives with those of the participants' habitual educators.

A museum's functions are infinite. They cannot simply be plucked from one theoretic perspective or another. The art museum has as many functions as the needs presented by its visitors, as many missions as it does circumstances. At the core of what we understand as a local community, there exist various contexts and individuals with different educational needs and cultural quests. I believe our institution has the obligation to willingly adapt itself and develop specific learning spaces situated within these diverse realities.

2. Adapting to the Pace and Needs of Both Parties We began our collaborations with the JSF intent on carrying out a project that would last the entire school year. Both parties were enthusiastic about cooperating but our schedules did not allow us to meet regularly and we weren't able to carry out the first project as planned.

After that, we decided to programme something else that adapted to our requisites, to the circumstances brought about by our working in common.

Since then, and with the exception of one project done in an urban space using the museum only as a reference point, our collaborations have taken the shape of sporadic workshops that have been organised when each party has had the proper amount of time to prepare them. There are meetings prior to these visits and evaluation sessions afterwards. We aren't able to sustain projects with any regularity but we are doing so with a continuity in style, to quote Beatriz.

In this case, the relationships form take shape through a collaborative approach rather than a collaborative project, meaning each party plans pre-negotiated activities conceived designed by and for the group, even though these plans may materialise in one session every four months.

When the team of educators begins elaborating a project, some of the first questions established are the duration of the programme, the duration of the sessions, the venue, etc.

Building Collective Proyect Networks. The Responsibilities of a Museum within Local Systems. COMMUNITIES I Amparo MoroĂąo

These practices have taught us to be flexible with schedules, dedicate adequate time to each session and take into account each participant's calendar when scheduling meetings. In short, the practice adapts to the individuals and not the opposite.

3. Dispelling Prejudices Regarding Art Education Here I will return to the section on position shifts mentioned earlier and specifically those having to do with pedagogical stance in which we educators position ourselves when taking on an educational project. In these years of work, I have discovered that this is the shift that frightens us most. It is precisely in these moments of uncertainty when we must firmly examine various questions: What is most interesting to the people I am working with? What type of practice will create a transformation in them? And most importantly, Is that practice far from where I stand at this moment? How can I get there? To date I have no answers to this last question. In my experience, getting there is tough, yet at the same time, enlightening.

These position shifts have led me to take decisions that at first were contrary to my understanding of art education in museums such as: socialisation as an objective in a project with autistic children; carrying out a project with a group exclusively made up of migrants; programming an initial project without the presence of the participants. These decisions have been uncomfortable but many times, reflecting on this discomfort has given way to true learning.

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4. Negotiating the Tools Selecting working tools is part of the negotiation. We tend to identify a museum workshop with practices related to fine arts, like painting or sculpting. If at the initial phase of these collaborations we have asked ourselves 'what tool do we want to use?', in the majority of cases, the answer has been 'painting'. This is a big paradox, keeping in mind that we have grown up in the media era, as David Buckingham asserts.

Months ago we began a collaboration with the Social Integration Centre of León, an intermediary space between a minimum-security prison and freedom, where the inmates enjoy certain liberties such as cultural and leisure activities. In the preparatory meetings with the educational staff, the proposals ranged from holding a painting workshop to creating a mural. I was thinking of other tools, ones present at their centre and the museum as well, so I postponed that decision until we had our first meeting with the group. To my surprise, the proposals made by the participants were in line with those made by the educators. In this case, the final decision was to use photography as a tool to get a feel for the new spaces.

All the participants would then create a mural. The medium here is only one feature and clearly one can carry out an interesting exercise with photography as well as painting. Nonetheless, I think these experiences demonstrate people’s connotations of a workshop and the type of artwork associated with fine arts and the traditional idea of a museum even today.

Working tools are merely a means to get to a place but sometimes they can be seen as that place.

5. Continuous and Collective Evaluation One of the great advantages of long-term projects is the possibility of ongoing group evaluation. The flexible nature of the programming, the spirit of dialogue, trust and the possibility to take breaks as needed, are features that facilitate a collective follow-up appropriate for the context.

During this time, the tools used for evaluation have varied according to the person executing the task – follow up notebooks for educators and their families, video or audio-taped group chats, interviews, reflections written by various people, stories, letters or any other format – as many formats as there are people.

6. The Museum as a Venue for Social Relations For some, social relations are a natural part of daily life. Some people even claim to be experts at them. There are those, however, for whom comprehending and manoeuvring in the framework of social norms is a terribly complicated task, which is why sometimes they must spend a

2 Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood : Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media. 2000. Cambridge, UK : Polity Press ; Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Building Collective Proyect Networks. The Responsibilities of a Museum within Local Systems. COMMUNITIES I Amparo Moroño

great deal dedicated to it. This would be what some academic spheres would call social skills education. This topic is worthy of specific analysis but not relevant to the work at hand.

Developing social skills has been one of the objectives in some of the collectives with which we have established programmes, although each collective (Juan Soñador Foundation, Caritas León and the León Autism Association) serves a different type of client.

The museum has become a space where newcomers can share a space, removed from their daily environment. A museum that acts as a public space, a specific space for experiencing new ways of behaving, a space for embracing the unexpected, can work as a socialising agent.

We could say that our actions to date fall into two categories of socialisation: one defined by the institution's intrinsic public nature, implicit in all museum activities. The second is socialisation as an objective, the end result of an exercise. It is this latter category that has presented numerous conflicts and is directly related to the work done in conjunction with the León Autism Association and the Asperger Association of León. The conflict arises from viewing socialisation as an end goal, an idea virtually light years from any critical educational theory. Nevertheless it is one of the requirements in teaching children with autism and the museum happens to be a perfect arena for addressing it.

7. Inter-institutional Negotiations Lastly, I come upon an aspect of these projects that, albeit less poetic, is sometimes decisive in developing collaborations: the omnipresent negotiation of interests. It is present in the very tone used in the press releases, the choice of the project's public presentation venue; from the delegation of responsibilities to the financing of materials, not to mention peoples' different ideas on art, education, collaboration, museum and dialogue. These ideas come into contact, repel each other and with a bit of luck, form hybrids.

In my opinion, resolving these conflicts passes necessarily through the phases of visualisation, listening, comprehension and most importantly, through dialogue amongst individuals: the basis for dialogue amongst institutions.

8, 9, 10, 11…....

Not all of the ideas are here, but this is some of the knowledge I have gleaned from these actions in collaboration with local entities. I have selected those most representative of the vast number of projects to date.

From here, they can be connected to each other or with others, as one desires. Each person can begin his or her shift in the direction demanded by the context.

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Exhibition Retorno a Hansala.

27 September 2008 / 7 January 2009.

Rogelio López Cuenca, Montserrat Soto and Alfredo Cáliz.

Exhibition of works focused on the film by Chus Gutiérrez by the same name.

Workshop En torno a Hansala.

We proposed this workshop as an experimental collaboration where artists, educators, students and persons from the inmigrant population were invited to participate. The work would be based on different perspectives of the migration process of Northern Africans, taken from particular experiences of these individuals in the León community. The objective of this workshop was to channel the expression of all this migratory process of those now living in León, through the participants’ words, photography, audiovisual supports, the internet, etc.

At the end of this text In this section we will review some of the projects carried out in the framework of the DEAC MUSAC collaborations with other institutions and entities of the city of León. As previously stated, each one reflects a way of collaborating and as such, a way of understanding relationships between the art museum and local communities. Some are still underway and have become more than an educational project; they have become a means for us to relate. This has been the case in the Social Integration Centre, the Mansilla de las Mulas Prison and the Social Guarantee Programmes.

Other programmes like Mil historias por obra and Contrastes had a start and finish date although they haven't really ended as such. Some of the Contrastes project participants are part of today's En Torno a Hansala workshop where representations of the migration phenomenon in Western media are being analysed. Some of the young people that participated in Mil historias por obra are now coordinating a documentary film project about the urban sport Parkour3.

This continuum allows us to evaluate different aspects while correcting them and growing from them, in this way spurring change in relationships established between museum pedagogues, the educators from different entities and the participants. These relationships are reinvented in each project, each session, each time a problem arises that must be solved both collectively and unidirectionally.

Studies done on publics or cultural marketing surveys often present an idea of the visitor as a consumer rather than an individual in contact with the institution, a player in the process. We can say that a museum must first take on various tasks in order to carry out a responsible and appropriate educational praxis: review the makeup of the cultural community surrounding the museum, reflect on the relationships different collectives have maintained with the museum to date and design, if necessary, strategies in tune with their necessities and concerns regarding the contemporary art scene.

This becomes much more meaningful when this phase of review, reflection and project design is done collectively, identifying possible topics of interest, tools or formats in an ambience of dialogue and negotiation.

3 Parkour. An urban sport consisting of using urban spaces and street furniture as a stage for jumps, summersaults and all times of acrobatic movement that offers a new way to appreciate and interpret the city using the body as a tool.

Collaborations with the Juan Soñador Foundation. COMMUNITIES I Amparo Moroño

COLLABORATIONS WITH THE JUAN SOÑADOR FOUNDATION. Amparo Moroño The FJS began taking different groups of young people to visit MUSAC in August of 2006. These visits have been repeated periodically since then, although without a set programming schedule. As a consequence of the relations between both institutions and dialogue between the museum's educational team and the Foundation educators, we have been able to achieve mutual understanding at each of these visits, that, although sporadic, have become an integral part of these youths' daily reality. With the firm conviction that the museum can act here as a useful tool in the educational and existential processes of these young people, we have been able to set in motion (along with other occasional activities) a joint project focused on the exhibition by artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo entitled Abajo la inteligencia.

The young people from the Juan Soñador Foundation are from what the educational system calls a social exclusion risk group, which means children who live in a situation of marginalisation with respect to conventional social structures.

Their ages fall between twelve and eighteen years; some have been referred to the centre as a result of legal conflicts and participate in the foundation as a way of paying their debts to society. Each one attends a different school, their lives take place in different contexts and they only meet up in the activity centre. Some attend the foundation in the afternoon (for tutoring sessions, arts and crafts, therapy, etc.); while others go at the weekend for leisure activity. These young adults are aware of how society has labelled them, just as they know we at the museum are familiar with their situation.

Periodically they visit cultural centres, museums, etc. with their counsellors and always within the framework of activities organised by the foundation.

They have always come to MUSAC visits in small groups no larger than twelve, and always with two or more counsellors. The museum educators and the foundation counsellors feel the visits to the museum as well as the complimentary educational actions carried out have been positive experiences for these teenagers. This is due not only to their hands-on experiences in contemporary artistic practice, but also because we have fostered attitudes which encourage them to feel a part of the life-beat of a cultural institution in their own city. Here there is a space for their opinion (the existence of different points of view is a starting point) where they can gain practical experience using contemporary art production tools (video or photography workshops for example).

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Exhibition Various artist.

Trial Balloons /Globos Sonda.

6 May / 10 September 2006.

Different artistic tendencies wer e examined in a selection of work by international artists with one common denominator: beginning in the 21st Century and the space-time element in their practices.

This collective gathered 48 fine artists and creators including designers, architects, musicians and performers.

The activities organised with this collective at the museum have always attempted to respond to the needs and concerns of the participants, a desire that they themselves and their educators have transmitted throughout the entire process. The activities should always be oriented toward improving their self-esteem, optimising their creativity, leveraging critical thinking and decision making, improving autonomy, raising awareness about other spaces within the city beyond their own neighbourhoods, fostering attitudes of responsibility within each project and widening social relations.

Using the characteristics of the collective and especially the recommendations of their educators, we have always made it a priority to propose experiences that combine museum activities with those of urban settings and those done at their meeting centre. These participative activities focus deliberately on eliminating the authority figure of the instructor by substituting it with group discussion. The projects have taken shape in each of the sessions by adapting the project to the needs and concerns of the teenagers; not the opposite.

We have worked with different groups and different projects over the past two years and the following pages will outline some of them: 1. August 2006. Exhibition Trial Balloons This was the first visit by the foundation youths to MUSAC. From it, relationships blossomed between museum and foundation educators. We decided to start by breaking down the barriers which distance the public from contemporary art and specifically, exhibition-going, which can be a boring experience for some young people, totally out of their realm of interest.

This project gave way to the production of a short documentary where each participant taped his or her own interpretation of the current art scene (the main theme of the exhibition itself) and the material found in the exhibition. First we explained the premise of the exhibition: we as spectators were allowed to question what we saw in the museum as absolute truth; we were there to make our own judgments. We then emphasised the fact that this was only an information-gathering exercise.

Strolling through the exhibition with our video camera allowed us to gather the feelings and reactions of the group on their first encounter with the museum.

At this first viewing of the exhibition, each person was to choose one piece they liked and eliminate another. At the end of the activity, we gathered again in the foyer to make a list of the works selected and those rejected and to comment on our first impressions. We marked our route on an exhibition map and went back in, this time focusing exclusively on the works that had piqued our interest most and then analysed them more carefully.

Collaborations with the Juan Soñador Foundation. COMMUNITIES I Amparo Moroño

With this objective in mind, we were able to transform what at first seemed like a traditional viewing into an experience based on the unique interests of each person; focusing on resolving the questions brought up in the group discussion. Using a video camera shared by the participants along the route was a way of familiarising each participant with unfamiliar spaces, giving him or her an opportunity to actively participate in constructing a collective narrative.

2. October 2006. Exhibition Make Death Listen This project was designed as a research project about what interests teenagers and how this is reflected in their bodies. The idea was taken from the exhibition by artists Muntean and Rosenblum and their interest in the depiction of young people in teen magazines and the mass media.

The project developed as an answer to and conversation with the works set in a concrete and local reality. Contemporary art is an ideal platform for examining identity and self-awareness issues. This exercise clearly deflected the attention away from the adolescents themselves – a vital issue for this age group, constantly mired in judgements about their condition, their hobbies, their hangouts, their past, their hopes and dreams, etc. We spent one session on this. First we saw the exhibition, discussed the images and the characteristics of the young people represented. These discussions opened a forum where we could address issues of alterity: how I see the other, how I see myself in relation to others or who I am with others.

After the visit we taped a video clip without using any spoken language.

The participants used static and sustained expressions to represent a scene dealing with their collective experiences. They based these experiences on how they felt the rest of society would represent the teenage condition.

3. 2007. Exhibition Abajo la inteligencia During one of the museum tours of the new exhibition launched at MUSAC in January of 2007 and stemming from conversations between museum educational staff and foundation educators, we suggested inaugurating the new term with a longer lasting project involving the boys and girls analysing their own neighbourhoods.

Some of the works from artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo's exhibition Abajo la Inteligencia reflected upon power symbols and the public statuary erected during Franco's dictatorship that can still be found in many of our cities today. The artist poses questions about the new meanings these artefacts take on in our current context. With this scheme in mind, we understood that Fernando Sánchez Castillo's work could lead us (among other things) to develop a fresh look at our urban landscape, decode slogans, faces, and proper names, creating a research exercise on the baggage hidden behind each of them.

Exhibition Muntean/Rosenblum.

Make Death Listen.

23 September 2006 / 7 January 2007.

First individual exhibition by artistic duo Markus Muntean and Adi Rosenblum. Focused mainly on painting, these artists sporadically use other disciplines such as photography, video and installations. Their work looks at the period of existential disorientation and identity crisis which adolescents experience as a mad rush toward adulthood today.

Fernando Sánchez Castillo.

Abajo la inteligencia (Down with Intelligence).

20 January / 6 May 2007.

The title refers to the historic row of 12 December, 1936‚ having to do with the Fiesta de la Raza (Conmemoration of the Hispanic Race) - today called Día de la Hispanidad (Hispanic Day). The row took place between Miguel de Unamuno and Millán Astray, founder of the Spanish Legion. These words were the latter's retort to a final attempt at presenting an ethical counter-position to the imposition of social and moral codes based on the negation of reflective thought: ¡Abajo la inteligencia! ¡Viva la muerte! Intelectuales, habéis perdido a España (Down with intelligence! Long live death!

Intellectuals, you have lost Spain!). The objective of this exhibition was to place emphasis on the acts and objects upon which a great deal of our current society's idosyncrasies are based. The heroes, the Francoist myths and praise of the object all embody the Spanish past. The artist articulated this through sculpture, painting, drawing and audiovisuals.

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Our educational proposal consisted in combing the city of León searching for this information and capturing it on film to show at the foundation and the museum. This process gave us the opportunity to stroll around the city and search the urban landscape. It also allowed the participants to enter into a dialogue among themselves and those family members who had lived through the dictatorship. Each new finding also made for conversation. The group was able to visit the museum on a weekly basis, so we decided to plan a work schedule for the duration of the exhibition. The project would be divided into three phases:

1. We began with an unguided tour of the Fernando Sánchez Castillo exhibition.

The tour followed the scheme utilised by the group on other occasions, going through the exhibition with a notebook and video camera.

2. The second step developed into a research process carried out on the streets of León with disposable cameras where the group, accompanied by their counsellor, would discover the vestiges of the Franco dictatorship still standing in our cities: street names, public sculpture, monuments, markings, façades. They conducted interviews with friends and families, gathered testimonies, taped different actions, etc.

3. Once this material was collected, we held a work session in the museum for organisation, classification and commentary on the visual material as well as the experience gleaned from the process. The most significant task was thinking of a format in which to re-exhibit these materials.

List of Activities

Today the collaborations with this foundation are stronger than ever, slowly taking on the shape we strove for from the very beginning. The ties have been strengthened between educators and this translates into a constant communication line between both institutions. In addition to the activities organised with the centre, many of these young people now come on their own to other youth activities programmed by the museum.

Collaborations with the Juan Soñador Foundation. COMMUNITIES Amparo Moroño

Words for MUSAC Hi! After all this time we haven't forgotten. We have been compiling the words of every participant involved in the activities and here you have them.

They aren't all here since there are kids we've lost touch with, but a good many of them are still here with us and have kindly given us their memories compiled in a questionnaire that I am attaching, in full, so you can use whatever you feel is most interesting.

In addition to the words taken from the boys and girls, all of us involved want to thank you for everything you have invested in the process and in us.

Young and old, we found that through your warm reception and patience, your tenderness and ability to motivate, we did not feel judged nor labelled. You left a door open for our fears to escape through, prejudices were destroyed in the face of new ideas created and experienced.

In the proposal and realisation of the museum visits, you stood by us on our quest, making us feel freer every day.

MUSAC was open for us to experiment and learn, allowing us to be the museum for a moment. We had the chance to use the cultural and public space which belongs to us in a way, because we have been, and are now a part of it.

We have found a resource that values care and quality – pillars that we as educators try to keep alive in our art of educating at all times.

'Our main focus was on the welfare of the boys and girls. Throughout the whole interaction there was a tightly woven complicity that wasn't driven by temporal factors but by the style, based on believing in people and in all the positive potential they have...

At variance with the activities we normally propose, directly or indirectly, we worked on individual and group qualities such as the capacity for expression, creativity, social involvement, autonomy and selfmanagement of free time, initiative, communications skills, integration, critical spirit, historical culture, etc...

Thank you for being by our side.

Juan Soñador Foundation Education Team

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Exhibition Ángel Marcos.

China.

19 May / 2 September 2007. Ángel Marcos shows his particular vision of the transformations underway in this country, stretched between tradition and new capitalist world patterns.

On his visits to the cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, Marcos’ camera captures urban environments replete with contrasts, reflecting the individual’s many ways to live and relate in public spaces.

In the context of the migrant community living in León, geographical issues become more complex as they find themselves in the building of their new ‘Me’, far from their countries of origin.

Moreover, the norms that predominate in our cities are often different from those of one’s urban or rural area of origin.

Therefore, the subject’s position within that context becomes another interesting pivotal point for reflection and educational intervention.

COLLABORATIONS WITH THE RED CROSS Amparo Moroño The Contrastes project derives from the relationships existing amongst the Red Cross workers, León's immigrant community and DEAC. These exchanges began with the scheduling of museum tours with different groups attending Spanish classes at the León Red Cross.

For a large part of León's immigrant community, the Red Cross is a meeting place where they take Spanish courses and receive job counselling. Their teachers take them regularly to MUSAC, where museum educators take them to see different exhibitions. Sometimes these students participate in hands-on workshops. These groups are composed of people who, in general, have little knowledge of the Spanish language or culture nor contemporary art trends.

These visits were made with increasing regularity and were finally transformed into a photography project. The project was based on artist Angel Marcos' exhibition China, whose theme was the city of León as seen through the eyes of a foreigner with preconceived ideas. Capturing the contrasts between what one found and what one hoped to find on arriving at León was the objective of this two-month long project which took place in the museum as well as outdoors.

The project fostered closer relationships among all of the participants as they all became more closely involved with the museum. Currently, this proximity is evident in the participation of each one of the group in a wide range of workshops and courses held by the museum. Now these people come to the institution not as a member of an immigrant collective but as individuals integrated into the dynamic of a cultural institution in their city.

Using photography as a creative tool gave us the chance to tell a story, apply our visions and points of view without having to use oral language.

Photographic language proved to be the perfect instrument to execute an educational activity in a group where at least five different languages were spoken.

We were extremely fortunate to have Ángel Marcos' collaboration for this learning experience. Set around his exhibition, it allowed us to add to the images' multiple interpretations.

We developed an activity where, with the artist's aid and that of some of the museum's educators: we took to the street with a group of twenty members of the immigrant community. During many outings, using a camera as our only tool, we explored the multiple interpretations of the urban space and the life-pulse of the city of León.

Collaborations with the Red Cross. COMMUNITIES I Amparo MoroĂąo

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A CONVERSATION ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE WITH ABDELJEBBAR BENAMARA, LATIFA JILALI Y NOURRE EDDINE ZAHRANI. Amparo: Before this project started, what did you think about MUSAC? Nourre Eddine: Before I arrived at León I was very interested in learning about art. One day, thanks to the Red Cross, we took a tour of MUSAC, where we found educators that helped us learn more about art, what to do in front of an image and how to understand it. My knowledge of the topic was limited but once I began the workshop with Ángel Marcos... Before, I didn´ t know how to manipulate a camera, how to chose what I was going to photograph, the composition...

Thanks to that workshop I feel alive. Before, I felt that people thought foreigners were only here to work, now I see they realise there is more - we are intelligent, we have a lot of ideas, a great culture...Moreover, the educators in these activities helped us to improve our language skills. Photography made us expose things that were inside of us, in our imagination. Now I have many new and good things in my head, ideas I transform into images. I have also been lucky to meet an artist like Ángel Marcos.

Latifa: I learned how to use a camera in the photography course; how to take pictures of León's neighbourhoods, the river, monuments, its people, the gardens. It was very important for me to learn more about using a camera.

Amparo: What were those outings in the city of León doing photographs like?

Abdeljebbar: I felt like a tourist who wants to see many things in the city. Although I am not a tourist, I felt like one for a few days and I liked it. There are many things that are different from my country, like the churches and weddings and markets.

Here, the old city is very different, the way the Spaniards lived many centuries ago. Older people are very different than those in my country. There are lots of gardens with trees, flowers, like roses...

Amparo: Is there any aspect of Spanish cities, specifically León, that you had not taken notice of before and have discovered through this project?

Abdeljebbar: Yes, you place more importance on new things you wouldn't have before. Without a camera, I wouldn't have paid attention to unimportant things, small details. The camera helps me see the smaller things in the street as well as on buildings like the cathedral. You can see what the picture means, what it contains, it allows you to see what the ground is like, the animals - you perceive the city in a different way. You see how people move through the city, how they live in it.

Nourre Eddine: A picture reflects many things that perhaps you don't realise in the half a minute it takes you to snap it ; but when you stop to look at it and analyse it, you discover all that lies behind it. Details from the architecture or the historical period would escape us without a camera - or the behaviour or the people playing traditional games like petanc, looking for a peaceful spot like the river's edge...

It is interesting to note that when we travel, the image of the city we are in, in this case León, how clean (or dirty) it looks to us, what places exist for passing the time and what that shows, the city's noise which also helps us to compile our little book on that city. Through photographs, one can get to know different cultures and people and reflect on them.

Collaborations with the Red Cross. COMMUNITIES I Amparo Moroño

Amparo: What were the group interactions like during the project?

Abdeljebbar: There was a good rapport among all of us from the beginning, which developed into friendship. Ángel Marcos showed us how to use a camera and to see things with a different perspective.

Amparo: What would have changed if in the group there had been people from León as well? Would you have liked to have shared the experiences with folks from here?

Nourre Eddine: It is important, because before coming here, what changes is your way of seeing. Before, immigrants were seen in conjunction with a lack of culture, but when we started this project people from here were surprised because now we are closer to the culture, photography and art in general. We have surprised ourselves in this group when we talked about any subject because we would see there were always such diverse opinions.

All of this work is enormously valuable, not economically but intellectually. It appears to be useless at first, but it fills those moments in the day when I am not sleeping, eating or working.

Abdeljebbar: I wonder if Ángel Marcos could go on a day trip with all of us. To discover new ways of seeing, show us more about foregrounds/backgrounds, composition...I would like to bring a CD with images of a Moroccan wedding so we could see it together, the differences between it and a typical León wedding.

Nourre Eddine: I have this dream that the group that started this would stay together to make, I don´'abt know, an association that works on a project to show the world what we do. We have worked with a still camera but we could also do something with a video camera, for example each one shoot a bit of our lives: at work, on the street, at MUSAC, and then later compare them. For example at work, how I act with my boss and with people from my country is different than how I behave when I'm here...and go on filming like that...

Amparo: That is a very nice idea. If you'd like to do it, we would like to work with you. We've had a great time working with you and would like to begin a joint project, perhaps in the spring, summer.... We should think about what we want to do and not break up the group we've created.

Nourre Eddine: With the help of the museum I have been able to feel I am truly human. When I arrived, I would go into a bar, for example, and everybody looked at me like I was inferior but here at MUSAC everyone respects us, helps us. They know we are valuable and help us to show it and bring out what we have inside.

Amparo: Ángel and I have spoken a lot about your work. Your way of seeing, your photographs are very poetic. We have found a brilliant project, fabulous - and that is exactly what I think must be brought out.

Great! We'll continue discussing this at another time. Lots of thanks to all of you...

(León, April 2008)

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COLLABORATIONS WITH SOCIAL GUARANTEE PROGRAMMES. Amparo Moroño Social guarantee programmes are the educational option offered by the León Provincial Council to young people who have, for different reasons, been expelled from compulsory secondary education. These programmes offer them vocational training with the aim of rapid integration into the job market. They are eligible to enter the job market after training with an average age of 18 at the time of their apprenticeships in a company.

The young people that study at these centres have had negative educational experiences resulting in their being expelled not only from an educational system that rejects them but also from their habitual social environment, becoming outcasts in the words of one of the students from the latest project session at the museum. The only thing they have in common is belonging to a group maladjusted to the current educational system.

This situation transforms into an attitude of mistrust towards anything related to education, teachers, classes or cultural activities in general. In these situations, one of the most difficult hurdles to jump is that which situates the teachers on one side and the students on the other, like opposite sides taking part in a battle. Even so, at the risk of falling into a cliché'8e, our experiences with social guarantee groups have been experiences of extremely productive and pluralistic dialogue.

As I have previously mentioned, one of the characteristics of traditional educational experiences in museums is their limited duration. This situates the participants in a position of mutual unfamiliarity, making it difficult to achieve meaningful learning. To address this, at the museum we try to introduce other ways of working with these groups that allow for more flexible museum visits in terms of time and structure. An example of this arose in an unexpected manner, resulting in a joint project with one of the social guarantee centres that gives training in León. The initiative was brought forth by three teachers: Victoria, Sara and Lourdes who work in the educational centre for youth integration training courses in León and who, through their own initiative, brought students to see exhibitions.

These visits occurred not only once per quarter but various times within an exhibition cycle. As a result, the teachers from the centre and educators at the museum were able to cultivate understanding and complicity and a much closer relationship with the young people who came to see the exhibitions.

At the beginning of the 2006-2007 school term we decided to reinforce those bonds that had formed naturally between DEAC and the San Cayetano Centre, in order to develop more enriching experiences that were better adapted to the participants' social and cultural realities (elements that were sometimes lacking in the museum experiences).

Collaborations with Social Guarantee Programmes. COMMUNITIES I 049 Amparo MoroĂąo

Our focus in this case was to eliminate the notion of visit that situated the participants in a passive stance, making the experience slightly boring and foreign to their interests, and it shift to one based on dialogue and hands-on activities.

In this case, due to the difficulties of meeting outside the museum's weekday work hours, we weren't able to involve the students in the planning of the programme. On the other hand, the projects specifically fashioned for this group are never programmed without first meeting with the members. (This differs from the procedures followed in the MUSAC School programming.) These initial work sessions explore the interests of the group regarding visual or musical culture in order to later design learning proposals that will aid them in knowing and understanding themselves in the world that surrounds them.

Within this context and related to the group activities surrounding the exhibition Abajo la inteligencia, an intergenerational learning project came to light in which four teenagers from this group voluntarily participated along with a group of senior citizens from the LeĂłn II Day Centre, one of the city council centres for leisure activities and educational programmes for senior citizens. I will dedicate a section to this later, but at this time I would like to mention the conditions favouring this experience, brought about through the collaboration of educators and both institutions.

After having asked for volunteers to participate in the experience, we negotiated with the teachers a window of time during the week for students to dedicate to the project in lieu of attending their classes. Thursday mornings were agreed upon: instead of going to their educational centre, the students would come to the museum during that allotted class time and receive the same class credits for it. The documentary the group created between them and the senior citizens is presented today as an example and motivation for students of later courses.

One afternoon a few weeks after finishing the intergenerational learning project (we had worked on it for nearly a year), I received a visit from two of the boys that had participated. They had brought their laptop and a few notes they wanted to share with me about a project – the filming of a documentary on Parkour, an urban sport they practiced in their spare time and wanted to tell the world about. They proposed a collaboration which included their friends and me: produce a documentary; but this time in a more serious fashion than the previous one where we had committed various technical errors.

Today, after five months of working on the Parkour documentary (and no end date in sight) the group has a total of fifteen members. The group has grown little by little through friendships made in their extracurricular circles.

There are members of the group that have finished their studies in social guarantee programmes and are working now; some that study in secondary schools (ESO), some that study vocational training and others that have just begun the San Cayetano social guarantee programme courses.

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All of them come to the museum three times a week with their notes, bursting with ideas for the next filming session. Together we have learned to develop and write a documentary script, use all the technical equipment, plan filming sessions and resolve a variety of issues I myself had no idea existed at the outset.

The flexibility of the teachers and the creation of a project in line with the subjects' interest have turned the museum visits into a weekly space for an infinite number of possibilities where learning and personal development take place. Through this we have learned how the nature of learning experiences can turn a group at first stereotyped, rigid and apparently homogeneous, into an open forum where diverse individuals participate depending on their interests at a given point in their lives.

MIL HISTORIAS POR OBRA: AND INTERGENERATIONAL LEARNING PROYECT The Mil historias por Obra project draws on DEAC MUSAC relationships with teachers and students in the Social Guarantee Programme of León and the heads of the Senior Citizens Day Centre León II and their clients.

Both groups make regular visits to the museum although their activities differ. Some of the visits are part of the museum-educational centre collaboration process and others are programmed by the centre's educators as leisure activities.

Exhibition. p. 41

The project was based on the Fernando Sánchez Castillo exhibition, Abajo la inteligencia, and connected both groups in an intergenerational learning experience. The end result was a documentary filmed by the teenage participants showing various discussion sessions taken place over the four-month course of the exhibition.

At the educational department, we interpret Fernando Sánchez Castillo's perspective as an invitation to take different critical positions regarding the images and power symbols we have inherited from our country's recent past. We also understand his work as a call for questioning and reflection as ways of understanding the social and political circumstances of the present. The young participants in the project saw this exhibition as a way to learn history without the taboos imposed by the press or the government4.

Representations of power reach us through various channels, not only through historical accounts, but also through our contemporary visual culture (symbols, family stories, political slogans, public statuary, institutional buildings...).

That is why when working with secondary level school children, we design proposals that stimulate the students to question the reality surrounding them by analysing the representation systems associated with current power structures.

4 Testimonies of the conversation held with Iñaki and Guillermo, two of the participants, in one of the evaluation sessions.

Collaborations with Social Guarantee Programmes. COMUNITIES I Amparo MoroĂąo

The MUSAC School experiences (programmes with formal education systems) were the inspiration for this project. In both DEAC programmes, the attitudes that we as educators suggested were the following: - Approach the historical account from critical stances, playing the devil's advocate. An exhibition has to do with the history of a group of people.

No matter the perspective, it is still a discourse that invites questioning the way this history has been constructed, disseminated and staged.

- Rethink concepts of winner/loser and conqueror/conquered associated with power structures.

- Analyse power symbols and their presence in our urban environment, the vestiges of the past as well as those that reflect current conflicts.

- Explore the concepts of entertainment and dramatisation in association with political events.

- Review positions of critique in contemporary art.

- Understand the processes of the de-contextualisation of an object as acts of re-signification.

Secondary students did not live through the period we did; nor are they familiar with the literature coming out of it, due to their age. In the first days of the exhibition work with students, we discovered that the readings the students took of the pieces at times breezed over the historical baggage completely but continued to be tremendously rich and constructive nevertheless. Having said that, we believed knowing about the historical events linked to the pieces would enhance these perspectives while bringing an extremely important historical period closer to these generations.

This reflection gave light to the two initial premises of the intergenerational learning project. These were: -Create spaces for students to have access to historical events from peripheral sources, removed from the official story. The newspaper archives we had been compiling at DEAC for some time had been working well as a tool but at the end of the day, the material we were using was homogeneous and single-voiced, coming from dominant power structures.

-Construct these new perspectives based on shared, dialogued, horizontal learning experiences, an aspect that eliminates the figure of the educator as content-generator.

Keeping in mind all those who had visited the exhibition to date and everything that had been shared thus far, we looked at the possibility of unifying the two collectives and comparing what each person had experienced regarding the exhibition pieces and the related historical events.

The result would be an open-ended experience in intergenerational dialogue where one could listen, narrate, converse, debate and in short, construct together using each slide and artefact from the exhibition.

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After presenting the project to the institution and once approval was granted, the next step was to find people interested in putting it into practice. This was not easy. For the students, it was part of a project proposed, designed and structured according to interests foreign to them.

When we later asked them what they were interested in at the beginning of the project, Iñaki and Guillermo said: Truthfully, we only cared about missing class no matter what but little by little we got into this unforgettable experience...then we imagined ourselves in a chair with a director's cap on, looking for the boy who'd bring the cappuccino. As we got more involved, we started having more fun and making good friends – many of those friendships still last. This shows that learning is fun5.

5 Ibid.

Collaborations with Social Guarantee Programmes. COMMUNITIES I Amparo MoroĂąo

The Working Sessions We established that each of the works on display would be a starting point, a springboard for a conversation session. The first day was dedicated to discussing the experiences of children in wars, working from the painting NiĂąos Jugando a Fusilar (Children Playing Firing Squad). Another session was dedicated to reviewing the position of armies during the conflict, working from the installation Abajo la Inteligencia. The piece Azor allowed us to reflect upon the way the Franco regime portrayed itself.

Every day the experiences of each of the participants in relation to the selected topic brought up new readings to the pieces that up until now had been codified through the eyes of the museum educators or measured using different criteria: ...what people know about this war forms around the ideas one has been taught...6 Video was chosen as our working tool. The idea was to turn these meetings into documentary film material. Using video as a tool came about from the need to work toward an end. Sometimes projects that are structured around discussion sessions dissipate when there is no goal in mind, a reason for the dialogue. We solved this dilemma by filming the testimonies, creating a documentary which would narrate the experience.

The teenagers' mission was to guide the dialogue during the sessions, so they had to have selected the questions they wanted to ask prior to the meeting. This forced them to research the subject and choose the filming locations for the interviews in order to get the best shot and prepare the technical material. They would come to the museum before the rest of the group and together we would search in the newspaper archives for interesting materials related to the topic for support.

We did this during the four-month exhibition period. After that, we continued the process of editing the documentary, this time without the senior citizens, who had decided not to participate in this phase. We dedicated eight months to this because of the technical difficulty and the numerous stops and starts due to the students' schedules. Finally in the spring of 2008, we showed the documentary for the first time in a private session for all those who had participated in the various phases of the project.

Final Reflections...

In order to evaluate this project, I would make tow types of analyses: One relates to the objectives established at the beginning having to do with the exhibition itself and the attitudes we tried to generate throughout the project. In different evaluation meetings held in the following months, the teenaged participants said:

6 Ibid.

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We didn't know what to expect: a great outcome from all the work done or a huge disappointment due to lack of experience in the sector. In the end we all liked it, we learned a lot about those years and of course we really got wise to the things we didn't know about before7.

Another analysis has to do with my task as a teacher and the things I learned during the entire process. I shall share some reflections from my notebook that have helped me in later situations: It is important to make projects flexible, have a margin of freedom that allows for sculpting the experience while it is in progress, that way projects become mobile phenomena, not stationary, rigid, fixed structures...

As a teacher, you gradually become an agent whose mission is to balance the different concerns and interests within the group... This experience has allowed me to rethink the idea of a “project that has worked well”.

I will dare to say in conclusion that this project not only brought to light unexpected changes in our understanding of museum education, but also in our position at the museum as it shifted to other areas where we were free to work in unexpected ways.

7 Ibídem.

Collaborations with Social Integration Centre . COMMUNITIES I Amparo Moroño

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COLLABORATIONS WITH SOCIAL INTEGRATION CENTRE. Amparo Moroño The León Centre for Social Integration (CIS) is an institution under the auspices of the León Prison where inmates are either in medium security (Spanish code 100) custody or minimum security, where the penitentiary system allows for certain degrees of freedom.

We began our relationship with CIS encouraged by Aída, the centre's psychologist. She came to the museum to propose a weekly activity that would give the inmates something to do in their spare time, at the same time covering the cultural outing requirement instituted by the centre as a means of working toward social reintegration.

At first we started with guided visits to the exhibitions that would allow us to get to know each other and form a group. We were conscious of one of the premises we would have to work with regarding the inmates' living situation at the CIS. The inmates can have access to a job, they can study or in the best case scenario, have a short period of conditional or total freedom. With regard to our building a project together, this variety of statuses constituted quite an unstable group of people. The situation was described as: Fortunately, the members of the group had moved up in status for various reasons and acquired total or conditional freedom or a job placement.

However, this hindered our forming a unified group for the activity. At any rate, working with the museum gave these inmates new expectations and motivated them to continue seeking new life projects. It also broke up the daily routine that sometimes makes them turn inward and reject the outside world.

This group disparity forced us to work from the given circumstances and, just as these remarks indicate, create new strategies that would mesh with these circumstances. Even so, there was always a stable core of members integrated during this process that became a driving force for the various projects.

We had been collaborating consistently with a group of CIS inmates since 2008 when the directorate of the centre contacted DEAC with a serious joint proposal. From the word go, we researched different projects and a variety of mediums to find a proposal that would meet the needs and concerns of such a diverse group.

Workshop Diario de Sueños Intermitentes. with the artist Virginia Villaplana. 2009

Currently, we have three working groups that are involved in projects already open at DEAC: One group creates the MUSAC Abierto radio programme twice a month. They meet weekly at the museum in teams to create the content and design the programmes.

List of Activities

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p. 58

The second group comprises many of the people who began the Hipatia publishing project in the León Prison and who are now at CIS. They continue the project now with the advantages that freedom affords them: ability to access the internet and research in the library or use computers. They contribute support by transcribing texts, coordinating the publication and sending information to the inmates.

The third group participates in a permanent photography workshop that has recently started collaborating with the magazine Hipatia to supply the images to accompany the texts written by the inmates.

León, 29 October, 2006

At first, a contemporary art museum may seem a very complex option and we were receptive to it in different ways. It is important, however, to remember that a museum not only offers art and culture but can offer opportunities and projects as well. Culture is global, it encompasses the life of human beings; it is dance, music, reading...much more than artworks.

At this time in our lives, culture represents our roots, customs, lifestyles and everything we want to transmit to others. That is why our weekly visits to a cultural institution have served as a support for picking up something that we perhaps forgot about one day.

When we made the fist visits to MUSAC, we were still in Mansilla and we organised them from the Cáritas shelter on various leave permits.

(Rudy) For me it was the first time I went to a museum and I really liked it. It's not that I am that interested in art or culture but I was impressed to know that something or another could improve your life. I loved the Carmela García exhibition because I identified with what she was trying to show. I loved one of the photographs of a transsexual. It was called I want to be Lee Miller, from a portrait series.

The first time (pointing to Jenny) I came with the volunteers, the second time with Antonio. That's when we held the debate about the exhibition. The debates let us hear different points of view on a topic, about life, the meaning of the exhibition. Sometimes the ideas are not to one's liking or go off the subject. There are people who mix exhibition content with personal issues. This can be negative sometimes but also positive because it means that they are identifying with the themes on display.

We went from tours to cinema chats in the room of smells (in honour of the smell of leather seats). There were people who didn´t want to see a film because they found it boring or they hoped the movie would be different so that is why, when we debated, controversies came up that were out of the context.

To those of us who liked it, we found that in a movie, not only could you have an opinion but you also had to delve deeper into it to understand it, to value what it can transmit on its own. Examples of the films we found most interesting were Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Hours, where we could grapple with topics like the sexual fantasies of many people or internet relationships that allow people to have online conversations with others they don´'abt even know. In the projection of the film Retorno a Hansala that we saw later, we met up with a lot of people. It is a very real film that allows you to meet people that are going through the reality of immigration.

After a time, we realised we weren´t heading toward the reality we wanted, so there we decided to take steps towards what we wanted to do from then on, with the possibilities the museum opened up to us.

We held a meeting with Antonio, Nadia and Amparo, and that is where the idea of a photography project came up. Many things were suggested that day: theatre, video...It was Aurora's idea to use photography

Collaborations with Social Integration Centre. COMMUNITIES I Amparo Moroño

and so we took a vote. We started the following Wednesday and that's what we have been struggling with, with Carlos as our teacher, giving us unconditional support. Our objective was to stop taking pictures in order to take them more effectively and learn more about framing the subject, focusing, etc.

Some of us got involved once the project had started – we didn't even know there was a photography course at MUSAC; we heard about the course through friends. We got involved to have another chance to do something and feel useful after achieving a really important step like conditional freedom. When we started the course it seemed at first too complicated and we toyed with the idea of dropping out but after three weeks, we had the chance to start new things and that is why today we still continue coming here with greater enthusiasm.

Today at this moment of transition toward new projects, we have decided to turn our relations with MUSAC into something new and open up the possibility of transmitting to society the idea that there is always a way out of difficult situations.

Our new path is toward gaining new perspectives and to express them using other tools. Among the possibilities we are considering is the creation of a radio show in León. We think radio is one of the most important and direct media for showing that there is always something to be learned from making mistakes.

Merely the thought of someone being able to put themselves in our shoes and say to themselves that making a mistake can have a very high cost, is enormously satisfying to us – to get the feeling that may be they won´t do it. We think there are people who identify with the subject, and that in one way or another will think things through better before doing them. It could be good because society might realise that at some point, somebody can do something wrong but it doesn´'abt mean that crime defines who they are.

It would also be a way for us to vent and freely express what we really live through. Many times we forget that nobody is exempt from entering a world like this, where there are no differences in social class, race, colour...here we are all equals, judged in the same way and have the same rights. It is our attempt at fighting against discrimination toward people for being in a certain place because of some act committed in the past.

Through radio we will try to transmit our concerns and life experiences that have brought us to live within prison walls. We cannot ignore the limitations we have inside them. A lifestyle makes you change because you have to adapt to a new system in which you may have never before thought you could find yourself.

You live through good and bad things in a prison. Loneliness is one of the main things that sometimes makes you disconnect from what is around you. It could be your friend or your enemy but in the end, something good always comes of it.

It's hard to explain these truths, but just trying helps us remember that there will always be another opportunity behind any walls.We hope that this new era we are starting can give us the chance to make new choices and something we have been looking for up to now: make up for lost time.

Through all the activities offered at the museum, we have been able to express and create many things others would not have given us the opportunity to. For all of this, the CIS inmates thank MUSAC for all their support. We hope to be able to continue working to clear a path for those who come after us.

Jenny Q., Rudi V., Daniel G., Abderrachid E., René G., Amparo M.

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COMMUNITIES I. Collaborations with the León Prison Belén Sola

COLLABORATIONS WITH THE LEÓN PRISON Belén Sola There are projects that begin long before one can truly understand the reason for the bonds being formed. A certain intuition kicks in and brings you closer to the needs of your public. You are driven to create an educational department for people who, in some way, ultimately redesign and improve the department's functioning.

Such has been the case of the León prison facility project, where I have come to understand many aspects of our collaboration after having worked on it for some time. On one of my last visits to the prison in November of 2008, I stopped to read the inscription at the main entrance, a transcription of Article 25.2 of the Spanish Constitution: Punishments entailing imprisonment and security measures shall be aimed at rehabilitation and social reintegration...The person sentenced to prison...shall have access to cultural opportunities and the overall development of his or her personality.

In recent months, the media interviews we have held for the Hipatia magazine have mentioned a type of social work being carried out at MUSAC with some of the city's associations. This interpretation may perhaps have something to do with the first paragraph of the Constitution Article: Punishments entailing imprisonment and security measures shall be aimed at rehabilitation and social reintegration...However, I sustain that this project rests on the same educational and cultural foundation as the rest of the DEAC programmes, the only difference being that here we find ourselves before a group that is not entirely free to access the museum.

Therefore, the second paragraph of the Article is especially significant and relevant: The person sentenced to prison...shall have access to cultural opportunities and the overall development of his or her personality.

Happening upon this article supported my conviction that the collaboration with the prison, just as the efforts made with other visitors of groups denominated excluded or socially marginalized, is based on and pursues the same conceptual objectives we have set out in this book in terms of education, art and social outreach. This so-called social work – the professionals in these sectors and visitors from these groups can undoubtedly benefit from these projects. However, I think it is important to define our work, especially in these spaces where interdisciplinary boundaries tend to blur. Social work and art therapy are domains that either appear in, benefit from or are supported by our praxis but they are not the materials with which DEAC works.

Our cultural endeavours are based on the idea that women can stop being the consumers of their own image and start being producers of that image, then self-represent it. The latter case would be, as Elke Zobl declared "to elevate the awareness level in order to stimulate a cultural shift"1.

1 Elke Zobl. Transnational Networks of Everyday Feminist Practices: From Grrrl Zine Network to Grassroots Feminism, Zehar. 64. 2008. “Although the most visible sucesses of social movements are changes in policies and practices, cultural change is perhaps the most durable type of social change”.

Collaborations with the León Prison. COMMUNITIES I Belén Sola

Hipatia describes an educational project as well as the group of people that meet weekly in the prison. The magazine we publish is only part of the work we do. A dynamic publication, the texts vary, sometimes they are not authored by Hipatia members but rather cell mates that wish to share their personal stories, feelings and experiences with us. We are not interested in creating a fictitious publication; the texts are all from those living within prison walls: their ideas, their representations of their own relationships; family, educational and social milieu. This is our main objective, one that involves, however, a long-term process of de-coding and critical analysis: a formidable job we take on together. It is slow and arduous, but we believe it yields significant results every day.

Other activities we are currently carrying out at Hipatia have to do with distribution: searching for outlets and distribution points and lastly, the creation of a library specialised in gender subject matter within the block.

We are petitioning for sponsorship from publishers in the form of book donations and in funds to purchase a projector for a weekly video forum.

HIPATIA FROM THE BEGINNING The first outings made by the groups from the prison to MUSAC were in 2007. We began working with Carles Congost's pieces being shown at the time in the museum's showcases. The group made two visits to MUSAC in the summer of 2007 and the DEAC team went to the prison three times in September to continue the project.

The proposal consisted in the elaboration in text and images, of a conflict played out in the format of a soap opera. We divided the team into groups, each one responsible for drawing up a plot and creating the characters.

The story would follow the basic guidelines of a written narration: introduction, conflict and denouement, where each participant would have to play a part in the piece. After hearing versions of their stories where conflict resolution was defined by the way the characters were or behaved, we went back and tried to find other ways to finish the stories. We did this by first disassembling the characters: analysing the stereotypes the participants had chosen (most of them imposed by gender or social condition) then we built them back up again. In this second phase, we saw ways of solving problems or acting differently by trying new identities on these characters and giving them new relationships.

Using this first experience as a catalyst, we decided to establish a more stable and lasting relationship with the prison.

With the prison inmate population of 1700, we first had to decide what we wanted to do and how to proceed. We had our first encounter with the real space: a micro-city of steel, a prison built in 1995 with all the improved features of accessibility, security and comfort for the inmates and the staff.

Moreover, the prison authority was fairly open to proposals for the education and social interaction of the inmates. All of this made it easier for us to familiarise ourselves with the environment and the particular characteristics of this audience.

Exhibition Carles Congost.

19 May / 2 September 2007.

Project for the vestibule showcases. The first showcase held the photonovel, part of the book Say I’m Your Number One (presented at the exhibition’s opening). It narrates the vicissitudes encountered by the members of The Congosound, unable to meet their obligations as a proper music band, causing them to neglect the art-music events they were invited to.

The story of The Congosound, designed as a sort of musical pictobiography , examines the problems involved in musical production in our times, while at the same time launching a series of contemplations on teamwork, the passage of time and existential crises in the face of maturity.

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The Base: Who will we be working with?

Of the 1700 prisoners, only 130 were women. These figures revealed the reason for the lack of training and occupational programmes available to women: they were clearly outnumbered by men. At the same time, we found certain common parameters within the female inmate population that could not be ignored. Perhaps the most important factor for focusing our work on the women was precisely this disadvantage. The obvious discrimination of women in society is compounded behind bars: racial (80% are from other countries or ethnic groups within Spain), social (mainly related to prostitution and drug use) and sex (although it is difficult to obtain objective data on this), to name a few. All of these basic disadvantages are undoubtedly sustained by cultural discrimination. It is not by chance that those most marginalized and unprotected are found in prison.

The Vehicle: with what means shall we act?

Given all the aforementioned, we decided to work with the inmates from housing block 10 of the prison: the women's block. At the first meeting they showed interest in publishing a magazine they already had fairly well underway as far as the written material was concerned. They handed us their texts and we gave them a proposal for publication.

This publication would be the conduit for the educational exercise we proposed. Here we found an excellent medium for working the conceptual objectives previously established by DEAC. MUSAC would contribute support for the design, editing, publishing and distribution of the magazine.

At DEAC we made a commitment to collaborate monthly with the women to deliver information, documentation and logistical support. We would also aid in establishing an editorial line and serve as a catalyst and generating force for the participants' particular interests.

The Process: How, why and with what clear objective shall we proceed?

Through this magazine, many possibilities shall come to light and many objectives shall be met: -These women shall play the leading role in the exercise at all times.

-The process shall open up two facets of: the collective (multiple subjectivity) and the individual (individual subjectivity). This means that we can teach 2 gender perspective on two different fronts : Collectively: Why a magazine made by women? How does it differ from one made by men or by both sexes? These are questions the women themselves analyse and reflect upon in the structure of the magazine itself, which is created by women inmates for both women inside and outside the prison.

Individually: The magazine as a space that places women as the proponents of their own voice. Their words will be read and considered without cultural, economic, social or political colouring.

2 Collectivity can be understood as a space from which to develop as an individual. To follow the idea of Lorena Méndez and Fernando Fuentes in: La Lleca. Cómo hacemos lo que hacemos.

Mexico. 2008: “Collectivity does not mean the containment of identities of those working within the project, but a spilling out of them into a third space. We see the project as a construction of this third space – not belonging to the individual 'I' nor the collective in a traditional sense – but one where new subjectivities can be generated, and thus be collectives”.

Collaborations with the León Prison. COMMUNITIES I Belén Sola

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THE EDUCATIONAL ACTION This complexity by the context such as the fixed objetives, is visible too in the differentiated layers or levels in the educational action: Individual Level Aimed at inmates' expression, they choose the sections, topics and have full freedom of speech. The value of their personal stories and viewpoints is emphasized, with a thrust on recovering the lost or deteriorated selfesteem many of them brought with them to the prison. All those women who wish to are encouraged to participate regardless of their education, background, reasons for their prison sentence, etc.

Learning activities for develop skills such as expression, reading-writing, computer, photography...

Collective Level Aimed at regarding ourselves as women: what makes us different within the group, what makes us equal. Issues come to light regarding sexuality, race, social conditioning factors, etc.

Action plans for group strategies: how we define ourselves as a group, what our objectives are. Proposals for topics to expand on, strategies to follow: negotiations for attaining a cinema space, the presentation of the magazine in the other housing blocks, creating and managing a library specialised in gender matter within the block...

Critical Development Level Aimed at reflection on the cultural mind-set within each of us and ways of transforming archetypes and stereotypes. This is the main objective of our work, one which becomes increasingly visible in our magazine.

Discussions on one's own texts and those authored by others. (Until now, we have been reading Gloria Anzaldúa, Mujeres Creando and Fátima Mernissi).

Sound performance of Ciegas con Pîstolas. 2008

Workshop with María Galindo Mujeres Creando. 2009

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COMMUNITIES I. Collaborations with the León Prison Belén Sola

Interest was expressed that the magazine not become a satellite feature like other DEAC programmes, therefore the publication is used as premise for carrying out other activities, maximising the presence of artists and professionals coming to the museum to give workshops or related projects.

A case in hand was the sound performance by León musician and performer Nilo Gallego's group Ciegas con Pistolas at Christmas time, 2007. This event celebrated the magazine's commencement.

Another was the creative writing workshop led by Sara Rosenberg, held in the afternoons at MUSAC and in the mornings in the women's block at the prison during December 2008. Another example was the graffiti workshop organised by Maria Galindo (Mujeres Creando) in January 2009.

In July of the same year, writer and artist Virginia Villaplana visited, and members performed a recital of readings from her book Zonas de Intensidad.

In September of 2008, Hipatia was presented to the public with a press conference featuring the MUSAC director, the prison director and six members of the group.

With a circulation of 3.000, the publication is distributed free of charge to all prison facilities, museums, art venues, libraries and any collective interested in subscribing all over the word.

WE BELIEVE IN THE VOICE OF HIPATIA (Collective text written by women members of Hipatia in July 2009 for the journal for critique and thought Mordisco. Sevilla).

The magazine project Hipatia sprung from the need to fight against the invisibility of the figure of the female inmate.

We could have identified ourselves with some other name, but the philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria became a reference for all of us, just as many other women that have been forced to fight against the societies they live in, in the past as well as the present. For this reason, Hypatia represents for us all those nameless women in our history.

We believe in our voices, we believe that with them, we can counter the invisibility women suffer in all aspects of society. This invisibleness is compounded by imprisonment itself. This double discrimination is what we shall fight with our magazine Hipatia.

The first seed of this publication was sewn more than three years ago, when, almost devoid of any other means than pens and paper, a magazine was fashioned called Mujeres en Positivo. How wonderful to look back and see the grand legacy all those women inmates were able to bestow on us with their strength, tenacity and free spirit. Many of them are no longer here: to our great joy many of them are outside. But amongst us that first seed remains alive and now with the outside support of MUSAC’s Department of Education and Cultural Action, it has taken root in the form of Hipatia.

We can say that the project grows daily and that we, the participants, also change daily. (In the prison, we aren’t always able to maintain a constant number of women or the same members, but what is ongoing and constant is the Hipatia spirit).

Collaborations with the León Prison. COMMUNITIES I Belén Sola

Virginia Villaplana. 2009

This is how, in the first editions to come out, we’ve been able to address topics of interest to us while sharing our experiences and our belief in a medium that knows no limits, walls or boundaries.

Without Hipatia we would have lost a great opportunity to improve ourselves as people. We would have also lost a great opportunity to nourish our inner freedom which must be preserved even behind bars.

In this small housing block coexist different cultures, nationalities and beliefs. All that diversity, this great Tower of Babel has brought more to us than we could have ever imagined our first day inside.

A common feeling amongst us women is one of constantly jumping hurdles; life in prison is pure survival.

We feel powerless in the face of so many difficulties we encounter or that are imposed on us, making our inner strength the only thing capable of helping us move forward, survive in these cages and motivate us with different things.

This is how we can also appreciate the precious, unique and irreplaceable moments we live here. Certainly many of them would be impossible to experience without having lived in a prison, but we shall continue writing about them and sharing different thoughts with the idea that they be heard out on the street as well. In some odd corner, who knows, we may be able to move people’s consciences. Perhaps it could bring about initiatives related to our situation, like, for example, this opportunity with the journal Mordisco in Seville.

Through these pages we are sending a message of strength, conveying our proof that through teamwork great objectives can be met.

A warm greeting from all the women inmate members of the magazine Hipatia: a cry for liberty and freedom of expression from women who made a choice to move forward.

Hipatia’s women

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COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira / Amparo MoroĂąo / Mariola Campelo

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COMMUNITIES II. What Can Reach a Museum? Inclusion of Persons with Differents Abilities Nadia Teixeira

WHAT CAN REACH A MUSEUM? INCLUSION OF PERSONS WITH DIFFERENT ABILITIES. Nadia Teixeira Since the opening of the museum, the structure of DEAC has evolved through a process of redefinition and expansion; a process which has shaped its functions as well. In this process, collectives visiting the museum for a variety of reasons have been transformational and configurative agents in our educational practice. Such is the case of a programme we specifically designed for organisations working with the intelectual disabled.

This programme now extends, thanks to proposals from other collectives, to institutions for the hearing-impaired, people with cerebral palsy and mental illness.

From this wide spectrum of projects we have developed, I will select some those I found most meaningful to the clients and professionals at the centres, as well as the ones most significant to me personally, as a learner.

These experiences for they have allowed me to analyse and reflect on my praxis as an educator. Not having had formal training in what is known as special education, I consider myself to be an apprentice in this area. As a learnersuch, I am exploring the application of different educational perspectives to these groups.

All collaborations are long processes that begin with a period where participating organisations get to know each other. In the first meetings, that normally take place at the museum, we discover each other's modus operandi. Whenever possible, educators from the museum go to the centres to get a feel for the context in which the clients interact. At that moment, negotiations ensue, laying the groundwork for the museum experiences to be developed. In the design of these programmes, the contributions of the professionals involved should be balanced with those of the clients. These negotiations have taken on many different forms over the course of these years.

There are proposals where the clients' voices are absent in the initial phase of conceptualisation of the project, and their interpreters express their possible desires and concerns for them. This has been especially necessary in the case of persons with severe mental disabilities. The programmes may then vary and undergo modifications during their course as the parties gradually get to know one anotheracquainted. In other cases, the clients themselves became the prime agents designing the activities. The following is a brief description of the projects that show the evolution of the these activities.

Collaborations with ASPRONA Centres. COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira

COLLABORATIONS WITH ASPRONA CENTRES Nadia Teixeira The Nuestra SeĂąora del Camino Centre for Persons with Severe Mental Disabilities is one of the Asprona1 centres that has made weekly visits to the museum since its opening. The centre describes its aims: The overall objective of this centre has been to prepare the client to interact in his environment with the highest degree of autonomy possible. Emphasis is placed on developing habits of personal conduct, improving motor coordination, increasing pre-oral communication, fostering social skills and stimulating mental and learning activities.

The centre's director, Ignacio Medina saw museum visits as a way to allow his clients to participate in contemporary cultural production and to exercise, as far as possible, their full rights as citizens. When we began working together, we decided to create an environment propitious to overcoming obstacles and boosting the clients' individual capacities by designing specific programmes to this end. The experiences should eliminate the barriers restricting their activity, increase participation and thus promote a higher level of self esteem and personal development for each of the clients.

Ignacio and I would define the procedure guidelines prior to the sessions.

In many cases, however, these guidelines changed shape after the group visit to the exhibition, given the fact that gallery experiences are often surprising and can bring up unanticipated responses. At these meetings we tried to analyse the potential in each piece of artwork. We evaluated, among other things, the sensorial or cognitive character of the experience each one may offer and in what it they may be adapted to the clients, taking into account the diversity and nature of the clients' impediments.

During the time I've worked with Ignacio Medina, we have never avoided exposing the clients to certain works which might provoke negative reactions in the participants. Many times we find professionals who protect them from stimuli they consider to be negative before visiting the museum: the most common example may be darkness. In our practice, nevertheless, we try not to anticipate what their experience will be since once inside the museum space, possible fears or repulsions may not be reproduced the same way they are in daily life and these reactions can be directed in a constructive manner.

1. The Association for the Protection of Intellectualy Disabled Persons (ASPRONA) is an organisation dedicated to the attention and promotion of mentally disabled persons, committed to defending the rights of these citizens (Exerpt from the Asprona LeĂłn 2007 Annual Report).

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Exhibition Fusion: Aspects of Asian Culture in the MUSAC Collection.

17 December 2005 - 16 April 2006.

This group exhibition from the MUSAC permanent collection was aimed at establishing a dialogue between Western and Eastern worlds: worlds that, since the beginning of civilisation, have been visibly separated. At the same time these cultures have maintained symbiotic influences especially in the artistic domain. 14 artists: six Japanese, two Chinese, two Korean, two European, one South African and one South American discuss the understandings and misunderstandings, appropriations and influences of these two civilisations in the age of globalisation.

Blanca Li. Te voy a enseñar a bailar / I’m going to teach you to dance.

26 January /4 May 2008.

Contrary to what one may believe given the characteristics of these types of groups, some museum works have proven to be the basis for enriching experiences despite the difficulties. An example was in the exhibition Fusion and with a piece of Rirkrit Tiravanija called Untitled, 1999 (Caravan).

The piece was made to be used; a space for generating attitudes, behaviours or social relations. Since the development of social abilities is one of the prime objectives of the centre, everything was geared toward this from the clients' very entrance into the museum: when requesting their ticket, checking their coats, etc... In this installation a specific area was also built – an architectural structure within the museum space – that focused precisely on the routine of receiving the visitor. It reinforced the type of dynamics in play which, in museum visits, are like crossing borders.

We dedicated a session to making use of this caravantrailer: we had a snack there, we rested, we looked at books...we shared a social moment with one another within the parameters of equality the installation provided.

We have utilised other sites within the museum when we felt they could be favourable helpful for developing basic social skills and personal relationships among group members. We did something similar with the exhibition Te voy a enseñar a bailar by choreographer and dancer Blanca Li. In one of her video installations we viewed Fitness at Home, images of a kitchen and various utensils and electrical appliances. A family appeared moving to a choreography. This invited the visitors to imitate their movements, as they were situated in the real kitchen shown in the video.

During the activity, we rethought and reused the space and baked a cake there together.

Choreographer and multi-faceted artist.

Video and installation were the media chosen here, with a nod to hip-hop, advertising, musicals, videoclips and performance. She also uses Flamenco and classical ballet, her genre of expertise.

Multiculturalism and heterodoxy are constants in her work. Another recurring element is the humour that comes from turning the commonplace upside-down.

Here we see her interact with chairs, a kitchen, a gymnasium, a discotheque or within a nightmare while she is sleeping.

Each participant was given a job: taking ingredients from the fridge, putting on the table cloth, setting the table, manipulating and mixing ingredients.

Autonomy and reciprocal assistance were put into play here.

Collaborations with ASPRONA Centres. COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira

Exhibition Pierre Huyghe.

A Time Scor e / Una partitura en el tiempo.

26 January / 4 May 2006.

This artist transforms shapes from one state into another: an architectural structure becomes music, a data warehouse becomes a community, a trip turns into a musical comedy, institutional research becomes a puppet opera. His works are action zones full of human, economic, social and political interactions. Many of his works are done in conjunction with other artists, where the identity of the creator is collective, not individual. His works propose the refutation of the contemporary practice of taking someone's place and speaking in someone's name. His interest lies in readings with multiple and subjective interpretations, where he offers the characters and viewers to take control of their own stories.

This was very interesting in terms of interaction and the participants' commitment to the activity. It turned out to be a very useful experience, extracting value from an art piece by using it; removing it from formalism and distanced contemplation. As an action in itself, the experience provided visible outcomes for each of the clients.

On other occasions we have tried to programme activities that adapt as much as possible to the particular interests of the clients. During a visit to the exhibition A Time Score by French artist Pierre Huyghe, one of the participants, Salvador, focused his attention on the plants and trees the artist had placed in the exhibition and astonishingly, began to name them.

Due to his medication, Salvador had been listless for weeks and we hadn’t been able to motivate his participation using the artwork. We then thought about how we could incorporate this unexpected interest of his and decided to programme a flower-planting session.

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COMMUNITIES II. Collaborations with ASPRONA Centres Nadia Teixeira

From then on, with this gift Salvador had given us as a pretext, every time the group came to the museum, we cared for and watered those flowers before starting our programmed activity.

We have also designed educational projects independently from any exhibition being showcased at that moment. They were autonomous experimentation projects based on a particular theme or on exploring a certain tool. An example is the photography project carried out in October and November of 2007. To start with, participants had no knowledge of using how to use a camera and some had never even held one. For this reason, the objectives we set were experiential and experimental. The first sessions were dedicated to familiarisation with the tool: handling it, exploring its features and possibilities in order to advance, in future sessions, to taking photographs. During these sessions, the participants had external assistance.

We tried to get them to associate the real object with the representation of it by recognising what was photographed on the camera's screen. This made them aware of the act of representation. This was a complex association for most of the group's members and although it is impossible to confirm to what extent it took place, some of them were able to assimilate how the camera worked and take some shots. AgustĂ­n, on the other hand, acted quite differently. Immediately after arriving at DEAC, he took his camera out of the case and went outside, pointing his camera toward whatever he fancied shooting. At the end of this second phase, we printed the images they all had made. When we said 'Look! You took this one!', they expressed delight.

Collaborations with ASPRONA Centres. COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira

Ignacio Medina made the following comments on this project: We hoped to open their realm of experiences just a bit further with this photography workshop.

Various sessions were dedicated to learning the mechanics of using a camera.

This process involved various factors: motivation, attention, comprehension, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, hand-eye coordination...

Once this was attainedachieved, the participants chose what to focus on and what to photograph.

The highly gratifying result is the photography board prominently hung on a wall at the Nuestra SeĂąora del Camino centre.

Our doubt, as always, is if we as educators had too much influence on the decision-making and selecting. The experience was very positive since it offered an additional chance for them to access something 'normal'.

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COMMUNITIES II. Collaborations with ASPRONA Centres Nadia Teixeira

Exhibition Enrique Marty.

Flaschengeist. La caseta del aleman (The Tent of the German man).

17 December 2005 / 16 April 2006.

At this time I would like to address some of the issues that have arisen for some time in relation to people with mental disabilities. I will do so starting with a photograph Ignacio took when we were visiting the Salamanca artist Enrique Marty exhibition; Flaschengeist. The Tent of the German Man, with his group.

Through an elaborate stage set, the Salamanca artist reconstructs the ambiance of a fair from the past. Different tents house the characters of this particular freak show: the levitating girl, the man with seven heads, the snake woman, the man with the giant head, the dog man, etc.

What lies hidden in this photograph seems paradoxical to me. In the forefront is a group of individuals and in the background, a carousel – a lively part of Enrique Marty's fair. Through this carousel, one can look at catch a glimpse of the past. The content of the exhibition was directly related to the group. The exhibition recreated the fairs of years gone by where people with physical deformities were exhibited in a way that made a spectacle –and a fortune– of them.

Seeing this image again brought me back to the moments whenre I had to decide whether to avoid this exhibition; at least for these collectives. In fact I did so, except in the case photographed here, when we got closer to see the carousel. At the time it seemed too harsh, exposing them to an exhibition whose content reflected such a monstrous social reality. Later, this experience made me question my stance; whether I behaved appropriately or was being excessively over-protective. But if this experience did one thing, it helped me reflect upon the ways these collectives can develop a critical sense.

I still continue to research this last aspect. In some of these individuals’ cases, the lack of efficient structures beginning in these peoples'early childhoods is a strong impediment to their developing a critical view of things. Although everything around me tells me it will be a tough job with for some of them, I will keep working toward that end.

Collaborations with ASPRONA Centres. COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira

One of the projects starting at this very moment -geared toward the development of a subject’s critical sense- is one with the San Nicolás de Bari2 Centre of Asprona. Its main objective is community integration3; an objective pursued by the majority of associations working with disabled people. As the programme evolves, we will strive to pinpoint which directions favour integration and which hinder it. It has yet to be decided what media will be used in the elaboration of these personal narratives. We hope they will reveal yet more of the concerns these groups have: jobs and income, sexuality, family, how to attain effective emancipation, etc. Perhaps these narratives can be beneficial to other client groups as well .

Workshop Contact Improvisation, Eckhard Müller y Daniela Schwartz.

2 This centre is located at Quintana de Raneros, a town 14 kilometres from the city of León.

The groups that visit us are from the areas of Occupational Therapy, Occupational Workshops and the Art Room. The professionals working on the project with us are Melchor Santamaría and María Jesús López Diez.

3 One of the examples of what we call inclusive practices consisted in inviting the clients from the San Nicolás centre to a contemporary dance workshop Contact Improvisation (held 1 - 4 October 2008). This experience can be defined as pluralistic and multidirectional given its focus for all the participants: the dancers instructing the workshop, Daniela Schwart and Eckard Muller, the students with professional training, the therapy centre educators and clients of Asprona. We all found it enriching to share the spaces and experience each other's different abilities, adding new dimension to the workshop's original expectations.

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COMMUNITIES II. Collaborations with the León Autism Association Amparo Moroño

Exhibition Candice Breitz.

Multiple Exhibition.

20 January / 6 May 2007.

An exhibition structured around five video installations. Through the splicing and montage of existing images and family videos, the artist re-exhibits the found material. She reveals, thus, the make-up and ideologies belying the materials.

Just as in karaoke and sampling, the original material is recycled, remixed and altered. Breitz uses film imagery that she appropriates from commercial cinema, television and music videos to access a critical space which examines the use of visual language as products of the ever-more dominant media industry as well as the methods and intentions hidden behind it.

COLLABORATIONS WITH THE LEÓN AUTISM ASSOCIATION. Amparo Moroño In the summer of 2006, the León Autism Association visited the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León with a group of autistic children aged six to ten. The educators at the museum, the children's parents and tutors all assessed the experience as a very positive one. It provided new motor and sensory experiences for the group and most importantly, provided new contexts previously foreign to their day-to-day world.

Based on these appraisals and with the intention of establishing a working connection between both entities, we began a long-term collaborative project in February of 2007 at the museum, confident that the exhibition halls would provide an exceptional learning space for these children with Autism and Asperger Syndrome.

As we find with other children, not all autistic children relate equally to their surroundings, nor do they go through the same learning processes.

In the case of autistic children their education must be individualised in a special way since their educational needs are extremely disparate. Any activity that does not take this into account not only runs the risk of being futile but of even being potentially harmful for the intellectual and emotional development of each child.

This is why, in the face of forthcoming future relations between both collectives, the museum decided to establish six sessions for building familiarity and mutual understanding. These sessions took place in February, March and April. We worked from the artist Candice Breitz's exhibition Multiple Exhibition, and were able to evaluate how bonds between the group and the exhibition formed progressively. We examined the group's level of receptiveness to the audiovisual pieces and to the different art techniques used in the workshops.

Collaborations with the LeĂłn Autism Association. COMMUNITIES II Amparo MoroĂąo

Common Aims This project started off as a familiarisation period between the museum and the group of children. As such, the educators understood this project to be essentially experimential in nature. The general objective was to discover how we interacted in a museum and in what way we wanted to work with the images so we could make accurate decisions in our joint programming with future exhibitions.

Our objective was to introduce new social and relational environments into the children's everyday world and explore meaningful learning possibilities for them within a contemporary art space. We worked on sensory stimulation using audiovisual art that revealed other forms of relating to colour, sound and shapes. Another research direction had to do with stimulating communication systems that are complementary to oral language (absent in the majority of the children). We also used arts and crafts exercises to familiarise the participants with new textures and materials. This afforded us an opportunity to work as a group and experiment with the body and the senses.

Through this first trial experience and various evaluation sessions involving the museum and association educators, we were able to decide on focal points for our future practices. The help of the volunteers was invaluable because they recorded everything in their field notebooks. These notebooks were brought out at the beginning of the project as open tools where educators, family members and volunteers could record their thoughts related to the weekly experiences of each child.

This was how we have sculpted the work we do today: recognising the educational potential an art museum can provide for this collective; a public space for establishing relational experiences as well as a place for experimentation and learning with two-dimensional imagery; a place to embrace new sensory experiences using visual and aural stimuli.

We established three axes for our practices that corresponded to those followed by the regular educators in the association classrooms: - Working on social skills using the potential of the museum (a public space) as a starting point.

- Using works of art as sources for multiple sensory stimuli.

- Exploring two-dimensional imagery as a communications tool.

We have worked together in an on-going fashion over the course of four exhibition cycles using different tools and strategies for each exhibition.

The contributions of each of the adults involved in the project and the information gathered from the children in the pilot project were always welcomed, serving as our guideline.

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COMMUNITIES II. Collaborations with the LeĂłn Autism Association Amparo MoroĂąo

Some words from the Association: At the LeĂłn Autism Association we try to meet the special needs of our clients; autistic children. The attention and treatment of people with autism should be geared toward providing them with the maximum quality of life and normalisation normality possible. One must cultivate a lifestyle similar to that of normal people. These children have the same need to enjoy themselves and the same concerns as other people their age. This is why we attempt to satisfy these demands within the most normalised framework possible.

Access to entertainment, sport and cultural activity is increasingly important in today's society. People with autism have the right to enjoy entertainment, sport and culture as an equal opportunity. These activities, even if they are focused on enjoyment, also provide interventional continuity.

Our first contact with the Educational Department of MUSAC, seemed very enriching and pioneering for our sector. On the one hand, the programme was complementary to the therapy they normally receive and on the other, we're offering a new context that could become a new alternative for spare time activity.

Currently, the basic needs of the children at the association are the same as those of other children their age: they need to play and participate in different leisure activities. They are curious about their surroundings and want to understand it, they have different sensory experiences, a need for organisation and communication, affection, learning, interest in new technologies, a need to improve their social and emotional relationships, etc.

The main difficulty we have at this point is being able to include our children in different programmes (leisure, sport and culture...) It takes intensive preparation of the children themselves as well as the people who will interact with them. We have few opportunities to allow them to make the most of these experiencesthese exposures to their fullest.

Having the Museum as a stage to work on has been a great advantage. Because of its physical and humane qualities we have discovered an advantageous space to carry out our programmes.

We have set some long long-term objectives for this project: 1. Supporting the organisation and planning methodology used with the children in at their school.

We coordinated with their educators so as to use the same communications tools they use in their school, thus facilitating their understanding and helping them to take onacquire new knowledge.

2. Making equal applications of the knowledge learned to the child's context.

We try to coordinate the new knowledge gaining acquisition from these programmes with that of their school. In this way the children learn to apply this knowledge to other contexts.

3. Utilising different communication aids with different people.

The communication notebooks are priceless tools for anticipation and comprehension and serve as well as expression supports. We consider it advantageous that they be used in as many situations as possible and with different people. This is the way to get the most out of them.

Collaborations with the León Autism Association. COMMUNITIES II Amparo Moroño

4. Exposing the children to different sensory experiences.

The way the children perceive different stimuli (visual, olfactory, tactile, taste, aural or proprioceptive) will have a direct bearing on their behaviour. Their difficulty in transmitting their emotional states constantly inhibits our understanding of their malcontent or on the contrary, their enjoyment and 'obsession' for certain objects or places. The museum visits are allowing us to compile information about the stimuli that cause greater or less degrees of anxiety and facilitate our work on in conjunction with them.

5. Using imagery as a methodology base.

We use images to help the children understand social situations and the emotional states of others. They do not have a global perception of the environment around them, so we believe it is important to expose them continually to real images in order to facilitate this comprehension.

6. Improving social skills We can use the museum as a place to meet different types of people and the exhibition as a place for new social learning – how to greet someone, how to get a ticket. This helps them to understand future actssituations.

7. Reducing behavioural rigidity.

Given their particular way of perceiving their environment and their serious difficulties with thought and understanding variation, their behaviour is often rigid and not highly tolerant to change.

We find it is good therapy for children to have the greatest amount of exposure to different contexts, programmed and structured in accordance to their needs.

8. Improving symbolic play.

The use of some exhibitions as a context for playing has served as a complement to other activities carried out with the children on a continual regular basis in the school for Autism.

The León Autism Association and myself personally, greatly appreciate the professionalism, human qualities, patience and sensitivity that Amparo has shared with our autistic children. She has truly been able to appreciate the special, enriching aspects of our collective.

We would also like to give thanks to our volunteers from La Caixa and others, whose collaboration was indispensable crucial to carrying out our project; and of course, to MUSAC, for wanting to share art with disabled persons.

Mercedes Jimeno Sánchez Psychologist, León Autism Association

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COMMUNITIES II. Collaborations with the State Referral Centre for Persons with Severe Disabilities Nadia Teixeira

Exhibition Cerith Wyn Evans.

Visible/invisible.

26 January /4 May 2008.

Selected recent works by the Welsh artist who, first interested in cinema, began in the 1990's to expand her means of expression into installation works where she avails of photography, audiovisuals, neon and sculpture. The spaces she creates carry references to theories of perception; baroque stage sets where the ambiance, sensory perceptions and emotions evoked in the spectator often take precedence over the piece itself. Works by Sánchez Ferlosio or Ramón del Valle Inclán are transmitted in Morse code to be decoded through signals of light. Some other works are designed to be enjoyed behind closed eyelids.

COLLABORATIONS WITH THE STATE REFERRAL CENTRE FOR PERSONS WITH SEVERE DISABILITIES Nadia Teixeira The collaborations with this collective have been fairly recent, beginning in March, 2008. The relationship started with the museum visit planned by Carmen Macías, a counsellor for the Memory and Creativity section at the centre. That day in a follow-up meeting attended by Carmen and the museum educators, both parties decided to maintain in contact in the future.

We began to work on ways to design a series of learning experiences which would facilitate knowledge about contemporary art for the clients at C.R.E.1 In later meetings, Carmen showed specific interest in working with photography. Once the group had agreed on this, we began to design an educational proposal that allowed for workingto work with the Cerith Wyn Evans exhibition content, using photography as a medium.

The proposal was based on the title of the exhibition Visible/Invisible, referring to the posthumously published book by philosopher MerleauPonty. In the exhibition, a series of luminous installations generated situations where we might question our perception: something is there so I see it, something is present but it can't be seen, something is not visible but can be found hiding in the form of a ghost or a reflection, etc. In this conceptual context, it seemed the photographic eye would be the ideal instrument with which to partake in the sensory experience the artworks and the museum spaces provided.

The project was carried out in three sessions over three weeks. We first became familiar with using the cameras, then later explored the galleries.

The activity was based on carefully looking at the pieces and experimenting with the camera to produce images that would allow us to examine the concepts of visibility and invisibility. The nature of the medium facilitated the task: in the photographs taken, things appeared due to the particular qualities of the pieces photographed – luminous phenomena not perceived at first sight. Some participants were worried about getting the correct composition of the image due to their difficulties in holding or handling the camera. We encouraged them to show us their own independentlyattained results. We were interested in how they used their individual possibilities and abilities to depict their own vision through the camera lens. We encouraged them to gain confidence by adopting a relative concept of technical perfection.

1 State Referral Centre for Persons with Severe Disabilities, Promotion of Personal Autonomy and Aid for Dependent Persons.

Collaborations with the State Referral Centre for Persons with Severe Disabilities. COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira

In the last session, continuing the game of the visible and invisible, we suggested discovering the invisible areas of the museum, meaning the restricted access zones. We sought permission to be allowed free access to them and were then free to roam. This led us into maintenance areas, the back of the restaurant, the car park, the photocopy room... At the end of the session the groups held a viewing and a selection of the photos.

The C.R.E. made copies of them and installed an exhibition in their Memory and Creativity room.

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COMMUNITIES II. Collaborations with the State Referral Centre for Persons with Severe Disabilities Nadia Teixeira

Exhibition Carmela García.

Constelación 17 May / 7 September 2008.

Constelación is the continuation of the artist’s long-term investigation process into gender and identity. In this exhibition, Carmela García built her work upon a concrete spatial-temporal reference, the city of Paris: the place, the left bank of the Seine; the time, the interwar period of the 1920s and 30s. This is the scene where she followed the lives of a group of women, reconstructing and documenting them. They all had very singular identities and sometimes lived together and collaborated with each other, coinciding in that space and time.

Dominique González-Foerster.

Nocturama 17 May / 7 September 2008.

Nocturama was an ambience exhibition comprising five piece-spaces; Promenade, a piece created with Christophe Van Huffel based on sounds creating a tropical space; Tapis de lecture , an invitation to lounge surrounded by piles of books; Cinelandia, a selection of films by Dominique Gonzalez Foerster; Solarium, a space for contemplation and the absorption of light; and lastly, Nocturama , a piece specifically created for the Museum, creating a new surrounding.

After this experience, and with the changing of exhibitions in May 2008, two more projects were designed and are still underway involving other clients of the C.R.E. One of these works with is in conjunction with the exhibition Constelación (Constellation) by Carmela García, while and another came about after a visit to the exhibition Nocturama by French artist Dominique González Foerster.

Carmela García's exhibition explored a certain period of history: the 1920's, within a specific context. Based on the transgressive positions of women (depicted in the exhibition) who revolutionised the notion of gender, we initiated a debate on the situation of women throughout history, their struggles to attain equality and about the complexities of sexual identity.

The piece Constelación at the entrance of the gallery gave us ample material from which to work. It was like a map where the artist had situated portraits of these women and established relationships among them. The portraits displayed ambiguity – the women were dressed in a fashion far too masculine for the time period. We also encountered images of men artists dressed as women or who signed women's names to their work and other references one may consider essential strategies in redefining the notion of gender in the first avant-garde of period in Paris. In terms of continuing the project, it was important to take note, in Constelación, of how these women wished to be portrayed and where, what poses they adopted and all the self-representation mechanisms used that allowed us to read into their intentions.

In the following meetings, we decided to do a bit of research to charge Carmela García's exhibition with other meanings and understand these women's intentions at the time in which they lived. In order to do this, we went to the museum library and set up computers for our internet search.

Days earlier, we had asked the participants if they had used this toolthe internet before. The responses were mostly negative and we felt it might be a good time for them to have their first contact with this tool, with our helpassistance.

Each one of the participants then chose one of the women protagonists and created an information and image archive on her. Later, we pooled our images and analysed the way the women were represented or represented themselves in them. Some of the questions guiding the debate were: What gestures or poses does she like to use to portray herself?

Where was she photographed or with what objects? How did they dress?

Is this appropriate dress for her time? What does it say about them?

As a logical and natural consequence, we proposed shifting this investigation from the women portrayed to the members of the group itself. That is, they would continue this research process but this time with one of their colleagues. They took cameras with them to their centre to work on portraits. The aim here was to get them to know one another a bit better and to think about how to consciously represent a colleague classmate.

Collaborations with the State Referral Centre for Persons with Severe Disabilities. COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira

We set up a meeting in their centre to talk about the elements that could be used in the making of a portrait. We created a small outline of the things that we would need to know before shooting. In the interchange, it was necessary to address the differences between taking a portrait – the image of another – and the task of representing one's self, taking a self portrait.

Carmela García's pieces seemed to have anticipated this already.

Another project idea evolved during a visit to the Dominique González Foerster exhibition. We debated at length about the installation located in one of the museum patios, in which seats had been arranged throughout the space. Various interpretations arose while analysing that scene. To many, the chairs reminded them of street furniture, benches or seats situated in such a way that predetermined people's relations with one another. While in that space, they commented on their experiences: difficulties they had encountered in the city, meeting and relating to people who do not move about in wheelchairs, the disabilities society actually creates by not removing architectural barriers, the need to raise people's awareness and many other issues that spilled into further meetings. The question: what do we do with all this? was a call to action.

Proposals came up such as getting media coverage, holding talks and programming interventions in public spaces, elaborating consciousnessraising signage, etc. Thus far, we have created a blog entitled Accesibilidad para todos (Accessibility for all) with the idea of facilitating a platform for sharing experiences and opinions on the wheelchair-user's relationship to his or her environment and society in general.

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COMMUNITIES II. Collaborations with the State Referral Centre for Persons with Severe Disabilities Nadia Teixeira

The projects described here are practical approaches; the beginning of a path leading to realistic and effective possibilities for institutional collaboration. In our opinion, the slightly blurry terrain where educational praxis with disabled individuals meets with the services DEAC can offer as a contemporary art museum can only be explored through a process of complicity, negotiation, coordination and continual evaluation of experiences.

The characteristics of openness, flexibility and adaptability required of these programmes can be enhanced by the very nature of contemporary art practices themselves. This is also true for the nature of contemporary art museums and their emphasis on how they receive the public.

Interdisciplinary research, as well as the training of those practitioners and educators involved, should respond to the pedagogical domains and social 2 actions addressed to date . With all their successes and errors, we have outlined the aims of the projects pioneered at our centre.

We strive daily to improve our strategic goals. We also test their flexibility to meet the challenges of diversity. We seek to attain, progressively, the extension of our institutions toward an active cultural citizenship for everybody; regardless of their abilities.

This is where we are.

2 At MUSAC, various meetings between professionals from these areas and museum educators have been held to foster dialogue and understanding. Spanish Federation of Organisations for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities (FEAPS) and the Santa Isabel mental health Hospital of Leรณn are two of the participating organisations in these events. Events to date are: The 8th Edition of the Asociaciรณn Castellano y Leonesa Mental Health Recognition Seminars (9 and 10 May 2008) and the Self-representing organisations of FEAPS 7th Regional Meeting (20 and 21 October 2007), and The 1st MUSAC Seminar on Diversity Attention, organised in collaboration with FEAPS (19 and 20 December 2008). See List of Activities.

The Hearing-impaired in an Accesible Museum. COMMUNITIES II Mariola Campelo

THE HEARING-IMPAIRED IN AN ACCESIBLE MUSEUM. Mariola Campelo Although brief, our experience in the area of physical and sensorial disabilities has opened our eyes to the need of addressing museum accessibility for these collectives by eliminating architectural, communication and information barriers in our galleries and exhibitions.

One of the initiatives addressing this issue at DEAC started at the beginning of 2008 – a project that would meet the needs of and integrate hearingimpaired and deaf persons.

Deaf people have a history of suffering from social communication exclusion and restricted access to information and cultural activities. In Spain, in the past, the society that surrounded them (the hearing public) prohibited the use of sign language, forcing them into an oral communication system that retarded their learning processes. At the time, integration was understood as the adaptation of an individual to his or her social environment and the individuals’ abilities were not regarded.

In Spain today, the law recognises the Spanish Sign Language (LSE) as a natural language. It also recognises support systems for oral communication for the deaf or hearing-impaired. The first of DEAC's actions in this area was to adapt a guided visitors service for this collective.

Interested groups can be accompanied by an LSE interpreter and an educator. To facilitate the communication for signers and oral communicators, a description of the exhibitions has been adapted to a simplified language that can be interpreted into LSE more readily.

We have located spaces with the best visibility inside the exhibitions so that the hands and lips of the interpreter can be seen easily. The numbers of visitors at one time has been reduced to 15 and the visiting sessions increased to two hours. We understand that a deaf person must view the guide at the same time he or she views is viewing the artwork itself and therefore will need more time to process it all.

Sign-guides and assistive devices for the hearing impaired are being studied to facilitate autonomy and access to the information in the museum.

At the same time we are working on an educational programme in collaboration with the Hearing Deficiency Detection Specific Team of León, that began in October of 2008.

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COMMUNITIES II. The Hearing-impaired in an Accesible Museum Mariola Campelo

This team seeks out deficiencies in the integration process of deaf children in normalised schools from early childhood education to secondary school.

They evaluate and diagnose the needs in the schools and counsel teachers as well as parents.

p. 74

Exhibition. p. 68

Our project came about through contact with one of the groups collaborating at the museum: the León Autism Association. The Through collaborations between DEAC and various entities organisations and the the close relationships established amongst the the professionals and clients, we were able to contact paved the way for the contacts made between DEAC and Mercedes Taboa and Mónica Lizarralde, educational psychologists from the Specific Team. These professionals wanted to arrange an activity for hearing-impaired adolescents in the León province. They were familiar with our work through Mercedes Jimeno, a psychologist from the León Autism Association, and were in favour of agreed to holding the a meeting at MUSAC. We suggested conducting a tour adapted to the needs of these adolescents.

We chose to work with an exhibition going on at the time, Te voy a enseñar a bailar by choreographer and dancer Blanca Li because this particular artist's study of body language was a very accessible visual language for this group. The educational psychologists participated in the organisation of this visit. The group was accompanied by two DEAC educators and one LSE interpreter who had volunteered for that day and now collaborates as an interpreter at the museum.

It proved to be a positive experience for all parties. Necessary The children were provided with the resources were offeredneeded to interpret and contextualise the exhibition with context-providing background. The studentsand they participated actively during the hours it took to cover the materialsee it all. They integrated naturally into the museum space in a natural way and were able to meet with each other on a social level, something that they don't normally get to do. As We, the hearing audience accompanying them, we enjoyed being able to see what interested these adolescents, their desire to communicate with one another and their open attitude toward what the museum could offer them.

After that experience, the interest in continuing a sustained collaboration was mutual. At present, we are working on different specific educational programmes for the children and adolescents working with the team, that will be executed during fortforthcoming exhibitions.

We will also examine the projects for an In-house House Day at MUSAC, where DEAC educators and professionals from Equipo Específico de Deficiencia Auditiva will participate, along with LSE interpreters, the children themselves and various individuals interested in participating in programmes for this community.

Persons Diagnosed with Mental illnesses as Museum Users. COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira

PERSONS DIAGNOSED WITH MENTAL ILLNESS AS MUSEUM USERS. Nadia Teixeira In this collective we find encounter people who suffer from the effects of their own illnesses on the one hand, and on the other, the impediments imposed by society, often translating into circumstances of isolation. The groups who that have come to the museum have done so thanks to rehabilitation programmes coordinated by their centres, such as the Psychosocial Rehabilitation Centre, ALFAEM and the San Antonio Abad Hospital. Other members are hospitalised, such as those in the Santa Isabel Hospital.

The museum can act, in these cases, as a comprehensive, inclusive, and de-stigmatising venue where visitors from these communities can develop group projects and build have a space where they feel their voice is needed, heard, respected and valued.

Contrary to the myths relating psychopathologies with a special capacity for creativity, I have found it very important in the groups I have worked with to rekindle what seems to be a dormant creative capacity. This creative sense can be activated in each individual through what I like to call hope and motivation.

At times it seems like such an effort for them. Overcoming the potent effects of their medication is not easy; so the pace of the sessions must adapt to the group. When the first centres started coming to the museum – after the first meetings with occupational therapists, social workers and psychiatrists – I wondered whether I should be familiar with each person's diagnosis before creating a programme syllabus.

What is first and foremost in this case? Meeting the person without knowing what mental illness they had; holding a conversation with them, asking what their concerns are; or knowing what the illness is and then starting from there to programme activities?.

The important issue was not having the clinical diagnosis of each individual but perhaps knowing how it affects ther motor skills, how they interacts, how they processes. Not only is it important to know the psychiatrist's view, but also that of the person with whom you are working with in order to and address those necessary specific aspects in the programmed activities as well as in the personal interaction1.

1 This idea is crucial to situating our practice within the domain of museum education and not art therapy that does indeed start with a diagnosis to aid the patient through art.

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COMMUNITIES II. Persons Diagnosed with a Mental illness as Museum Users Nadia Teixeira

COLLABORATION BETWEEN MUSAC AND SANTA ISABEL HOSPITAL This project is the first of what would become long-term collaborations 2 between MUSAC and the Hospital Santa Isabel Hospital of León . The project lasted approximately one year, stemming from a series of visits to the museum by the Rehabilitation Unit of Santa Isabel Hospital, coordinated by the hospital psychologist, Carmen Rodríguez. In the interest of establishing a formal museum-hospital relationship, a project was developed by the professionals of both entities: social workers, psychiatrists, occupational therapists, clients and DEAC educators. Different target experiences were negotiated in these talks. Crucial to the execution of the project was the mutual familiarisation of the entities involved in order for them to work responsibly and with a profound commitment and responsibility.

From the museum to the hospital On 24 March of 2007 we travelled to the hospital to familiarise ourselves with our clients' environment. We took note of the spaces we may want to use for group activities in the future such as the occupational therapy workshops, the special needs employment centre, the auditorium, the library and the social club.

2 The Hospital Santa Isabel was created in 1965 as part of the León hospital complex. It is located on the outskirts of the city. The Hospital has different units: Psychiatric Convalescence Unit (UCP), Rehabilitation Unit, Long-term Psychiatric Unit and Assisted Living Units. Over the course of the project, people hospitalised in different units came on board, as well as those in assisted living, making the client group diverse in nature. A family member of one of the clients also participated.

Persons Diagnosed with a Mental illness as Museum Users. COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira

Project initiation A meeting was called held on 31 May 2007 at MUSAC attended by Carmen Rodríguez, (psychologist), Laura Franco (occupational therapist), Jesús Morchón (psychiatrist), Rafael Gil (psychiatrist), Ignacio de Lucas (psychologist) and myself. The meeting entailed visiting exhibitions and exploring possible lines of actiondirections. We decided to begin by using an exhibition by French artist Pierry Huyghe, A Time Score. We felt that with his work we could explore a series of concepts like relationships between the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. We worked with four different pieces from the exhibition: The practical proposal Using the This is Not a Time for Dreaming video, we discussed the way in which Pierre Huyghe represented the story. We also discussed the process of acting out the piece with puppets. Our proposal was to collectively build a story – real or fictitious – and use puppets to enact it.

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Project development The works on display invited us to question the fine line dividing the real, the fictitious and the symbolic: a recurring theme for a person with mental illness and an appropriate one for studying his or her particular viewpoint.

I remember during the discussion we held, someone told me that his or her struggle was precisely that, distinguishing between the three.

Another piece was a marionette that portrayed the artist himself and had to do withwas related to the video This is not a time for dreaming. A character manipulated by strings lead us to reflect on the strings which compel us to act like marionettes at times; not inunable to control of ourselves.

List of Activities

The initial proposal was well received and set off an adventure that lasted nearly a year. Nobody in our group had knowledge of the puppet world except one DEAC educator who had participated in a course given at MUSAC by Anxo García, puppeteer and director of the Museo de las Marionetas (Marionette Museum) of Lalín (Pontevedra).

Our next step was to decide as a group what story we wanted to tell.

One of the ideas was to make a story about mental illness but was not one of the most popular options when put to a voteit was not very popular in the voting. The proposal that won the consensus was the narration of a dream. We then set uparranged our next meeting where we would pool our dreams together to elaborate a script.

At our next meeting, this time at the hospital, it was decided we would vote on one of the dreams that would outline the general structure of the play. The most popular dream was Máximo's – one about a strip club.

José Méndez wrote the final script. As agreed, a character from each of the members' dreams would be included.

Using all these dream characters, José Méndez gave shape to this comedy script.The rest of the group worked on the puppet-making process. There were various suggestions but in the end, it was decided kitchen utensils would be used to handcraft them. Little by little the objects became more lively and more and more expressive.

For example, the character of one of the sex workers at the club was portrayed by a lighter in the shape of a match. Each time she approached a customer, the lighter lit up, playing with the concept of the heat and fire of seduction. Another object was a spray bottle. We used it to portray the grumpy old woman who yelled at her husband for talking to the girls at the club. She would show her anger by dousing him with water. For the Civil Guard officers, the participants chose two objects one would use to hammer or smash something, and so on. Then each one chose a character and we began working on the voices and movements of each puppet.

Persons Diagnosed with a Mental illness as Museum Users. COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira

THE MAD STRIP CLUB STORY PART I On a cloudy afternoon at the beginning of autumn, at the end of summer.

Antonio can be seen on some waste grounda piece of waste ground picking the last summer flowers.

Antonio: I've stopped my car here because I'm going into that dive with something new: a bunch of flowers for the fist girl who comes up to me.

He goes into the strip club and upon seeing him, the workers and customers all start to smile, taken by surprise. One of the prostitutes, Sara, goes up to Antonio.

Sara: Those flowers are really pretty, where did you get them?

Antonio: I picked them the field out there at the back.

Manolo (waiter): What will it be, sir?

Antonio: A glass of milk and champagne for my friend. What was your name?

Sara: My name is Sara.

Antonio: Ever since I first laid eyes on you, I’ve wondered what it would be like to spend a night with you. I feel something special for you. You're not like the others.

Sara: We can be together tonight but you know that for me you are just another punter and I need the money. It's 100 euros.

Antonio: Don't worry about the money, I've brought enough to be with you.

Manolo: Go on up and they'll bring your drinks right up to the room.

They disappear up the steps and the sky suddenly starts to rumble. It's raining cats and dogs. At the flash of a lightning bolt, the door opens and an entire family with young children enters.

Pedro (father): We want to rent a room for the night. My old Ford Fiesta broke down and we don't have anywhere to go.

Noelia (mother): That's right, and give us each a nice warm glass of milk.

Manolo (waiter): Looks like today everybody wants to milk the cow. Minors are not allowed here, let alone such cute little kids. It could be a bad example for them. Wait here and I´ll get Raúl, the boss.

Raúl (boss): Can I help you? This is a very loose establishment and we are not used to such respectable guests. And minors are not permitted here.

Pedro (father): It's raining outside and my car's broken down. Couldn't we just stay the night? We'd pay just like any other customers.

Raúl (boss): It's not the money, it's that we are nearly out of rooms. I could put the parents up in the attic and I'll see where we can put the kids.

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PART II Raúl (boss): Where am I going to put the kids? The only thing to do is let them sleep with Sara and Antonio.

José (the child): I don't want to sleep here because these two are doing weird exercises.

Antonio: What...? What are you going to do with the children? They can't stay here.

Raúl (boss): You shut up. I'm the boss here and the kids will sleep on that other bed behind the screen, they'll sleep fine and they won't see what you are doing.

A few minutes pass. It continues raining. A senior citizen tour bus pulls up. A man and his wife get out and run toward the door to get out of the torrential rain.

Celedonio: This looks like a decent place to stay the night.

Dominga: God help us! I'm afraid this dive is a girly bar!

Manolo (waiter): What will it be?

Raquel, one of the girls, saunters up to Celedonio seductively and says: Raquel: You want to have a good time with me?

Dominga (bursting with rage): Don't you touch this man. He's my husband.

You can go get yourself another punter, honey.

As Raúl, the boss, comes down the stairs, he asks the two old people: Raúl (boss): Don't tell me you want to stay here tonight, with us? Well okay then, another two in Sara's room. Go on, up you go!

In the mean time the customers and girls at the bar are cracking up, what with all the milk and the flowers and the kids and all.

It doesn't end there, though. With another lightning bolt, the door opens and two Civil Guard officers appear with the tri-cornered hats like the old days. It must be the rural patrol. They are looking for a patient who escaped from the psychiatric institution.

Rodolfo (Civil Guard officer, bad guy): Okay I want everybody to show us their ID, here in the bar light so we can see your slimy mugs.

Adolfo (Civil Guard officer, good guy): Do as he says, Rodolfo's got a wicked temper...

Antonio

Noelia

Raquel

Persons Diagnosed with a Mental illness as Museum Users. COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira

PART III The light suddenly goes out as a lightning bolt strikes nearby.

Rodolfo (Civil Guard officer, bad guy): Oh shit! Nobody move! You! Call an electrician!

Manolo (waiter): (Holding the telephone in one hand and a candle at the same time in the other): Juliรกn, can you come to the bar? We've got a blackout and there's a lot going on here...

Juliรกn (electrician): Well if it's that urgent I'll be there in a flash. Ha! Ha! Ha! 20 minutes pass and a hairy man, not seen before, comes in.

Wolfman:- I'm going to devour you disgusting beasts!

Rodolfo (Civil Guard officer, bad guy): Shit! It's the guy who escaped from the insane asylum! (Adolfo takes out his sawed-off shot gun.)

Adolfo (Civil Guard officer, good guy) suddenly shoots upward and hits a huge hanging lamp which falls on him and the wolfman.

People scream and run about in the dark, including the Civil Guard officers. The people upstairs wake up.

Antonio: What's going on here?

Sara: It looks like a stampede has come through here.

They kiss. Antonio gives Sara a bill and promises to return.

The calm after the storm. At the club, the only ones left are the two children in Sara's room, behind the screen, and the parents in the attic.

It is eight o'clock in the morning and the sun has just come up. Three of the girls who work at the bar go inside.

Felicidad: What a mess! Let's go up and see if there's anybody here.

Ascensiรณn: Good idea Feli, let's see what's cooking upstairs.

When they open the door to the room, the three flowers Antonio brought the night before light up the room with red, blue, green, yellow and pink lights. When Maravillas, the third worker in question, comes in, she finds the children sleeping behind the screen.

Maravillas: Ohhhh! Just look at these two little cuties!!

The others go to peer in just as Joselito and Sandra wake up.

Sandra: Where are we? What's that pretty light shining on us?

Joselito: Don't you know this is a whorehouse and they let us sleep here last night out of pity?

Waiter

Civil Guard officer

Sara

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Sandra: Where are daddy and mummy?

Feli: Hey kid, watch your mouth. This is a nightclub where men come to enjoy themselves and we entertain them.

Maravillas: There was a storm here last night, inside the club and out; it's better we don't explain.

Ascensión: Your parents are probably sleeping upstairs in the attic. If you want, we'll all go upstairs and wake them up. Here, we'll give you these beautiful flowers for you to take home.

Pedro and Noelia, Joselito and Sandra's parents appear. They grab the children and fly out the door, taking the flowers that turn out to be magic and can grant wishes.

The whole rundown Ford Fiesta family get in the car.

Pedro (father): That was a bad idea. Come on, let' get out of here. Lets make tracks.

Noelia (mother): I always told you these places were bad news! They even have a wolfman as a customer, for goodness' sake!

Alicia (little girl): A wolfman? She falls back to sleep.

José (son): Wolfmen don't exist. It must have been a nightmare, right mummy?

Noelia (mother): I don't know, son. Start the car Pedro, I beg you.

They scramble out of there while Celedonio and Dominga get back on the bus.

Celedonio: Despite my age, women still find me attractive.

Dominga: Woman? The only woman you'll see the rest of your life is me, none of that messing around with these vipers. Do you hear me Celedonio?

Celedonio: Yes, yes (with a grin).

Julián (electrician) enters: What in the wires, I mean world...happened here? What happened to the chandelier? What do you people do here? (laughs) Manolo (waiter): Don't even ask, you'd never believe me. This is a highly risky business.

The house is still and the curtain closes.

Persons Diagnosed with a Mental illness as Museum Users. COMMUNITIES II Nadia Teixeira

General evaluation by the participants, read during the Mental Health Awareness Days.

We liked the comedy because it was fun, original and unique, with a witty edge to it. It shows that a serious topic can be dealt with in many ways.

We made puppets out of cheap materials that were completely improvised and made the audience laugh. With imagination, a few bits and bobs and enthusiasm, we were able to do all this. We accomplished more than others do with more means. We even added special effects that topped off the show.

Other facets of sex were revealed – in this case sex for money – with little hints of love and humour that relate to the sexual freedom of our times. They are three comedy acts full of chaotic events but instead of turning tragic, they provoke hilarious laughter.

We participated in the show to interact with one another, learn new things and have new experiences. We had a good time, we entertained others and showed the Hospital in a positive light. We also did a good deed for the theatre, a literary genre nearly abandoned these days. We made it much more accessible and the audience could participate more thoroughly.

We felt a companionship amongst the actors. This show has made us happier, more human. It has helped us to integrate and grow more as human beings. It was enriching. Being more creative we can see the world in a better light. We felt valued by our peers, the tutors, the rest of the staff and the audience. This show has made us want to do more things. We feel braver in front of an audience and in the face of criticism.

We value ourselves more.

We want to thank all of those who participated in the project, those who directed it, the audience and those who are listening to us now.

We dedicate all our efforts to those present and to all our friends at the Hospital.

LONG LIVE THEATRE!

List of Activities

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MUSAC SCHOOL: POSSIBILITIES FOR THE MUSEUM IN THE CLASSROOM Antonio Gonzรกlez Chamorro

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MUSAC SCHOOL: Possibilities for the Museum in the Classroom Antonio G. Chamorro

MUSAC SCHOOL: POSSIBILITIES FOR THE MUSEUM IN THE CLASSROOM. Antonio G. Chamorro The work that DEAC MUSAC carries out with schools rests on certain theoretical foundations and follows general principles; however, our practical experience and interacting with groups has taught us that each educational proposal must be made to measure. Each group and each person is a separate universe and therefore, each educational practice must work within that specific reality.

With an eye on this diversity we would like to provide examples of our educational programmes directed at schools in the last four years. We have done so across twelve exhibition seasons. The twelfth is in process at the writing of this introduction.1 Certain basic principles have inspired our curricular programming and we shall describe them in further detail with each practical case.

- To provide, through art, the tools to experience life in today's society from a critical and personal standpoint with an onus on communications media, new technologies and visual culture in general.

- To work with and instil values that foster the overall development of the individual and cultivate initiative and self-esteem in the students. The values we refer to are multiculturalism, gender equality, pacifism and ecological awareness.

- To aid in the student's development of diverse types of intelligence.

- To introduce art of the present in early childhood and in young people in a playful manner, adapting to these groups' particular forms of comprehension and enjoyment.

- To act alternatively, adopting measures complementary to the school's educational curriculum. To embrace the student's concerns, roles, experiences and trends as building blocks from which to work.

- To promote the perception and habits related to culture – understood in all its forms – in the future adult.

- To work towards a better relationship with the teachers, optimising MUSAC's resources.

- To examine our position as educators and progressively evaluate the project proposals.

Through the use of exhibitions we have gained access to extremely diverse subjects, many of them closely related to the school curriculum while others are outside the realm of formal education. These subjects range from gender issues or multiculturalism to the analysis of stereotypes in the media; from music and formal elements of artistic expression to social studies or challenges and characteristics of today's world. These topics also include the body and gestural language, analysis of public space, identity building, coexistence, the critical use of the media and the museum, and the student's emotional and social surroundings. Given the above, the educational experience is a unique opportunity to capture the student's observations and comments, for it is in this domain where the student thinks, experiments, expresses herself and creates.

1 To date, 33 school programmes have been carried out for each educational stage. More than 70,000 students have attended them between 1 April 2005 and December 2009.

Possibilities for the Museum in the Classroom: MUSAC SCHOOL Antonio G. Chamorro

To aid in a better comprehension of the subjects proposed, we regularly engage in diverse practices: crafts, conceptual exercises, narrative expression (corporal, visual and written) and critical/analytical practices. We shall analyse their applications by providing some specific examples further on.

We shall also discuss how our school programming relates to our other departmental programmes. The research, meetings and brainstorming ahead of each programme-design aid in understanding how to relate our experiences to the rest of DEAC programmes.

The current heads of Pequeamigos MUSAC (Littlefriends) are also members of our preschool and primary school education programming; thus, the educators converge on many aspects of both programmes. DEAC's various community outreach programmes are based on these previous school experiences and concurrently, many of the activities developed for community collectives have been adapted for the use in schools. In a similar way, the seed planted by the organised school visits has compelled young people to come on their own to the Masdedoce (over twelve) workshops, the music and cinema programming and to the museum exhibitions themselves.

It is our hope that a thematic thread be visible in all the programming we describe. This is the search for a diversity of voices at the museum, the education in values, the analysis and critical view of our world and the media that conveys it. In summary, it is the interdisciplinary nature of the subject matter and praxes with their multiple connexions.

As Muntsa Calbó and Roser Juanola2 point out, the following diverse components coexist in art education at museums: - Feeling and perceiving - Expressing/creating/responding - Knowing, contextualising and comparing - Interpreting or expressing values, critiquing and acting responsibly

2 Ricard Huerta and Romá de la Calle. Espacios estimulantes. Museos y educación artística.

Valencia. 2007.

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Evolution and future When we embarked on our endeavour three years ago, DEAC MUSAC had a great deal of work to do. We will no longer see the days of thirty or forty students per educator. Today the educator-student ratio is around one to every sixteen students.

At the first exhibition there were only two of us educators: Nadia Teixeira and myself. Along with Belén Sola, we prepared the syllabi for each school stage. As our work progressed, practical issues emerged such as how to provide personalised attention to different collectives: groups with special educational needs, youth integration groups, migrant population, ethnic minorities, etc.

The teacher and student evaluation responses were very positive. The trust built among primary and secondary schools and teachers from the outset was very significant. There came a moment, however, when we were overwhelmed with the high demand from schools, as our programmes not only covered the local area surrounding León but also the entire Castilla y León region, Asturias, Galicia, occasionally Basque Country and Madrid as well as France and Portugal.

This response forced DEAC MUSAC to grow at a mind-boggling pace in comparison to the rest of the museum departments. Today there are eight and at times nine of us in the department. These figures and the projects created bear witness to the importance education and cultural involvement have to the museum directorate.

Exhibition. Pg. 40

The evaluations of MUSAC School continue to be very favourable and as I have mentioned, the educator-student ratio is more than satisfactory. Despite this, at DEAC MUSAC we feel the relationships with schools must deepen so the work done prior to and following the visits can contribute to making them more fruitful and interesting. To facilitate this, we have begun working with those classrooms that have more flexible schedules or with smaller secondary school groups where projects of longer duration can be implemented.

We shall also describe here those collaborative activities that have failed, such as our experience with the Trial Balloons exhibition.

As an example of the deepening of these bonds, I shall describe a recent project for the students from the Colegio Maristas Champagnat relating to the MUSAC permanent collection. We have always maintained that art, among other functions, offers us a way to capture the world around us.

With this in mind, we responded to Óscar Ranz's initiative to carry out a project with his older secondary school students involving the museum's permanent collection. The experience was designed to reinforce topics related to environmental education, consumer education, sex and affective education, health, mass media and peace.

The project can be found at www.maristaschampagnatleon.blogspot.com.

It has received second prize in a nationwide educational innovation competition sponsored by the Marist Brothers of Champagnat.

Possibilities for the Museum in the Classroom: MUSAC SCHOOL Antonio G. Chamorro

The school girls and boys prepared the didactic sections and sought out the links with the MUSAC Permanent Collection works. They based their work on the Existencias exhibition and on the two volumes published on the MUSAC Collection. All of the material was created by the students and posted on this blog. We are now in the process of preparing audio guides that will be available on the internet in the form of podcasts.

According to the students themselves who had the chance to share their evaluations on the MUSAC Abierto radio programme, the experience not only allowed them to acquire a feel for art of the present, but also to study topics frequently excluded from school curricula and to do so in a fun and constructive fashion that required on-going teamwork. All of this was done using the internet: the medium they are simply mad about.

A special seminar: Zona de Conflicto, was held twice that dealt with armed conflicts, directed by photographer and journalist Gervasio Sánchez.

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List of Activities

List of Activities

In the seminars, the students were to research the topic using the internet and interviews with people around them. They would later contrast this information with Gervasio's view of it all, brought to us in the form of a photographic and humanitarian journal of conflict occurring throughout the world. The sessions were attended by over 1000 students.

In 2008 a video forum was introduced for secondary school students giving them an opportunity to learn via these visual parameters of our culture.

We have also made attempts at increasing and improving communication channels with the teachers. A course has already been planned with the 3 CFIE León in 2006 and we have just finished a second one that has allowed us not only to gain a deeper understanding of the teachers' point of view, but for us it has also been a time for reflection and critical analysis of our practice as educators.

Lastly and before closing this chapter, I would like to mention the university community. Relations at this educational level have been less frequent than both institutions would have liked. This is a result of a lack of interinstitutional collaboration and is mainly about the exchange of university credits, professors and cultural programmes. Even so, there have been university professors who have designed their practical coursework in 4 close collaboration with DEAC .

3 Teacher Training and Educational Innovation Centre of León.

4 Practical work for the subject Art and Architecture since 1945, an Art History degree course at the Universidad de León. As a feature of this course, professor José Alberto Moráis and MUSAC began a partner programme for work placements at the museum. The students were given an additional project by MUSAC after visiting each of the exhibitions on different days and taking part in their corresponding workshops. It was impossible to cover all the subject matter for the entire course, so the ten students were asked to prepare one of the topics for a public presentation at MUSAC's conference hall. This way, the students not only covered the course material but also became familiar with preparing a public lecture on a topic. Other professors like Jaime Vindel, Mar Flórez Crespo and Rosa Eva Valle have incorporated the museum in one way or another into their course work.

List of Activities

List of Activities

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Exhibition Existencias.

21 September 2007 / 6 January 2008.

The third MUSAC Collection exhibition. The exhibition covered every corner of museum space, displaying works from over 200 national and international artists. The selection did not hold to one specific theme but rather situated us in the very essence of collecting: selection and accumulation. Through this accumulative display mode the exhibition, reminiscent of Baroque salons and cabinets, underscored certain concepts implicit in the formation of an institutional collection: accumulation, multidisciplinarity or crosscombination, while at the same time re-examining ways of holding an exhibition.

Another opportunity initiated with this academic institution has been the training placements within our department. Over nine students have come to DEAC under this agreement and some have pursued professions in the 5 area of museum education . I would also like to mention two studies on audiences conducted at the museum by professor Mar Flรณrez Crespo of the Art History Faculty in 2006 and 2008.

We would like build a future along these practical lines so that teachers and students can create alternative or complimentary learning tools to those offered at their schools or by the museum discourse itself. For this, we can avail of what new technologies have to offer: working online and remotely.

With great hopes that our learning continues from day to day and that we continue experiencing new strategies and programmes, our desire is to educate for a life in the world of the present; to aid in developing and widening the students' emotional, social, ethical, communicative, cognitive, political, relational, economic and cultural spheres.

SOME EXPERIENCES Here we shall narrate some of the activity-programming developed around exhibitions. As the programming is extensive, we have chosen to speak here only about the experiences proposed for the students in the last stages of primary and secondary school. The other activities for preschool education and first stages of primary school are described in the chapter entitled Pequeamigos MUSAC. Although Pequeamigos MUSAC is an extracurricular leisure programme, it is based conceptually and methodologically on many of the proposals used with other school children.

The bacchalaureate students within the Spanish secondary educational system have a wider content and activity base as well as a closer working relationship with their teachers. It is through these course subjects that they come into contact with the museum.

One of our latest programmes developed around Existencias, an exhibition displaying the bulk of the MUSAC Collection with no particular order in mind.

The exhibition had no common thread, no thematic axis. It was all about collecting as the accumulation of objects. In this case, the viewer was in charge of establishing his or her own conceptual guidelines during the visit and engaging in a type of open dialogue with the works.

Our proposal emanated from a discussion about the act of collecting. We analysed what motivates us to collect and what influences the decision to choose where, when and how to show our images. Afterward, in the museum galleries, the students designed a project for a temporary collection at MUSAC. To do so, they employed the materials used by the museum staff use to set up exhibitions: catalogues, mock-ups of gallery space, content lists, etc.

Workshop Existencias 5 Students have come to the museum to do work placements in Child Psychology, Education, Art History, Arts and Trades and Museum Studies.

Possibilities for the Museum in the Classroom: MUSAC SCHOOL Antonio G. Chamorro

They followed their own criteria and utilised their visual culture background to make their choices. The students became curators: selecting and choosing work to create the discourse they were interested in at that time.Their proposals were based on a real collection and were laid out within a real space: two elements that could have otherwise been chosen by people from the outside community. The students wished to speak about trends generated by the media, sexuality and stereotypes. They analysed social, economic and ecological issues. They chose topics such as music, drugs and gender equality. They selected works from previously collected art to interpret and analyse their world.

In conclusion, our aim was to work with the student's critical expression and their collective creative production that involved a good bit of conceptual, expressive and spatially orientated teamwork. We also tried to set in motion a process of questioning and reconstructing of the museum's own collection.

We were quite inspired by the radio workshop given by Ángeles Oliva and Toña Medina as part of MUSAC's Masdedoce programming over two summers. During the Existencias project we set up an experimental radio workshop where students created a mini audio-guide or narration about the selected piece they had previously explored. This experiment was aired on Radio Universitaria de León, on the MUSAC Abierto programme.

Exhibition Emergencias.

1 April / 21 August 2005.

The premise of Emergencias was to make a large group exhibition of the MUSAC Collection works. Under this title the exhibition attempted to train the viewer's critical eye on pressing issues in our society: the destruction of the environment, armed conflicts, pandemic diseases, etc.

List of Activities

List of Activities

Motivated by the chance to have a weekly slot on MUSAC Abierto at the radio station, we realised it was necessary to start using digital recorders to speed up the recording process. We discovered that the Dave Muller exhibition went hand-in-glove with the radio medium, and I will explore this later.

Mention must be made, in relation to Existencias, of the museum's opening exhibition, Emergencias. It was also compiled exclusively of MUSAC Collection pieces. At that time there were two of us educators working with the public in the museum galleries. The educational proposals could not, therefore, have quite the discursive quality desired although during the visit dialogue was always encouraged.

Workshop Emergencias

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Exhibition Dave Muller.

I like your music, I love your music.

26 January / 4 May 2008.

This artist's work focuses on the role music plays in the identity-building processes of individuals as well as collectives. Muller explores the social dimension of music by examining the cultural references – visual as well as musical – that shape his universe and that of his the people using drawing, collage and installation techniques.

The role music plays in the lives of young people is as unquestionable as the influence it has on how they perceive themselves as group, their aesthetic sense and themselves.

It was, undoubtedly, the most appropriate exhibition to use for the school community collaborations. The huge variety of topics encompassed went beyond the discourse of art and the artist's function in today's world. It provided us with subject content easily matched to the diverse curricula and cross-curricular academic subjects. Using this exhibition, guided visits were adapted for each scholastic stage. The most playful tours were created for the preschoolers. They were done in a storytelling format and dealt with diverse cultural settings and different problems faced around the globe. For the older groups, the themes extended to an exploration of mass media, violence in all its forms and the immense problems facing the planet and mankind today.

In the case of students over 10 years of age, we proposed a project in conjunction with Jorge Macchi's piece Charco de sangre (poema) (Puddle of blood, poem). The students were provided with press clippings from which they were to extract information about a current event they were particularly interested in or concerned about. They made a collage of the news clips.

During the month of the first exhibition, it was interesting to note the good reception the educational centres gave the museum. They were surprised and pleased to encounter there activities that were more akin to creative play workshops – where emphasis was placed on student participation and opinion – rather than on formal talks about art or artists. This surprise factor inspired the participation of many schools and high schools in León and they continue to make periodic visits today.

Artist Dave Muller's exhibition I like your music, I love your music narrated his musical influences in a sprawling painted mural as well as musical portraits of the people around him.

The exhibition led us to propose a study wherein the students would investigate what their musical portrait would be like. They were asked to analyse where or from whom their musical influences came and if they had a space to enjoy their music. It allowed us to study the intimate flow between music, culture and identity. All of this was then broadcast by the students over the airwaves of MUSAC Abierto. They enthusiastically created alternative top hits lists within this exercise of rethinking the market and its influences.

Workshop I like your music, I love your music

Our educational proposal was to create an experience where the students could actively participate in the weekly MUSAC Abierto program and make the musical selection from the museum's resources itself. In this workshop we proposed analysing and visualising – as a group – the web of experiences that make up our musical history. We then reconfigured these elements into a story to be narrated on the radio show. This would give us the chance to review what factors (other than those strictly related to music) have had an influence on our preferences. We could then see exactly where we belong within these musical narratives. These narratives will now occupy a platform – a radio broadcast – that is traditionally reserved for transmitting the official story. Not only do these narratives exist alongside the official version, but they can also serve to distort and change conventional cultural patterns.

Possibilities for the Museum in the Classroom: MUSAC SCHOOL Antonio G. Chamorro

We will now describe a project that used video as the tool for us to engage in something similar to a performance. The exhibition we used was Made Death Listen by artists Muntean/Rosenblum.

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p. 41. Exhibition

The general ideas discussed in the exhibition visit were: - Adolescent identity: disorientation or identity crisis?

- Exploration through image and text - Corporal and gestural language as a means of representing emotions and feelings - Human models and mass media aesthetics - ClichĂŠs and stereotypes about young people - High culture and popular culture - Tradition and modernity - Traditional art techniques, perspectives and composition - Religious imagery - The flight from the city to the country: implications - Comics - Set design - The power of the group or collective versus individual identity in a global society The majority of the show pieces were large oil paintings depicting young people dressed in the latest fashions, with poses taken from baroque religious imagery paintings against natural or urban backgrounds. We discussed the influence that advertising, mass media and all types of imagery have on our behaviour.

Another angle of the exercise was seeing what the text accompanying each piece suggested to these adolescents. After the examination and debate, they were asked to work in groups, creating a live portrait that would reflect their own portrayal of adolescents. These static choreographies, where postures and gestures were crucial to sending out the desired message, were videotaped by the groups themselves.

The topics they spoke about were violence in the classroom, liberties, racism, music, drugs, homophobia, social or emotional inequalities – not always in a negative light; but in many cases in an attempt to promote positive images.

We used performance, not only as a way of working on the expression of our own ideas but also for working everything related to the body; appreciating how video served as such an important tool for this. We also discussed the process of taking a concept from an image and abstractly applying it to something else: in this case the body. We were able to work with means not usually present in the school setting and allow the students to explore theatre and movement, reflect on issues important to them and of course, to gain a better understanding of the subjects they were critiquing or analysing.

Workshops Make Death Listen

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Exhibition Julie Mehretu. Black City.

23 September 2006 / 7 January 2007.

This was an exhibition of more than twenty canvases by the Ethiopian artist reviewing her most recent work. In an almost autobiographical way, her pieces could be construed as maps of her past or a depiction of her worldview. She organises and arranges her cartographies in overlapping layers of drawing and painting where she pours out as much personal reference as she does political and social tension derived from architecture and urban planning and their relation to power.

Exhibition. p. 69

During this same exhibition season we had the opportunity to work on a project for those students closer to urban settings by using Julie Mehretu's exhibition Black City.

We started with Julie Mehretu's idea of how architecture and urban planning are a reflection of the system and power structures (an undercurrent of all historical periods that have in some cases even become defining characteristics of those periods). We used maps of the city where the group of students lives and colour-coded the different land use areas. The students themselves chose what the coded areas would stand for: leisure, security, administrative power, culture, sport, nature...) On this map we could then mark their habitual routes, what areas were their favourites, what things they would change in the city. We also became aware of what things we choose and what is imposed upon us. Everything we changed on the map was done on an acetate sheet which we placed on top of the drawing. This interesting exercise gave us a sociological approach to an adolescents' urban territory.

As a last practical example of our projects, we will use Pierre Huyghe's exhibition A Time Score. In this case, our educational proposal focused on generating an appreciation for teamwork, an understanding the importance of being part of a group and sharing. We were also fishing for a debate about piracy and copyright, stressing the ubiquitousness of this topic in relation to the internet and new technologies. The focus was on fostering a mature use of the internet and its creative possibilities as well as promoting the study and exploration of techniques such as video, interactive art and video games.

Our goals were: to compel the student to question the exhibition, create group interaction through collective creation, respond to the needs created by new technologies, cultivate a sense of self-identity, teach social values and support the development of the students' intellectual, emotional, social, visual and motor skills. Collectively, we built a story starting with the creation of a character – an invented one, one from the exhibition or perhaps even ourselves. We gave the character life, multiple personalities and the ability to inhabit different historical periods at once. The tools we used were those from the internet (a literary blog or a Youtube channel) or video. Project planning and use of the imagination to create these fictional presentations were important elements of the exercise.

Another facet was the presence of music and literature (Pierre Huyghe's oevre is closely related to that of Jorge LuĂ­s Borges') in this exercise. We wanted to base the activity on respect for the students' way of working and doing things; encouraging their voice and their decisions. The visit was geared towards invoking communication and dialogue, critical thought and participation.

Workshop Black City

Possibilities for the Museum in the Classroom: MUSAC SCHOOL Antonio G. Chamorro

The workshop strove for the creative development of ideas while shifting the focus from the exhibition onto the students. Each group went along developing their story within the exhibition scenery; then staged and videotaped it. Some were actors, others camerapersons and yet others scriptwriters. The next step was posting the video on the internet to access it from the blog where the story was being written. Some groups continued working on others' stories and others decided to work on the same subjects. The medium used (the blog) allowed us to continue the story outside the museum and even outside the classroom. The topics dealt with were similar to those in the previous workshops. This was a clear manifestation of how young people are involved in the world around them.

Blog A Time Score

In working with some exhibitions we proposed that the students prepare preliminary activities in the classroom but except for a few occasions, very few groups did so. The students came to the exhibition without having prepared the work beforehand. Searching into the causes for this has led to better communication with the centres. We have seen the need on behalf of the schools for more museum support for these types of activities.

The course organised in collaboration with the CFIE has been a great aid in determining the causes for this low participation in pre-visit activities.

In the case of the exhibition Trial Balloons, we proposed collecting objects or images having to do with our memory: social, cultural, geographical or otherwise. This exhibition was enriching in that it brought up various debates. Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, the preliminary classroom activity failed partly because the magazine we had wanted to publish with the students' material never came to fruition.

The workshop we proposed was based on a special edition of the magazine published by Pablo Leรณn de la Barra for the exhibition: Pablo Internacional Magazine.

We invited all the groups to prepare a preliminary classroom project that could be used afterward for publishing a magazine. This variety of material would be the fruit of debates or any information created or collected that could then be edited and published in the form of a magazine in which all the members of the workshop would participate.

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MUSAC SCHOOL: Possibilities for the Museum in the Classroom Antonio G. Chamorro

We proposed three working motifs: Public space as a stage for art.

Thinking on the meaning of public and private space and extending our understanding of public and popular art to include street art such as graffiti, mural art, street furniture, public sculpture, architecture, etc.

The memory album.

With this theme we wanted to bring in concepts dealing with heritage.

Investigate the symbolisms of the objects and materials that make up our identity and extend this into the terrain of the contemporary and the students' own experiences. We also touched on the idea of immaterial heritage. Not only tangible objects and images are pregnant with meaning; we also attempted to understand the importance of smells, songs and memories.

For me art is‌ With this premise we discussed and considered different questions: How do you define art? What does art have to have? Must a thing be something in order to be art? Who is a true artist? What must a work of art contribute or contain? Images, texts and thoughts that came up in the workshop were then reflected in the magazine.

Possibilities for the Museum in the Classroom: MUSAC SCHOOL Antonio G. Chamorro

WHAT IS ART TO YOU?* Student: For me, art is a way of expressing what you are going through, what you feel, what happens to you. If you are going through a happy time, you may create a song, a painting or a book that expresses your joy. If you are going through a tough time or somebody around you is, your work might be more melancholy.

Mother: Art can be represented in many ways: painting, dance, music...you use it to say what you think.

Aunt: It is a way to express feelings. It can be expressed through many means, for example painting, song, sculpture...and although some of them may not be well-known, they can also be art forms.

Granny: It is a pastime where you can enjoy yourself dancing, singing or even whittling.

Student: For me, art is doing a job that is worth something. It also means to me a creation or an activity through which a person shows an aspect of reality or a feeling in a symbolic way using the material, image or sound.

María: It is the expression of beauty or feelings from an individual's point of view.

Mamen: It is the expression of oneself and one's feelings.

José: A conception of things that demonstrates a different portrayal of things.

Laura María Fernández Martínez Student: Art is a form of expression.

Father: Art is a way to express reality.

Mother: Art is the way an artist has of expressing his emotions.

Sister: It is creativity.

Diego Fernández Fernández Student: Art is the intelligence through which creativity is expressed using signs or actions to attempt to communication on many levels, free from pre-defined rules.

Person 1: Art is the specific human activity that avails of certain sensorial, aesthetic and intellectual faculties.

Person 2: Art is a way to express feelings.

Person 3: Art is a way to give shape to your ideas.

Alba Castaño Natal Student: For me, art is a different way of expressing human sentiment, artist's feelings, for example painting, sculpture...

Sergio: Art is expressing what one feels in different ways.

Father: Art is something different that few people have the qualifications to do.

Mother: Art is the skill to make something: pictures, mosaics...

Andrea Suárez Onduri

*Surveys conducted by the San Andrés Secondary School. León.

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PEQUEAMIGOS PROJECT: SYNTHESIS OF EXPERIENCES Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina Viñuela López

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PEQUEAMIGOS PROJECT: Synthesis of Experiences Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina Viñuela L.

PEQUEAMIGOS PROJECT: SYNTHESIS OF EXPERIENCES. Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina Viñuela L. The educational programme Pequeamigos MUSAC began at DEAC MUSAC in 2005 when Belén Sola proposed we create a specific learning programme for young audiences. The department was to outline its own educational aims. We decided to create a friends-of-the-museum club as a means of establishing a sustained and reciprocal bond with our young audiences.

This club would become the springboard for encouraging children's interest in the art practices of today and as a consequence, the diversity of the world around them. This association is designed for girls and boys aged five to twelve: the Pequeamigos. When a child enrolls in the programme, they are issued a numbered, non-transferable membership card and an action kit: a rucksack filled with various materials such as a magnifying glass, paints, binders, etc. From then on they are elegible to participate in any of the activities specially designed for them.

Pequeamigos strives to cover the widest educational scope possible to stimulate all of the child's capacities. We are especially interested in developing their human potential, as critical, autonomous audiences. With a multidisciplinary and holistic approach, the thrust of the programme is placed on encouraging children to tap into the art world – and more specifically, the contemporary art scene. We do not limit our activities to guided exhibition tours or crafts workshops on various artistic techniques.

Our projects embrace several disciplines such as dance, movement, music, painting, video, theatre, etc. These disciplines are used in ways that allow the children to unveil their capacities and to better understand themselves.

Based on the knowledge that children achieve true learning through doing, our programme strives to provide them with meaningful experiences that will develop their competencies, and at the same time adapt to their particular interests and needs. Our programming places the children in a leading role at the museum so they feel like truly active members. Their level of involvement and autonomy increases progressively. This becomes clear in the way the programmes are elaborated: the participants virtually become the creators of their own didactic materials. Our goal is for all children to find themselves at home at the museum; that the museum become a part of their everyday landscape, in accordance with each one's age, knowledge base, individual skills, interests, etc.

The museum is thus conceived of as a meeting place where education is a social experience. It is a place where children can gain knowledge and improve their relationships with others and develop their own criteria for understanding realities foreign to their own.

Creativity is an inherent human quality, therefore there should be no compartmentalisation of the child's different developmental areas. On the contrary, one must emphasize the integration of art in general areas of education by understanding it as an instrument for expression and selfidentification.

Synthesis of Experiences: PEQUEAMIGOS PROYECT Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina Viñuela L.

The activities we propose involve the child as an integrated whole; his emotions, feelings, intellect and body cannot be separated from one another, therefore our exercise encompasses the whole.

In short, we do not strive to turn all children into artists but rather, as we have previously pointed out, draw them nearer to the languages of a variety of genre that allow for new and diverse modes of expression. We strive to develop their individual competencies – inextricable from social development – by raising sensitivity, experimentation, imagination and creativity.

We see education as a living process of re-socialisation and reinvention directed at increasing and strengthening the capacities of our clients on an individual as well as collective level. This shall be attained by restoring and recreating values, by producing, appropriating and applying knowledge through motivating and innovative projects. We believe in a concept of education in which the educator is no longer he who educates, but rather, during the process of educating, is himself educated in an on-going exchange with the pupil who, in turn, educates as he is taught.

Pequeamigos began hand-in-hand with the exhibition Emergencias, the opening exhibition of the MUSAC Collection. Since then, our department programming has grown and developed simultaneously with the exhibitions.

Pequeamigos MUSAC is one of the few programmes that stand as alternatives to formal education in the city of León. The programme has remained consistent and actively engaged with the community since its conception. Each planned experience has been carefully analysed and evaluated so as to improve and broaden the range of didactic resources, techniques and teaching processes used with each new set of exhibitions.

We began with playful tours through the exhibitions: diverviajes and little by little, we have expanded the offering. At the moment we have various parallel programmes: diverfamilia, intensive workshops, artist-led workshops, courses, collaborations with the museum library, collaborations with the Isadora Duncan Single-Parent Families Foundation, the Red Cross, the León City Council, the Juan Soñador Youth Association...

By observing the progress of these activities, we can best evaluate them; and to date, our evaluation is quite positive. In fact, the children who were reluctant to participate at first – afraid of the unknown, overly protected by their families, etc. – now come every weekend to the museum.

The personal relationships established with the children allow us to have a greater understanding of each child's needs and from there we can try to strengthen those characteristics in them that will help them develop into well-rounded adults.

Here, however, we value the children for what they are and not only for what they can potentially become.

This is their space and we have created it together.

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PROGRAMME DESIGN There are two distinct guidelines for our practice. On the one hand, the exhibition tours called diverviajes that are a different and delightfully surprising way to enjoy the works on display because the visitor is able to programme his or her own tour. These are play-learning and discovery trails; along them the children discuss what they see in the galleries. We also act things out, create, transform...we can become whatever we want.

Each weekend we hold three new diverviajes designed for different age groups. The programming is closely connected with the all-around individual exhibition programming. During holiday breaks we hold intensive workshops where we bring on board experts and professionals from different fields and disciplines to work with us. Although our department promotes the participation and collaboration of invited specialists, we at DEAC are in charge of all the programming, coordination and execution of the activities.

There are two types of workshops: meet-the-artist and collaborative workshops. The meet-the-artist workshops are designed so that the children to get a first-hand feel for the artist's world. In some of the meetings we go beyond the mere contemplation of the work and embark on a joint activity, an enriching experience for both parties.

The workshops and classes we offer may be intensive or long-term. We attempt to incorporate the expertise of professionals from the art world to contribute to the childrens' learning enjoyment. The range is wide: dancers, origami masters, circus performers, art therapists, educators, actors, etc.

PROJECT AIMS 1. General aims - Create a space for the child’s learning and enjoyment.

- Follow a learning path that leads to the appreciation of contemporary art from an early age.

- Provide children with a play space where they can experiment, learn, express their feelings, emotions and knowledge using diverse artistic languages in an interdisciplinary manner.

- Foster the development of each child’s capacities through hands-on experience that will boost creativity, curiosity and self-esteem.

- Use play and imagination to create experiences that promote solidarity, respect and social committment.

- Offer a cultural space, alternative to formal education and complementary to the education community, for inculcating values in citizenship.

- Foster the capacity in children to relate art of the present to its original inspirational sources; thus stimulating curiosity and interweaving artistic creation with thinking processes.

- Pique the child’s interest in searching out his or her own identity through artistic expression.

Synthesis of Experiences: PEQUEAMIGOS PROJECT Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina ViĂąuela L.

2. Specifics aims - Create access to an ample variety of tools and techniques for artistic expression: dance, juggling, photography, music, theatre, video, manual crafts, corporal expression, comics...

- Develop in the child the capacity for reflection, criticism and dialogue, thus promoting the expression of opinions and feelings toward the works of art.

- Promote teamwork while at the same time maintaining structures open to modifications that will respond the the participants’ concerns and personal ideas.

- Explore the possibilities of our bodies through experimentation with movement in a fun atmosphere.

- Discover the variety of elements that configure artistic language and experiment with them. They will enable the expression and communication of facts, feelings, emotions, human drama, fantasies, etc.

METHODOLOGY We apply a methodology of discovery-based, meaningful and dialogic learning that is socioemotionally stimulating based on activity, play and direct experimentation. The atmosphere is one of participation and ongoing experimentation and innovation. The children are themselves the protagonists of each of these proposals from the outset and therefore the builders of their own knowledge base. Not only do the programmes focus on delivering content but also awakening in our young clients capacities for sensitivity and criticism. This is, in short, a methodology that promotes innovation and the children's involvment in their socio-cultural surroundings by interacting with artists, information deliverers, educators, family members, etc.

Some of our methodological strategies: - We use materials and techniques related to those employed by contemporary artists such as video and photography, etc.

- We place the same value on processes of interpretation as production.

- We incorporate new technologies as methodology tools.

It is not enough to claim the importance of the child's learning experience as a starting point.

Our goal is to provide specific alternatives to the one-way tranference of knowledge. We want the children to take on protagonism and become fully included in the teaching-learning process.

Our mission is to design learning spaces and guide the process of knowledge and skills aquisition in the Pequeamigos.

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ACTIVITIES AND PROGRAMMES Diverviajes These are pedagogical routes through the exhibitions where the child can create his or her own type of tour and become an active co-creator. The element of play is ever-present in these adventures. Through play they discover, learn and discuss what they see in the gallery at the same time they become familiar with the museum space as a place to play. Each weekend we hold three new diverviajes designed for different age groups.

The programming reflects the themes of the current exhibition.

Diverfamilia From the very outset of our educational work we have perceived the need for some type of activity in which mothers and fathers could be more actively involved. We felt it would be fulfilling for the parents to come to the museum guided by the Pequeamigos group, allowing them to participate in a fun learning experience alongside their children. Thus, diverfamilia was created: a once-a-month experience for adults interested in enjoying a special diverviaje with their child. Each child is accompanied by an adult who becomes – for a day – just another pequeamigo. These activities promote family communication and experiential interchange.

Artist-led and professional workshops

In 2006 we began programming a series of intensive workshops for the

holiday breaks. We introduced this special format in order to get to know and work with different contemporary artists who either exhibit at the museum or are part of the local community.

In many cases we proposed a didactic project we had designed ourselves while incorporating the artists' ideas. In other cases, the artists themselves directed and programmed the workshop.

We began the project during the Easter holiday of 2006 with a workshop on 1 sound art directed by Nilo Gallego called Tirón de Orejas (A tug on the ears).

2 During the Christmas holidays of 2006 Pablo García took us on an adventure through the world of comics and puppets with the workshop Vamos a contar historias (Let's tell some stories).

For the Easter holidays in 2007 we sponsored a movement and creativity workshop guided by dancer and educator Marisa Amor called Danzad, danzad, pequeamigos (Dance, littlefriends, dance).

1 Musician and performer from León, he has collaborated with DEAC from the very opening of the museum, teaching classes in sound art, action art and a sound workshop for the pequeamigos. Nilo Gallego has programmed Encuentro liebre de arte de acción and collaborated in the practical aspect of the Culture and Visual Análisis Workshop. (List of Activities) 2 León photographer and designer. He created Poster nº 2 of the Millennium Goals project.

(List of Activities )

Synthesis of Experiences: PEQUEAMIGOS PROYECT Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina Viñuela L.

In the summer of the same year, four intensive workshops were held 3 based on works by artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Ángel Marcos and Nestor San Miguel. Juggling, origami figures, words, shapes and colours filled the museum halls. This time, the artists displaying at the time collaborated: Ángel Marcos in the Descubriendo China (Discovering China) workshop along with the following specialists: -Nuria Castaño (vocal technique specialist) in the Palabras Salen de mi Boca (Words Come out of my Mouth) workshop.

-Manuel Sirgo, origami expert and Pablo Parra, expert in circus performing arts, guided the workshop El Pingüino Malabarista (The Juggling Penguin).

Music flooded the museum during the 2008 Easter week holiday: Juan José Alonso (base), Rocío Contreras (music teacher), Jara Casanova (violin), Gonzalo Ordás (electric guitar), Diego Gutiérrez and Rodrigo Martínez (members of the traditional music group Tarna), Soralla Parrado and Mónica Alonso (members of the tamboreen group Gritsanda), all participated in the workshop Somos lo que Escuchamos (We Are what We Listen to).

In July of 2008 we dove into the world of drawing with Colombian artist Nicolás Paris in the workshop titled Lápices intrépidos (Intrepid Pencils).

This was the very first time an artist held a workshop in the gallery space itself before the exhibition actually opened. He held this drawing experience 4 in Laboratory 987 for this particular group of children.

That same month we dared to discover the fantasy world of imagination and all its possibilities with Micaela Secada, art therapist, in her workshop Imaginarium.

3 Photographer from Medina del Campo and well-established in the international art scene.

He has held professional photography seminars at MUSAC, a workshop for groups from the immigrant population in León (p. 44) and was the inspiration for the Pequeamigos workshop Descubriendo China where he was interviewed by the children.

4 Laboratorio 987, a gallery for specific artistic projects is the annex space that functions independently from the general museum programming.

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Intensive Workshops These workshops are similar in format to those previously described but different in that there are no artists nor external specialists involved. In this case, the workshops were coordinated, designed and executed by the Pequeamigos programme educators and have a more direct link to the exhibitions underway at the moment.

Exhibition. p. 40

Exhibition Nestor Dan Miguel Diest.

El segundo nombre de las cosas.

19 May / 2 September 2007.

Néstor San Miguel uses the overlapping of information to organise the void and give shape to the chaos.

Cinco Días, Cinco Sentidos. During the Trial Ballons exhibition.

The 2006 summer programming consisted of four intensive workshops, each lasting five days. When we observe a piece of art in a museum, we are used to employing our sight above all other senses to appreciate it.

We proposed stimulating children's other senses to contemplate the art work. Each day of the workshop, repeated over four weeks with different participants, was dedicated to a different sensory organ. W e experimented using taste, smell, sight, touch and sound.

Batido de Formas. During the El Segundo Nombre de las Cosas exhibition.

Geometric and abstract shapes, colour and figurative compositions were some of the material we used to work from. In this case, we opted for corporal expression: movement dynamics and group body sculpture; and through crafts: collage, games in which we made costumes of recycled objects, drawing, etc.

Exhibition. p. 80

Arte por los codos. During the Nocturama exhibition.

The aim of this workshop was to bring children closer to the world of theatre. Using this French artist's work, a whirlwind of different ambiences and stage sets, the Pequeamigos participants designed and assembled all the elements of a mise en scène: set design, costumes, make-up, music and lighting. They also pieced together the basic elements of drama: plot, conflicts, scenes, characters, space and time. At the same time they learned basic concepts about theatre: its history, its function, famous works, theatre in other cultures and types of theatre in general. The culmination of the work, the performance, was attended by the children's friends and family members.

Exhibition. p. 80

Mujeres Creando (women creating). During the Constelación exhibition.

The main objective of this workshop was to familiarise children with concepts of gender, identity and equality. In order to do this, we proposed a research project, similar to Carmela García's concept for her exhibition.

But here, we broadened it to include women close to the children's lives so they could discover the individual stories of the women around them.

Synthesis of Experiences: PEQUEAMIGOS PROJECT Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina Viñuela L.

Special Activities Perhaps the most innovative of our special activities was the pequeamigos visit to MUSAC while the Blanca Li exhibition was being hung in January of 2008. We were the first observers to tour the exhibition – a real priviledge!

At other times, the children have been able to interview artists like Ángel Marcos, Fernando Sánchez Castillo and Nicolás Paris. The children also organised their own parties and exhibitions.

Starting in November 2008, the MUSAC library and DEAC began jointly organising storytelling sessions open to the general public. The pequeamigos actively participate in this endeavor, using a similar work method as those used in other collaborative activities. We meet with different professionals and pool our ideas for a proposal closely related to the exhibition content, the pequeamigos programming and the museum's modus operandi.

One of our main objectives is that the pequeamigos become active protagonists in their programme and become more autonomous. As leaders, they work in teams to design their own activities, elaborate their own learning tools and didactic materials, they create and update their blog and the peque librarian blog, participate in the radio programme, etc.

Among the parallel activities underway, we would like to make special mention of one particular project, Millennium Goals, held during several months in 2007. This DEAC-generated proposal included film screenings, lectures and the printing of a poster where each millenium goal was rendered in some way by local and national artists.

Each of our weekend scheduled events (the diverviajes) were dedicated to one of these objectives. The current flowing through our work with the children is everything-that-occurs-at-the museum. Not only are the children familiar with the work of various artists exhibiting at the museum, they are also familiar with and actually star in a museum community where cultural and social action abound. We include them in each event, lecture, congress, talk, round table, seminar and cinema cycle that takes place at MUSAC... and the list goes on.

As a novelty for 2009 we have added the Pequeño Bibliotecario (Little Librarian) club to our host of learning options. The Pequeño Bibliotecario club is a group of pequeamigo book enthusiasts. Their job is similar to the teams mentioned before, in that they help us design their own programming. The array of activities includes: a reading club, meet-theauthor sessions, the little librarian corner (where children discover, through hands-on practice, what a librarian does) storytelling, competitions (for best book mark, mini story, illustrations, etc.), making a blog, choosing texts for the library, purchase requests, etc. In short, the pequeamigos become real-life librarians and have total access to the library.

List of Activities

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Classes This is a format designed to offer the Pequeamigos participants ongoing activities during a three-month period in a similar fashion as the adult learning programmes at the museum.

List of Activities

Workshop on 20th Century Art History We began a journey through 20th Century Art History with the help of Sara Martín Terceño in February of 2008. This was the first time we had used a format based on the Introductory to 20th Century Art History Course for adults. The course lasted three months. Children aged eight to twelve could enjoy the works of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. By experimenting with techniques and concepts, they were able to create their own artworks and familiarise themselves with the most important movements and trends in art of the past century.

Virtualizarte This workshop, beginning in October of the same year and designed for this older group of Pequeamigos, was directed by Inés Quiñones. The participants learned to manage Web 2.0 Blogger software. Virtualizarte was designed in collaboration with the museum's Centre for Documentation and Library in order to form a co-creating, designing and editing team of children to work on the blog with us: www.pequeamigosmusac.blogspot.com. This allowed us to bring the clients themselves into the process of designing and programming their own activities.

Open Workshops At the beginning of the Pequeamigos MUSAC programming, we offered open workshops for non-members on a periodic basis. In accordance with our programming structure, each weekend we designed different activities relating the the artists exhibiting at that moment. Any child who came into the workshop was invited to do a project, normally some type of craft.

The main objective was to open the doors of the museum to the children of the general public. The open workshops themselves worked quite well and were well attended. However, it is not always the number of participants that determine the quality of a project. We decided to suspend this activity based on several factors. It was imposible to form a coherent group because the children came and went freely. This was an impediment to the type of holistic approach to creativitiy inherent in our practices because the workshops became mere crafts classes. We spotted an opportunity here to substitute the open workshops for an additional diverviaje and hold all our our general public workshop activities during the holiday breaks. This solved the problems we encountered such as age differences, different levels of knowledge and limited duration of the activities and we were able to better tailor the activities to our clients' needs.

Synthesis of Experiences: PEQUEAMIGOS PROJECT Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina ViĂąuela L.

PRACTICAL EXAMPLES We have selected what we feel to be our most representative programmes out of the host of Pequeamigos MUSAC activities held over the course of these years. They are separated into the exhibition cycles upon which they are based.

Emergencias The important role this first MUSAC exhibition played in establishing the fundamental pillars of the Pequeamigos MUSAC programming is undeniable.

This was a time for experimentation and was the museum's first contact with its young audiences. This was to be our calling card and we were fully aware of the importance of setting off on the right foot – our future depended on it. It could not have gone better. Although it took place in the summer, a time of cultural activity slow-down in the city, and was hardly advertised, the attendence was very high and that meant we were on the right road. The array of subject matter and techniques showcased at Emergencias provided an understructure for our programming.

Our first tool was a simple yet effective one: a puppet show. Two marionettes debuted in it: Emer and Gencias, the keepers of the museum, privy to all its secrets, who invited the children to venture into the contemporary art world. Then, abracadabra, the marionettes became real live humans! That is when we made our entrance. From there, we began our tour. So began the Pequeamigos programme. There are still some children who remember Emer and Gencias even today. Every weekend, children with their little packs equipped with paint and a specially designed notebook invade the museum on their diverviajes. They trail behind Mario, who has become the Peqeamigos fuzzy frog mascot.

Using Emergencias, on each route we worked on two or three different topics using diverse disciplines.

One of the topics addressed was the negative impact humans have on the environment. We tackled this emergency using the photographs of Allan Sekula and Andreas Gursky.

In his series Black Tide of 2002-2003, Sekula invites us to witness a grim reality: the ecological disaster of the sinking of the Prestige off the Galician coasts of Spain. After viewing the photographs and following up with a debate about the consequences of this disaster, the Pequeamigos built a gigantic paper boat near Allan Sekula's pieces, measuring 4 metres in length. We recreated the sinking of the Prestige and the clean-up of the coastline. Each child left his or her mark on the boat by writing or drawing what this experience meant to them.

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Exhibition Pipilotti Rist.

Pröblemäs Buenös. 4 obras de Pipilotti Rist y amigäs.

17 December 2005 / 16 April 2006.

Pipilotti Rist's work can be described as part of a narrative genre of art. She works with life memories that evolve and invade the present. In some ways the work is autobiographical; yet it goes far beyond dealing with simple personal anecdotes. Rist's video installations transform her body, her desires, that which is sexual, that which flows, movement and music into the substance of her work.

This visual artist, just as her heroin Pippi Longstocking, drinks from the unbridled optimism of a child and sees the world as a stage for fantasy and adventure.

Another photograph chosen to explore the same theme was Ohne Titel XIII by Andreas Gursky, a frontal view of a rubbish dump on the outskirts of Mexico City. This was another social and ecological conundrum and we chose to approach it from the question what exactly is all this rubbish?

The participants became private detectives with a mission: to investigate the lifestyles of today’s society through the waste it creates and observe and analyse the consequences of this lifestyle. Using magnifying glasses, they carefully zoomed in on every inch of the photograph in search of clues. After gathering a list of innumerable items we held a discussion about environmental issues.

These are examples of how we proceed with the children. Photography was the common technique used in both cases; but the strategies for approaching the work were the totally different. In order to programme an activity, we study each work of art as if we were the children themselves.

We carefully examine what exactly we want them to discover in each piece and choose the most adequate tool that will take us there, keeping in mind the child's motivating forces and learning needs.

Many aspects of the programme took shape over the course of time, nevertheless, this experience gave us a great deal of guideance. We became increasingly aware of the didactic pontential at the museum as we tapped into its resources.

After Emergencias, we dedicated a great deal of time to evaluating our activities; analising how and why we took the decision to do one thing and not another. This allowed us to improve future programmes. We had the pillars firmly in place and now the task was to progress with the same enthusiasm and develop the programme to its fullest potential.

Pröblemäs Buenös. 4 obras de Pipilotti Rist y amigäs The central theme of this project was obvious: the association between the artist, in this case Pipilotti Rist, and a character children would recognise: Pippi Longstocking. With this method we facilitated a new learning connection to a knowledge base the children already had. This was a very effective strategy; in fact we have used it again in other projects.

For Pipilotti, just as her heroin Pippi Longstocking, the world was a playground and life, a grand adventure. Pippi Longstocking's image was present from the outset of the project and was in fact, the main axis. We watched part of an episode of her adventures each day. That way the children became situated in the context and a favourable space was created in which to carry out the activities.

It surprised us how easy it was for the children to understand our idea and associate the artist and therefore, her work, with Pippi.

Synthesis of Experiences: PEQUEAMIGOS PROJECT Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina ViĂąuela L.

The artist's videos and video installations were soaked in colour, light and shadow, kaleidoscopic and oneiric images: all details very familiar to a child's universe, effortlessly opening the doors to working with the world of fantasy and imagination. The smallest children had an unquestionable preference for dressing up and putting on make-up; for being their most admired heroe for a time. We could not resist becoming Pippi Longstocking ourselves and feel first hand the power of her character.

Rist's hypnotic musical compositions for her videos were the background for many of the dynamics we engaged in involving movement. We played with the body's communicative possibilities and enjoyed searching for them using exercises of spatial orientation, gestural improvisation, contact or relaxation.

We also built mobiles with transparent objects emulating the video installation Apple Tree Innocent on Diamond Hill. Each child brought white or transparent containers or objects from their homes, which we then hung from a tree branch using a bit of string. We were able to incorporate the themes of recycling and care for the environment into the main themes of the project.

Trial Balloons Nearly 50 artists showed their work in this exhibition, works which pertain to the MUSAC Collection. It was a tour through present contemporary art.

One of the aims of our work is that children cultivate an appreciation for art objects. There is no better way to teach this than by allowing them to experiment being little artists. This is a way to help them feel confident about their artistic productions and learn to respect and value the creations of others – whether this art is created by their peers or the artists exhibiting in the galleries.

One of the things we did was a happening. As a preparation, we made an enormous poster that stated: We Are a Work of Art. After this we divided into two groups. Some would be in charge of showing the poster. The children decided that a good place to 'exhibit' themselves would be in the outdoor patio, visible from the inside of the building. Another group of children was in charge of interviewing the visitors and making them believe the work was just another piece MUSAC had acquired. They used a video camera to film it all, by themselves. It was astonishing to see how seriously the children took the exercise. The participants in the live sculpture spent half an hour perfectly still and the visitors' surprise was really worth watching. Some of them actually believed the charade.

After this amazing performance, they exchanged their impressions and analysed their actions as well as the public's reaction.

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Exhibition SANAA: Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa.

20 January / 6 May 2007.

These two architects presented their work for the first time in Spain in an anthology of their artistic career. A dozen models, one of them scale 1:10, and various drawings showcased this architectural style that embraces the symbiosis between architecture and nature, plays on shadow and light and the flow between interior and exterior.

Another way to get the children to feel more a part of the museum and to value the art works was by making the Peque-Buche.

We emulated works by Tobias Buche, an installation of panels covered in photographs, photocopies, computer print-outs; all placed without a narrative intention. We created a similar piece where the children hung their creations, photographs and souvenirs from their MUSAC experiences.

This exercise involved the preliminary exploration of a series of questions: what should be put on display, what criteria to follow in selecting material, how to organise it on the peque-Buche and what the story was going to be. Group decisions had to be made and a plan was needed to divide up the tasks. This creative process became a work of art in itself, even taking on more significance than the end result. Cohesion among the group members was key to creating a propitious environment for open exchange: a whirlwind of voices that brought such richness to the activity.

At the close of the peque-Buche experiment, the children were enormously satisfied with their role as true artists, enjoying the month-long run of their work on exhibit for everyone to see. They enjoyed the priviledge of creating their own art collection and showing it at a museum.

SANAA We decided to focus on this interior-exterior flow for our activity with the little ones in another attempt to make MUSAC a bit more accessible. We tried to break those barriers that distance us from contemporary art and welcomed the children into a place in which they could feel at home. We structured our project around one of the installation prototypes named Flower House. The main characteristic of this 1:2 scale model was that symbiosis between nature and architecture. Its flower-shaped structure with transparent walls and open, airy spaces invoked images of a house flooded with light and doorways directly open to nature.

We carried this idea out to one of MUSAC's indoor patios, tranforming it into a garden. Before getting to work, the children scripted a step-by-step plan. Taking into account that many pequeamigos children still did not have writing skills, we suggested they draw these different phases as they would a comic strip. As soon as they had worked out the process, they were ready to build their garden. Each child prepared their flower pot, planted a flower and watered it. Then we moved into decorating phase.

The children adorned each potted plant with little card signs containing written messages and drawings. They were able to care for the plants and observe their growth during the ensuing months. At the close of the project and in a final gesture of creating a stronger affective bond between the children and museum, each participant was invited to take a plant home.

Synthesis of Experiences: PEQUEAMIGOS PROJECT Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina Viñuela L.

The cooperative nature of this type of activity helps cement a groupconsciousness where the children take group decisions, interrelate and in many cases develop tutorial relationships among themselves, an effective mechanism in the learning process. Let us not forget, however, the ludic quality of these tasks that reinforces motivation and inquisitiveness. This motivation becomes self-perpetuating when the children are able to experience the museum space as something in some way theirs, a part of their life.

Another objective of this particular activity was to bring architecture closer to the children. A somewhat complex topic, we tried to offer it to them in an attractive, interesting way. We played architects and built our own house – a life sized one! But before building, planning was in order. Each group worked out a project for the house they wanted to build with the space and materials given them. Using styrofoam, they erected differentsized homes working with floor plans, scale and spatial orientation.

We attempted to stimulate in the children a functional type of learning – here, through building – that would allow them to relate their experiences at the museum to others in their daily lives.

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Exhibition p. 68 Exhibition p. 102 Exhibition p. 80

Te voy a enseñar a bailar I Like your music, I love your music Visible-invisible AlreVés Vés was the name chosen for the next Pequeamigos project. This play-on-words in Spanish hinted to the essence of our proposal: by looking at our surroundings back-to-front and every which way, we would find new ways of communicating.

As on other occasions, we searched for a nexus among these artists' work. In this case it was communication and the mechanisms favouring it: music, movement, language...all of them directed at greater selfknowledge. We dealt with verbal and non-verbal language, linguistic codes, the body and movement and musical preference as a feature portraying an individual or a group. The search for channels of alternative expression catapulted us into all types of activities.

We invented a secret language of pictograms to communicate with one another in relation to the piece Chandeliers by Cerith Wyn Evans, in which different styles of hanging lamps transmitted Morse code messages using blinking lights. Our secret language required the knowledge of the code we used to decipher it. The children played at encoding and deciphering and challenging the museum visitors to solve the enigma. We created simple messages that ranged from a person's name to complicated sentences and even stories. In this manner, the children experimented with language and understood the art work thanks to their real-life interaction.

Using Blanca Li's work we focused on the concept of the everyday by exploring the possibilities for movement regarding our day-to-day durables.

Playing and freedom of movement were our means. Videos by the artist such as Thoneteando were springboards for creating activities related to the body, movement and daily objects. One of the proposals was to choreograph an interaction between two chairs. The objective was experimentation with these items, giving them new uses.

Synthesis of Experiences: PEQUEAMIGOS PROJECT Julia Ruth Gallego and Cristina Viñuela L.

One of our most fulfilling experiences was with the workshop We are what we hear, inspired by Dave Muller's exhibition. It focused on the idea of music's role in constructing identities.

The first day was dedicated to seeing the exhibition and creating our own musical history. The youngest of the participants drew scenes from their favorite songs and placed them on a time line. The oldest ones related to the music the music they listened regularly to everyday situations. This exercise brought into clear view the importance music plays in our personal development. Their visual representations of this were wall murals brimming with drawings depicting the soundtrack of their lives.

The best way to feel music is when it is live, and so we did. The workshop filled with guitars, tamboureens, violins, base and bagpipes. We spent a day on each musical style: classical, contemporary, folk, etc. We invited musicians from the León community and designed activities with them – one for each day – following a common pattern: each musician would play an instrument and allow the children to participate in the concert.

The children learned traditional León songs, wrote musical scores and organised an orquestra of instruments they themselves created. They even invented a Pequeamigos anthem. They thouroughly enjoyed the priviledge of seeing and hearing all types of instruments. We closed the workshop with an open class for family and friends of the group to reap the full benefits of exchanging experiences and knowledge.

AlreVes Vés was a project oriented toward enjoying such a common daily habit as is communication. It was an approximation to the infinity of resources we have at our fingertips and demonstrated the diversity that surrounds us.

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PRAXIS AS A DEPARTURE POINT: A TWO-WAY JOURNEY Belén Sola

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PRAXIS AS A DEPARTURE POINT. A Two-way Journey Belén Sola

PRAXIS AS A DEPARTURE POINT: A TWO-WAY JOURNEY. Belén Sola I find it difficult to theorise about a practice that is performed through such nomadic notions as perpetual construction, transposition and flux. There are two reasons for this: one, because of the transformational process imvolved and two, because of the dual nature of our audiences; on the one hand individual (singular) and on the other, collective (multiple).

This educational practice has forced me follow a variety of itineraries and at each stop along the way, to understand my role and my place there. I shall attempt to explain some of these journeys – fully conscious of the contradictions or lack of coherence they may suggest – perceptions I myself have experienced throughout the course of this work.

WE ARE NEGOTIATORS AND MEDIATORS. THE NEXT STEP IS TO STOP BEING THEM. 1. WE NEED TO TALK: NEGOTIATION Amongst ourselves. Because we must face ourselves every day and decide on our acts. The department meets weekly to comment on the programmes currently underway, plan, and when necessary, evaluate and re-programme projects.

No project is actually planned until it has previously been tried out in the galleries (or elsewhere). It is then that the most important evaluation takes place: detection of errors in methodology, time factors, assessment of where we are in terms of expectations and goals. The readjustments are made and the experience continues. These weekly meetings are paramount to the development of our programmes.

With the museum audiences. As we have seen, the range of visitors is diverse and so are the forms of negotiation. We could say then that our dialogue with the community takes place through two different channels: with those who represent themselves and those represented by social agents.

With institutions. Universities, schools, the prison, the hospital, associations, etc. These relations are not always what we would desire them to be. It is here we encounter the first interference in our museum education: the lack of communication or the disconnect that originates from another binomial negotiation: that between DEAC and the Museum Institution.

Many times, we know the audience or know of them through their representative voice: educators, professors, leisure provision specialists, social workers, therapists, prison staff, doctors, etc. At other times, it is the audience who gives us the guidelines from which we work. The appraisals are in this way focused on what a museum can contribute to its socio-cultural relations and what these can in turn contribute to us (being a department based on feedback).

1 DEAC is understood as a team of people involved in the decision-making for the programmes they develop.

A two-way journey. PRAXIS AS A DEPARTURE POINT BelĂŠn Sola

With the MUSAC institution. Because it is the institution that approves our programmes and has the capacity to facilitate the mediation mechanisms we at DEAC use in our role as annex to the institution. The educational endeavour becomes especially complicated when the department is disjointed or segregated from the rest of the museum departments. The image from within the department and from without it are not easily reconciled. The communication between DEAC and the museum institution is not either.

My first reflexion on the subject has to do with a certain resistance. There is a resistance, on behalf of both parties, to shifting our perspectives: that of the curator/exhibitor and that of the visitor/educator. This resistance is at the root of the majority of disagreements that can arise between a hierarchical institutional system and the apparatus for pedagogical relational practices (that is inevitably immersed in the system and feeds from its hand).

This great paradox leaves us only two alternatives: Throw in the towel or invent the towel.

We are indeed inventing at this moment, and for that reason, we must de-structure, de-institutionalise and disintegrate those practices based on hierarchy and the subordination of them not only to one discourse but also one managerial and organisational model.

The clients' expectations must also be sensitive to this new parameter we shall denominate a-institutional, and far from being a problem, it opens up new possibilities for educational programmes with the community.

With other museum departments. Because we share a museum, a space and a schedule which are sometimes difficult to coordinate. In this sense I feel internal education is of the utmost importance: all museum professionals should be instructed in the practices of the education department.

This is the best way to understand the visitor's perspective and all that implies. Here I am not only referring to the technical departments but to all staff contracted to clean the installations, tend to the galleries, all maintenance staff, security guards, etc. Whether or not the visitor feels respected and valued at the museum depends greatly on them.

This instruction would also facilitate understanding that a museum designed for exhibiting must constantly transform itself and be used as a museum conceived for pedagogical practices.

2. REACHING OUTWARD: MEDIATION As we have seen, everything we do starts with our publics; however, many different interests arise in the negotiation phases with them. Mediation should then be understood as one of DEAC's functions, as a stage in a process where the museum institution assumes an important role.

The museum is established in people's minds, a reference point within the city and a place from which to work; it is not, however, the aim and end of our practices. From here we begin to execute the de-institutionalisation phase decisive to this new cartography.

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Field work is essential at this point. DEAC reaches outward, searching out the active agents in the city. We feel that de-institutionalising means humanising the museum, putting faces and names to those of us working there. This same identification process applies to the audiences with whom we are working.

Mediation has many things in common with negotiation; but with interesting nuances. This field work, which was carried out before the museum opened, has brought us closer to a large number of people and collectives working in social and cultural practices in this city. It has certainly helped us to know them better. But this prospective work must take place as well in the museum practices themselves. Here we face several interferences that arise in the negotiation: they cause us to step backward, to one side, skirt them and continue; proceed faster or slower...

3. INCLUDE: (RE)POSITION AND (RE)ASSIGNMENT OF THE LOCAL COMMUNITY IN THE ROLE OF ACTIVE AGENTS IN MUSEUM PRACTICE. I think it is crucial here to make a distinction between the concepts of integration and inclusion, although in our work we sometimes give little importance to the use of exact terms. (We have lost our fear of not expressing ourselves as precisely as we would like to; but do strive to be as coherent as possible in our practices.) Strategies based on diversity must incorporate respect and difference. Perhaps, in this sense, we prefer to be more of an inclusive museum: one that strives to allow every visitor his or her own space (or not) at the museum, rather than an integrative museum, invariably dedicated to socio-political questions having more to do with the normalisation of its audiences than respecting individuality.

Inclusion is an objective – a point toward which we gravitate. From here we can re-configure new practices for a full, multidirectional, multi-voiced educational exercise enriching to all of us and to society as a whole. This compendium of experiences, shared here and open for reflection, is a complete work in itself; but it also lays the groundwork for a model of museum that can question itself via its audiences and its practices.

We have travelled down many roads to reach where we are today. I know, however, that many more are still yet to be discovered – by us and by many other museums and art exhibition centres.

It is my sincere hope and desire that this will happen.

LIST OF ACTIVITIES 2005/2009

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LIST OF ACTIVITIES

LIST OF ACTIVITIES PROGRAMMED

BY DEAC MUSAC Herein the reader will find a description of the major activities programmed at the Museum since 2005, either by DEAC or other Museum departments.

WORKSHOPS WITH ARTIST AND SPECIALIST GYPSY CHANNEL Directed by Antoni Abad Coordinated by Raul Ordás* April 2005 Young Roma kids toured public and private spaces with mobile phone-cameras. They gathered and exchanged experiences and opinions, becoming journalists of their own reality.

THE GAZE Directed by Chus Gutiérrez Coordinated by Raul Ordás May 2005 Project on learning the comprehensive process of documentary film production, culminating in the production of a short documentary.

OTHER MAPS Dirrected by Rogelio L. Cuenca Coordinated by Raul Ordás May 2005 A way of viewing the concept of public art and various issues dealing with transformation and urban use under today's globalisation process.

IMPOSSIBLE DIALOGUES Directed by Florentina Alegre and María Galindo, of the Bolivian artists’ collective Mujeres Creando Coordinated by Belén Sola Jully 2005 Workshop focused on the particular actions and discussion sessions which led to the publication of the magazine Mojadas.

BLOW YOUR NOSE Directed by Nilo Gallego Coordinated by Raul Ordás November-December 2005 In conjunction with the Dora García exhibition.

Workshop involving various ways of experimenting with sound.

*Cultural Management internship at MUSAC 2005-2006.

TECHNIQUE Directed by Locking Shocking (Ana González and Oscar Benito) Coordinated by Belén Sola March 2006 The participants elaborated a specific project related to fashion design.

CURE-ART Directed by Carlos Canal Coordinated by Nadia Teixeira June 2006 Workshop on photography as a healing tool.

BANDS AND OTHER PEOPLE. 7 DAYS, 8 HOURS EACH DAY Directed by Jon Mikel Euba Coordinated by Belén Sola July 2006 An exploration of examples of work throughout history, illustrating specific practises and production strategies. It was, at the same time, an invitation to participate in a practical video creation experience.

LOVE IS A QUESTION OF LIFE OR DEATH Directed by Ángel Masip Coordinated by Belén Sola July 2006 Practical pictorial workshop which developed individual and group projects for exploring different methods of visual expression.

COMICS: CONTEMPORARY SEQUENCE ART Directed by Miguel Ángel Martín Coordinated by Belén Sola October 2006 Workshop which explored the creation of a narrative structural base in two parts: theory and practise.

LIEBRE LIEBRE QUIERO SER. EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE ART WORKSHOP Directed by Nilo Gallego Coordinated by Belén Sola October - November 2006 An examination of performance art in its various manifestations, from Dadaist cabaret to video performance.

ARQUIGRÁFICA: AN ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP Directed by Olga Cuesta February 2007 This workshop concentrated on the evolution of contemporary arquitecture,using digital photography adapted to the field of architecture to demonstrate the relation between the two art forms.

LIST OF ACTIVITIES

EVERY-DAY-LIFE ART Directed by Alicia Framis Coordinated by Belén Sola March 2007 Proposals for new ways to act. Alternative spaces which can suggest new forms of a social interaction where daily activities become less dehumanising.

NO FICTIONS Directed by Chus Domínguez Coordinated by Belén Sola April - May 2007 A documentary workshop on creating where participants experimented with shapes and ways of approaching reality.

DOWN WITH INTELLIGENCE Directed by Fernando Sánchez Castillo Coordinated by Tania Pardo* April 2007 The objective of this workshop was to explore power symbols using a particular object: the Azor, Franco's pleasure yacht which is currently displayed outside a restaurant in the town of Cogollos (Burgos). The mast of this yacht was part of Sánchez Castillo's exhibition at MUSAC. SLAUGHTERHOUSE CLUB WORKSHOP Directed by Enrique Marty Coordinated by Carlos Ordás July - August 2007 An old slaughterhouse in the León town of Benavides del Órbigo, was the location selected

by Marty whose space and memory would be transformed by the participants in the project.

Other activities around were: - Seminars for the public on artistic practises of the end of the 20th century at the local Public Library from January to June, 2007.

- The publication of photography book featuring the people, landscapes and villages of the Ribera del Órbigo area by photographers Gerardo Custance, José Guerrero, Sofía Moro and Jesús Salvadores.

THE CLOSE BODY (DIALOGUES ON WAYS OF SEEING) Directed by Olga Mesa Coordinated by Belén Sola July 2007 This workshop becomes a laboratory for stage set creation and thinking on the body where the actor and his gaze is an act of the present leaving one to consider the body as a space for questioning and renovation.

*Curator of Laboratorio 987 MUSAC between 2005 and 2009

CONTACT IMPROVISACIÓN I Directed by Eckard Müller and Daniela Schwartz October 2007 MUSAC and León University organise this workshop-seminar as an invitation to approach contemporary dance as a space for observation and action.

WRITING AND CREATIVE ACTION Directed by Sara Rosenberg Coordinated by Belén Sola December 2007 A course for those who want to write, participate in and recreate a world of their own by giving shape to ideas and expressing thoughts.

SOUND ART. THE BODY'S AMPLIFIED EXPRESSIVITY Directed by Rui Costa and Manuela Barile Coordinated by Belén Sola February 2008 Practical and creative workshop where one can produce multidisciplinary performance combining voice, movement, physical acustic and sensory space, to expand possibilities for expression.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND INTERIOR Directed by Olga Cuesta April 2008 A course that spans the foremost trends in interior design photography.

DANCE AND DISABILITY Maite León Dance Company Coordinated by Nadia Teixeira May 2008 A workshop for training educators in the technique and methods of Maite León PsicoBallet dance in order to implement it on a professional level. Art and disability are combined in PsicoBallet and the workshop provided tools for working with disabled persons through contemporary dance.

THE CLOSE BODY II Directed by Olga Mesa Coordinated by Belén Sola July 2008 Continuation of the previous workshop (2007), with a more profound look into the experimental format of thinking on the body.

FIELD WORK Directed by Virginia Villaplana Coordinated by Belén Sola July 2008 Theoretical and practical workshop for auteur documentary creation. Focused on narrative video and photography forms as tools for essay and discursive approaches to temporal processes.

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CONTACT IMPROVISACIÓN II Directed by Eckard Müller and Daniela Schwartz Coordinated by Belén Sola and Nadia Teixeira November 2008 The morning session of this workshop was held for non-professionals with mental disabilities with an afternoon session for professional publics. At the weekend, a session was held combining the two groups.

WRITING AND CREATIVE ACTION II Directed by Sara Rosemberg Coordinated by Belén Sola December 2008 Second edition of this workshop, held in the morning at the León prison and in the afternoon at the museum.

PAINT LIKE MONKEYS Directed by Antonio Ballester Moreno Coordinated by Cristina Viñuela García February 2009 Workshop of practical exercises for developing a creative methodology based on relinquishing ideas and thought and fostering the immediate and the emotional in the pictorial act.

REPRESTENTING ONE’S SELF Directed by Oskar Gómez / Compañía L’Alakran Coordinated by Alfredo Escapa* April 2009 Performance workshop calling on the actor to examine the nuances between one’s identity and their representation in public.

PATTERN RECOGNITION Directed by Itziar Okariz Coordinated by Belén Sola July 2009 Workshop on the reflection of performative exercise as culture-building, in so far as it is a tool for producing signs, for transgressing and for transforming codes.

GUIDED TOURS: WASTELANDS, DEMOLITION SITES AND RUINS Directed by Lara Almarcegui Coordinated by Nadia Teixeira November 2009 Workshop for investigating areas undergoing change in the city of León and outlying areas: industrial land, empty lots and homes, buildings being demolished, ruins, abandoned villages...

*Educator and actor from León

SEMINARS THINGS SINISTER AND OTHER MODERN TERRORS Directed by Estrella de Diego Coordinated by Tania Pardo 31 March and 1 April 2006 Activity accompanying exhibition by Enrique Marty. Participating in the seminars were writer and journalist Juan José Millás, neurologist Rafael Arroyo, playwright Angelica Liddell and writer Alan Pauls. The seminar ended with the screening of Tras el Cristal, by filmmaker Agustín Villalonga.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND COMMITTMENT: WAR IS NOT A SHOW Directed by Gervasio Sánchez Coordinated by Belén Sola October 2006 Seminar on documentary photography as a medium for communicating human horror and pain in a dignified manner.

CONFLICT ZONE Directed by Gervasio Sánchez Coordinated by Belén Sola and Antonio G. Chamorro April 2007, 2008 and 2009 Photography seminar for secondary school students wherein the causes of major world conflicts were studied through the work of this photojournalist. Materials were provided to students to do preparatory work in the classroom and at home prior to the seminar.

STILL IMAGERY: FOCUS ON PHOTOGRAPHY Taught by Ángel Marcos July 2007 Intensive workshop with the photographer based on his exhibition China at the museum for professionals and enthusiasts.

PHOTOGRAPHIC FOCUS SEMINAR Taught by Carmela García Coordinated by Amparo Moroño October 2008 An intensive seminar with the artist based on her exhibition Constelación held at MUSAC. MEET WITH MARINA NÚÑEZ Coordinated by Mariola Campelo March 2009 This workshop was designed as an open debate between visitors and the artist herself as a way to learn about Núñez’s artistic career. Particular focus was placed on those works present in the exhibition FIN, being held simultaneously at MUSAC.

LIST OF ACTIVITIES

THE RULES OF CHAS Taught by Santiago Alba Rico Coordinated by Belén Sola in conjunction with the Mutual Support Network* June 2009 An approach to this philosopher’s thinking; a clear and revealing analysis of contemporary entertainment and languid conscience.

NEW ROUTES, NEW URBAN CONDITIONS Directed by Octavio Zaya Coordinated by Helena López Camacho 10 October 2009 Within the New Silk Roads project by artist, theorist and urban planner Kyong Park. In the seminar, a space for reflection was opened up to the transformation of urban and social dynamics in globalisation’s new social, economic and political contexts. Other participants were architects Santiago Cirugeda and Teddy Cruz.

MASDEDOCE / UP TWELVE A programme stemming from MUSAC Pequeamigos, aimed at children over age twelve.

To date, the following workshops have been programmed: DISC JOCKEY Directed by Nerea Tascón Ruiz Coordinated by Antonio G. Chamorro December 2006 Introduction to the world of a DJ with basic training on how to use the professional equipment.

EXPERIMENTAL RADIO WORKSHOP Directed by Ángeles Oliva and Toña Medina Coordinated by Belén Sola July 2006 Radio broadcasting workshop where participants made jingles, programmes and radio theatre productions.

CAUCAUPHONY. CREATIVE RADIO Directed by Ángeles Oliva and Toña Medina Coordinated by Antonio G. Chamorro July 2007 Continuation of the experiemental radio workshop of the previous year.

BREAKDANCE Directed by Álvaro Díaz Díaz Coordinated by Antonio G. Chamorro April 2008 Urban dance techniques and styles were explored in this workshop.

VIDEO WORKSHOP FOR YOUNG PEOPLE Directed by Julio Fernández Coordinated by Antonio G. Chamorro February - March 2008 The basic concepts and tools were learned in order to create a fiction narration in images.

GRAFFITI Directed by Fernando de Uña Romero Coordinated by Antonio G. Chamorro May - June 2008 A practical workshop for understanding the world of graffiti art.

CREATIVE COMPUTER WORKSHOP Directed by Inés Quiñones Coordinated by Julia R. Gallego y Cristina Viñuela L. October - November 2008 Practical classes on writing and posting a blog.

EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE GROUP Directed by Antonio G. Chamorro and Cristina Viñuela L. (DEAC educators) From summer 2009, a space was established once a week for adolescents who wanted to experiment with sound, movement, video, writing and acting.

PEQUEAMIGOS WORKSHOPS

DJ IN SESSION: SOUND MIX WORKSHOP Directed by Nerea Tascón Coordinated by Antonio G. Chamorro December 2007 Continuation of the DJ workshop of the previous year. Deeper understanding was gained about technique and participants created their own mixes.

A TUG ON THE EARS, SOUND ART Directed by Nilo Gallego Coordinated by Julia R. Gallego, Belén Sola and Cristina Viñuela L. April 2006 The sound workshop of the previous year was adapted for children.

RECORDING SILENCE Directed by Juan Marigorta and Luis Melón Coordinated by Belén Sola March 2007 Aimed at an introduction to contemporary video creation: handling a digital camera as well as the editing equipment.

DANCE AND CREATIVITY WORKSHOP Directed by Marisa Amor Coordinated by Julia R. Gallego and Cristina Viñuela L. April 2007 Dance and movement as means for creative expression and learning.

* A network of León citizens groups born within the context of the economic crisis at the beginning of 2009.

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INTREPIDS PENCILS. DRAWING WORKSHOP Directed by Nicolas Paris Coordinated by Julia R. Gallego and Cristina Viñuela L. July 2008 Using Nicolas París exhibition in Laboratorio 987, the MUSAC Pequeamigos enjoyed a workshop with the artist himself.

(The complete list of all children’s workshops can be found in the MUSAC Pequeamigos chapter.)

OTHER WORKSHOP ANIMATION WORKSHOP Directed by Ruth Gómez Summer 2005 Didactic space where the visitor enters the world of animation and its diverse techniques.

PAINT A UTOPIA Christimas 2005 - 2006 Workshop directed to all publics, no admission nor enrollment involved. Each person was invited to paint their own utopia with the materials available in the museum's foyer.

ARCHIVEOFDESIRE Christmas 2006 - 2007 Using computers or paper, visitors left their desires recorded for the following year. Their works were then photographed and projected on the walls of the foyer.

PUPPET WORKSHOP Summer 2007 Based on Pierre Huyghe's exhibition. The workshop was set up in the foyer for the entire summer. Anxo Garcia, Director of the Marionette Museum of Lalín (Pontevedra) and expert puppeteer gave an intensive workshop for adults over two weekends.

FILMS SESSION FILM AND HUMAN RIGHTS Coordinated by Raul Ordás April - August 2005 These film session were inaugurated within the framework of Emergencias.

One Shot. Dror Moreh Goodbye Hungary. Jon Nealon Persons of Interest. Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse Saints and Sinners. Abigail Honor Rana's Wedding. Hany Abu-Assad Juvies. Leslie Neale

Mother's Crossing. Lode Desmet A great wonder. Kin Shelton Against my Will. Ayfer Ergun Yanny Levkoff. Luis Alaejos and Raúl Díez Alaejos IRANIAN FILM Coordinated by Carlos Ordás September 2005 Related to Shirin Neshat's exhibition, this series demonstrated a sampling of films made after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Where is the Friend's house? Abbas Kiarostami The Circle. Jafar Panahi Life, and nothing more. Abbas Kiarostami Kandahar. Mohsen Makhmalbaf Through the Olive Trees. Abbas kiarostami The Color of Paradise. Majid Majidi Baran. Majid Majidi TEEN AGE. ADOLESCENCE IN FILM Coordinated by Carlos Ordás November 2005 In relation to the exhibition Make death listen by Muntean and Rosenblum.

The Dreamers. Bernardo Bertolucci Welcome to the Dollhouse. Todd Solondz Kids. Larry Clark.

El otro barrio. Salvador García Rosetta. Jean Pierre y Luc Dardenne Elephant. Gus Van Sant Hard candy. David Slade MOOLAADÉE Coordinated by Carlos Ordás November 2006 African cinema unveiled.

Samba Traore. Idrissa Quedraogo.

Le franc. Djibril Diop Mambety.

La petite vendeuse de soleil. Djibril Diop Mambety.

Sia, la rêve du python. Dani Kouyaté Madame Brouette. Moussa Sene Absa.

Tasuma, le feu. Daniel Sanou Kollo.

Moolaadé. Ousmane Sembene.

CICLO DE CINE AMORES DIFÍCILES (TOUGH LOVES SERIES) Coordinated by Carlos Ordás December 2007 Based on short stories by Gabriel García Márquez A collection of perspectives through the eyes of renowned Latin American directors.

La Fábula de la Bella Palomera. Ruy Guerra.

Milagro en Roma. Lisandro Duque Naranjo.

Cartas del Parque. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.

Domingo feliz. Olegario Barrera.

El verano de la Señora Forbes. Jaime Humbrerto Hermosillo.

Yo soy el que tu buscas. Jaime Chávarri.

LIST OF ACTIVITIES

MICHAEL HANEKE Coordinated by Carlos Ordás March 2007 The Seventh Continent Benny's Video 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance Funny Games Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys The Piano Teacher Time of the Wolf Caché DEGUSTAR EL CINE (CINEMA TASTING) Coordinated by Carlos Ordás April 2007 Babette's Feast. Gabriel Axel The cook, the theif, his wife and her lover.

Peter Greenaway The Celebration. Thomas Vinterberg Tortilla soup. María Ripoll A Chef in Love. Nana Djordjadze Mondovino. Jonathan Nossiter Super Size Me. Morgan Spurlock CHUS DOMÍNGUEZ 21 and 22 April 2007 Selection of works by León film director. prezo da dote Chamamento O tempo dos bullós O ámbito do Cauca Ciudadano inmigrante JAPAN LOVERS Coordinated by Carlos Ordás May 2007 Heaven’s Bookstore (Tengoku No Honya Koibi) Tetsuo Shinohara Crying out love in the center of the world (Sekai No Chusin De) (Ai Wo Sakebu). Isao Yukisada Spring snow (Haru No Yuki). Isao Yukisada Be with you (Ima Ai Ni Yukimatsu). Nobuhiro Doi The Milkwoman (Itsuka Dokusho Suruhi).

Akira Ogata Tokyo Tower (Tokyo Tower). Takashi Minamoto Midnight Sun (Taiyo No Uta). Norihiro Koizumi AMOS GITAI Coordinated by Carlos Ordás June 2007 Kadosh Kippour Eden Kedma Alila Free Zone

NO FICTIONS 21 April - 13 May 2007 Programmed by Chus Domínguez Coordinated by Belén Sola As a final event for the workshop of the same name, a selection of works by the most internationally renowned documentary film makers.

Más allá del espejo. Joaquín Jordá Los rubios. Albertina Carri De l’autre côté. Chantal Akerman Retrato. Carlos Ruiz Carmona Onde jaz o teu sorriso. Pedro Costa El perro negro. Peter Forgács The good woman of Bangkok. Dennis O’Rourke El diablo nunca duerme. Lourdes Portillo CHINESE CINEMA TODAY Coordinated by Carlos Ordás June 2007 Shower. Zang Yang Together. Chen Kaige The Road Home. Zhang Yimou Letter from an Unknown Woman. Xu Jinglei MUSIC, CULTURE AND IDENTITY Programmed by Chus Domínguez Coordinated by Belén Sola February 2008 Sympathy for the Devil (one plus one). J.L. Godard Mystery Train. Jim Jarmusch Style Wars. Tony Silver 24 hours Party People. Michael Winterbottom The Boot Factory. Lech Kowalski The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Jeff Feuerzeig Last Days. Gus Van Sant CHOREOGRAPHERS BEHIND THE LENS Programmed by Chus Dominguez Coordinated by Belén Sola March 2008 Le dèffi. Blanca Li Selection of experimental films by Maya Deren Complaint of an Empress. Pina Bausch Selection of choreographed pieces by Joëlle Bouvier and Régis Obadia Selection of works by Miranda Pennell Blue Sky, Black Sky. Paula de Luque and Sabrina Farsi Here After. Wim Vandekeybus

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FILM IN THE CITY Programmed by Chus Domínguez Coordinated by Belén Sola May - June 2008 Life in Loops: a megacities RMX. Timo Novotny De niños. Joaquín Jorda Silence!. Victor Kossokovksy Palimpsesto Salmantino. Basilio Martín Patino The Pickpocket. Jia Zhang-ke Selected works by Gordon-Matta-Clark Alice in the Cities. Wim Wenders NO FICTIONS II October 2008 Programmed by Chus Domínguez Coordinated by Belén Sola After the 2007 edition of No ficciones, we prepared a look at different lines of non-fiction from a gender-based perspective: film and video by 21st century women who make up the new insurgent narrative, a term used by artist and writer Virginia Villaplana in the opening lecture of this series, to describe this type of film with certain formal treatments and content.

Remote Sensing. Ursula Biemann.

Señorita extraviada. Lourdes Portillo.

Sonia. Nathalie Delaunoy.

Video Remains. Alexandra Juhasz.

Lover Other. Barbara Hammer.

Lettre à ma soeur. Habiba Djahnine.

Harat. A Journey Diary. Sepidehfrasi.

November and Lovely Andrea. Hito Steryl BUILDING VOICES Coordinated by Izaskun Sebastián* November 2008 / February 2009 Film and lecture series by directors who represent the current filmmaking scene in Spain. Invited guests were: Cesc Gay, Pablo Llorca, Salvador García Ruiz and Isabel Coixet. Screenings of their selected films.

ANN HUI March - April 2009 Boat People Ah Kam -The Stunt Eighteen Springs July Rhapsody The Post-modern Life of My Aunt MOVING CITIES. NO FICTIONS III Programmed by Chus Domínguez Coordinated by Belén Sola September - October 2009 The film series No Fictions has been programmed for the third year running, exploring different modalities of contemporary documentary film.

In this edition and in conjunction with Kyong * Press Department of MUSAC

Park’s exhibition New Silk Roads, a series of films were shown that unveiled—through reality— the transformations taken place in recent years in some of the urban enclaves located in these new routes of globalisation.

Paper House. Belgin Cengiz and Ofuz Karabeli Kazakhstan, naissance d’une nation.

Christian Barani and Guillaume Reynard The City Beautiful. Rahul Roy Singapore GaGa. Tan Pin Pin The Concrete Revolution. Xiaolu Guo Dandelion. Ren Shujian HAL HARTLEY FILM SERIES Conceived by Ugo Rondinone Coordinated by Eneas Bernal and Pepe Tabernero December 2009 – January 2010 Held in conjunction with cultural events at the University of León about American filmmaker Hal Hartley.

DOCUMENTARY OF THE MONTH Proyect of Parallell 40.

Coordinated by Roberto Díaz* y Belén Sola A european No Fiction film is screening every first Thursday of the month.

2008 La guerra contra las drogas. Sebastian, J.F To Die in Jerusalem. Hilla Medalia Resistencia. Lucinda Torre The champagne spy. Nadav Schirman The Monastery. Perenille Rose Gr ønkjær La otra copa. Damián Cukierkorn I am from nowhere. Georg Misch From Father to Son. Visa Koiso-Kanttila Madres. Eduardo Félix Walger Il fare politica. Hugues Le Paige.

Bye Bye Belgium. Philippe Dutilleul.

What would Jesus Buy?. Rob Vankemade 2009 The Englih Surgeon. Geoffrey Smith 1973 RPM. Fernando Valenzuela The Mosquito problem. Andrey Paounov Cool and Crazy. Knut Eric Jensen Los demonios del Edén. Alejandra Islas.

Rembrandt’s J’acusse. Meter Greenaway Recipes for Disaster. John Webster The Dictador Hunter. Klaarttje Quirijns Hold me tight, let me go. Kim Longinotto Celebration of flight. Juliette Sanders Barraques. La ciudad olvidada.

Alonso Carnicer y Sara Grimal.

*Supporting Service of MUSAC

LIST OF ACTIVITIES

CINEMA CHATS EDUCATIONAL PROYECT ON FILM Directed by Antonio G. Chamorro.

This project began at the start of 2007, aimed at learning basic film analysis tools and applying them to generally accessible and well-known movies. These would be related to the exhibitions being held at the museum at the same time. At first it became a favourite film series for publics aged 60 and over, with available seating for 30 viewers. Currently this capacity has risen to 60 spaces, welcoming a wider age range of viewers.

After the screenings, participants enjoy coffee during the chats.

FILM AND ARCHITECTURE February - March 2007 In relation to the SANAA exhibition, we focused on different ways to understand urban spaces through film.

Match Point. Woody Allen Tokyo Monogatari. Yasujiro Ozu Mon Oncle. Jacques Tati En Construcción. José Luis Guerín Manhattan. Woody Allen Playtime. Jacques Tati Sleeper. Woody Allen The Fountainhead. King Vidor FILM AND LITERATURE: READING IN THE SHADE July 2007 Based on Pierre Huyghe's exhibition, the focus was on relating film and literature.

Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran.

François Duperon Fahrenheit 451. François Trufaut El coronel no tiene quién le escriba. Arturo Ripstein The Hours. Stephen Daldry ABOUT EXISTENCIAS October - December 2007 A screening of films related to museums, collecting or accumulating.

Le Violon Rouge. François Girard Everything is Illuminated. Liev Schreiber Nueve Reinas. Fabián Bielinsky La Collectionneuse. Eric Rohmer Manolo Recicla. Manolo González The Gleaners and I. Agnès Varda The Lives of Others. Florian Henckel Russian Arc. Alexander Sokurov FILM AND DANCE February - April 2008 The basic guideline for this series was dance, based on the exhibition Te voy a enseñar a bailar

by Blanca Li.

Shall we dance?. Masayuki Suo The Turning Point. Herbert Ross Dancer in the Dark. Lars von Trier Billy Elliot. Stephen Daldry Le Dèffi. Blanca Li Rhythm is it! Thomas Grube and Enrique Sánchez Down Argentine Way. Irving Cummings Iberia. Carlos Saura WOMEN IN FILM June 2008 Inspired by Carmela García's exhibition Constelación, 4 films made by 4 women of different nationalities were screened.

Gbravica. Jasmila Zbani Gary Cooper que estás en los cielos. Pilar Miró Faithless. Liv Ullman Water. Deepa Metha AMERICAN INDEPENDENT FILM October - November 2008 In relation Paul Pfeiffer's exhibition, great independent American classics were screened.

No Country for Old Men. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Night on Earth. Jim Jarmusch Buffalos'66. Vincent Gallo Dark Innocence. Gregg Araki Brick. Rian Johnson The Darjeeling Limited. Wes Anderson The Savages.Tamara Jenkins NORDIC FILM February - March 2009 In conjunction with the exhibitions by Danish artists Elmgreen and Dragset and Norwegian artist Kristin Roestorp, twelve films were shown to bring us closer to one of Europe’s most dynamic film traditions.

The Word. C.T. Dreyer Dogville. Lars Von Trier Dear Wendy. Thomas Vinterberg The Boss of it All. Lars Von Trier Kitchen Stories. Bent Hamer A Beautiful Country. Hans Petter Moland Factotum. Bent Hamer Scenes from a Marriage. Ingmar Bergman Lilya Forever. Lukas Moodysson Saraband. Ingmar Bergman A Man without a Past. Aki Kaurismaki A Little Trip to Heaven. Baltasar Kormákur FILMS FROM THE EAST September - December 2009 Kyong Park’s Exhibition The New Silk Roads was a catalyst for this series on films from the East.

A selection of videos from the MUSAC Collection were included, all related to this geographical region. Two lectures by professionals from Casa Asia were held.

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Video selection from the MUSAC Collection Always. Takashi Yamakazi The Road. Zhang Jiarui Lecture: How to See Asian film 1, by Por Gloria Fernández and Enrique Garcelán Welcome to Dongmakol. Park Kwang-Hyun Lecture: How to See Asian Film 2, by Gloria Fernández and Enrique Garcelán Mumbai Meri Jaan. Nishikant Kamat The Pye-Dog. Kwok Chi-kin 881. Royston Tan

STUDENT VIDEO FORUM Beginning in May 2008, audiovisual analysis and debate for secondary school students featuring four films shown at MUSAC the last week of the school term, followed by comment-sharing sessions amongst all the students and DEAC educators.

Persépolis. Marjane Satrapi y Vincent Paronnaud Mi vida en rosa. Alain Berliner Fucking Amal. Lukas Moodysson Quinceañera. Richard Glatzer ANNUALES COURSES INTRODUCTION TO 20TH CENTURY ART HISTORY COURSE Years 2005-2006. 2006-2007. 2007-2008. 20082009 and 2009-2010 Thursday from 12:00 -13:30. October - May. Approach to 20th Century Art for general, non specialised publics. Held weekly in one hour and a half sessions, taught by members of DEAC and colleagues from the exhibition coordination team.

The programme covered material from the first avant-garde movements to present day art markets, following an academic structure until 2009, a period after which new historiographical perspectives were incorporated. In this latter course, under the direction of historian Patricia Mayayo, a history of 20th Century Art was approached through examining gender differences. In following years, new versions of art closer to our times will be examined.

Course Programming until 2008 Avant-garde 1: “isms”.

Carlos Ordás y Amparo Moroño Avant-garde 2: Dada. Marcel Duchamp.

Belén Sola Avant-garde 3: Surrealism. Salvador Dalí.

Tania Pardo Avant-garde 4: Pablo Picasso. Tania Pardo Abstraction: Vasily Kandinsky. Carlos Ordás y Antonio G. Chamorro

Art in Spain at the Dawn of the 20th Century.

Tania Pardo 20th Century Architecture.

Belén Sola y Kristine Guzmán* Abstract Expressionism: Jackson Pollock.

Belén Sola y Antonio G. Chamorro Film as a Form of Expression: Luis Buñuel.

Belén Sola Pop Art: Andy Warhol.

Tania Pardo Art as a Concept: Land Art. Carlos Ordás y Nadia Teixeira Action Art: Joseph Beuys. Belén Sola 20th Century Photography. Rafael Doctor Spanish Art: 1970s. Carlos Ordás y Nadia Teixeira Spanish Art: 1980s. Belén Sola y Mariola Campelo Spanish Art: 1990s and Current Trends.

Tania Pardo Public Art: The Street as the Venue. Belén Sola Video as an Artistic Expression. Agustín P. Rubio Art and Women: Frida Khalo. Tania Pardo From Sculpture to Installation. Carlos Ordás The Art Machine 1: Collecting and the Museum.

Belén Sola The Art Machine 2: The Current Art Market.

Tania Pardo The MUSAC Collection.

Carlos Ordás y Amparo Moroño Course Programming 2009 - 2010 Gender and Sex Differences in the Historical Avant-Garde: Ideological Contradictions.

Amparo Moroño Screening: Paris was a woman directed by Greta Schiller.

Modern Art and the Figure of the "New Woman” in the Between-war Period. Guest lecturer; Juan Vicente Aliaga The Other Dadaism: Women Artists in the Dada Movement. Araceli Corbo At the Edges of Surrealism: Sexual Myths and Stereotypes of the Surrealist Revolution. Mariola Campelo Screening: Lover Other. Directed by Barbara Hammer.

Guided tour of the retrospective exhibition of The spanish artist Delhy Tejero: Representaciones.

Life-change: Fashion, Design and Decorative Art in the Other Vanguard. Antonio G. Chamorro.

Between Experimentation and Documentary: Women Photographers in the First Half of the 20th Century. Nadia Teixeira.

Avant-garde, Women and “New Art” in Spain Frida Kahlo and the Hidden Side of Mexican Muralist Painting. Guest lecturer: Patricia Mayayo Artist as Hero: Masculinity Myths in American Abstract Expressionism. Antonio G. Chamorro Sexual Imagery in Pop Art: A twisted interpretation * General Coordinator MUSAC 2002/2009.

LIST OF ACTIVITIES

of Andy Warhol’s Work. Tania Pardo Expanding the Limits of Art 1: Women, Performance and Action Art. Belén Sola Screening of Not for Sale directed by Laura Cottingham Art and Feminist Politics in the 1970s. Nadia Teixeiro.

Expanding the Limits of Art II: Women Artists and Nature Pieces. Guest lecturer: Tonia Raquejo Another Take on Postmodernism: Feminism and Critique of Representation in the 1980s. Mariola Campelo Transvestism, Masquerade and Queer identities in Contemporary Art. Guest lecturer: Jesús Martínez Oliva A Spanish Case: Art and Feminisms in Democratic Spain. Guest lecturer: Patricia Mayayo Video and Gender Issues: Guest lecturer: Susana Blas Video Screenings from the MUSAC Collection.

Araceli Corbo th Architecture, Sex and Gender in the 20 Century.

Antonio G. Chamorro Gender and Identity in the MUSAC Collection.

Amparo Moroño At the Dawn of the Millennium: Institutionalisation of Gender Discourse?. Belén Sola WORKSHOP ON CULTURE AND VISUAL ANALYSIS Courses 2007/2008 and 2008 /2009 This course is given weekly with a focus on the context and audiovisual pracises of the 20th and 21st century. Divided into two theoretical sections and one practical section.

Teaching staff: Araceli Corbo, Chus Domínguez, Antonio G. Chamorro, Amparo Moroño, Tania Pardo, Izaskun Sebastián, Belén Sola. Practical sessions given by Nadia Corsi, Marino García and Juan Marigorta.

Course Programming 2007- 2008 Cinema’s origin: Cinema and Avant- garde.

Carlos Ordás Luis Buñuel. Viridiana. Belén Sola The italian neorrealism. R. Rossellini. Roma Cità Aperta. Tania Pardo The Nouvelle Vague. F.Truffaut: Les 400 coups.

Izaskun Sebastián Pier Paolo Pasolini: Saló. Belén Sola Spanish Cinema 80. Pedro Almodovar. Tania Pardo European Cinema 90. Lars Von Trier. Breaking the waves. Izaskun Sebastián John Waters. Pink Flamingos. Izaskun Sebastián Cinema and documentary. Agnes Varda.

Chus Domínguez New cinema languages. video within MUSAC Colection. Agustín Pérez Rubio

The author and his work: Carles Congost The author and his work: Ana Laura Aláez The author and his work: Martín Sastre The author and his work: Marina Nuñez MUSAC Colection: Pipilotti Rist. Antonio G. Chamorro MUSAC Colection: Shirin Neshat. Amparo Moroño Last quarter workshop lead by por Chus Domínguez, Nilo Gallego, Marino García y Juan Marigorta.

Programación 2007/2008 Lumière brothers, Méliès and Griffith. Tania Pardo Sergéi Eisenstein. The Battleship Potemkin.

Chus Domínguez Billy Wilder. The apartment. Tania Pardo Juan Antonio Bardem. Calle Mayor. Tania Pardo Jean Luc Godard. À bout de souffle. Belén Sola Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Die Sehnsucht der Veronica. Belén Sola John Cassavetes. Faces. Chus Domínguez Woody Allen. Manhattan. Antonio G. Chamorro Chris Marker, Sans Soleil. Chus Domínguez Víctor Erice. El sol del membrillo. Chus Domínguez Wong Kar Wai. 2046. Mariola Campelo Bill Viola. Nadia Teixeiro Nam June Paik. Araceli Corbo Marina Abramovic. Olga Sánchez* Pipilotti Rist. Antonio G. Chamorro Shirin Neshat. Amparo Moroño Last quarter workshop lead by Nadia Corsi, Chus Domínguez, Marino García y Juan Marigorta.

DOCUMENTARY FILM COURSE: REALITY AND AVANT-GARDE. Programmed by Chus Domínguez January - March 2008 Spanish professionals were at the front of these master classes, held Saturday afternoons to bring documentary film closer to the public. The course examined different facets of the documentary film genre, its various techniques and languages.

Origines. From Lumière to the British School and Robert Flaherty. Josetxo Cerdán Kino-Pravda. Soviet Avant-garde Movements.

Vicente J. Benet Western Avant-garde Movements. Margarita Ledo Free Cinema, Direct Cinema and Observational Documentary. Mª Luisa Ortega New American Cinema, American Avant-garde.

Roberto Cueto Experimental Film, Thought-provoking Film.

Josep Maria Catalá Film archives. Compilation Film.

Antonio Weinreichter From Cinéma Vérité to Performance Documentary.

Carlos Muguiro New Screens: documentary genre, the museum and new media forms. Jordi Balló

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COURSES AND JOINT SEMINARS Since MUSAC’s opening, its role as a mediator with the city has been visible through the shared programming of seminars, workshops and congresses. In other cases, we host programmes proposed by different collectives themselves.

Both ways of working enable understanding and learning from the wide array of sources the city can offer.

THINKING IN THE PRESENT Directed by Estrella de Diego 19 de abril 2009.

Closing workshop of Thinking in the Present, organised by La Casa Encendida in collaboration with MUSAC. The aim was to encourage reflection on different creative areas within today’s worldwide context. On 9 April, MUSAC’s auditorium held a dialogue between José Luis Blondet, Curator at Boston Center for the Arts and artist Vasco Araújo, entitled “Public Programmes, Educational Projects and Museums”.

COURSES WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF LEÓN Museums for All: Educational Proposals for an Intercultural Society Directed by Olaia Fontal and Rosa Eva Valle Coordinated by Belén Sola October 2005 From the Museum to the Classroom, Enjoying Culture through Diversity Directed by Olaia Fontal and Rosa Eva Valle Coordinated by Belén Sola October 2006 Body, Image and Expression: Between Artistic Creation and Educational Intervention Directed by Mª Paz Brozas Polo October 2006 Graphic Humour; our Unresolved Subject Directed by Francisco Flecha and Martín Favelis Coordinated by Antonio Maya and Belén Sola September 2008 Afroeuropeans I y II International Symposium Directed by Marta Sofía López November 2007 and October 2008

* Cultural Management internship at MUSAC 2007-2008.

COURSES IN COLLABORATION WITH THE CENTRE FOR TRAINING AND EDUCATIONAL INNOVATION (CFIE).

The continual presence of the school community at MUSAC and other exhibition venues makes it necessary to compare and analyse objectives and methodologies between both educational fields.

Art of the Present as a Resource for the Educational Community Directed by Pilar Durani (CFIE) and Belén Sola October 2005 With Carmen Lidón, Charo Garaigorta, Olaia Fontal, Jose Luis Puerto, Alfredo Marcos, Sixto Castro, Belén Sola, Antonio G. Chamorro y Javier Hernando.

Practicing the Museum Directed by DEAC MUSAC team October 2008 With Julia R. Gallego, Antonio G. Chamorro, Miguel Ángel Fernández, Amparo Moroño, Alfred Porres, Belén Sola, Nadia Teixeira and Cristina Viñuela L..

SEMINARS HELD IN COLLABORATION WITH LOCAL COLLECTIVES Milennium Goals With the aim of disseminating the eight Millennium Goals approved by the UN in 2002, this project was carried out in collaboration with various NGO Regional Coordinators for Development and consisted in the creation of one poster per artist, a lectures series and a film series. The objectives for the lecture series were to inform, debate and contextualise each one of the Goals.

Coordinated by Belén Sola April - November 2007 MDG 1.End Poverty and Hunger.

Lecture: Can poverty be erradicated?. Pablo Martínez Osés Films: Working Man´s Death. Michael Glawogger Iron Island. Mohammad Rasoulof Poster by Elena Fernández MDG 2 . Achive Universal Primary Education.

Lecture: Culture and Freedom. Carlo Frabetti Films: Être et Avoir. Nicolas Philibert Not one Less . Zhang Yimou Poster by Pablo García MDG 3. Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women.

Lectures:Prostitution open to debate.

Colectivo Hetaira Gender, Equality and Autonomy. Beyond the MDG. Almudena Cabezas Films: Promised Land. Amos Gitai Panjé Asr. Samira Makmalbaf Poster by Azucena Vieites

LIST OF ACTIVITIES

MDG 4. Reduce Infant Mortality Lecture: Infancy and the Third World: a vision from the territory. Mercedes García Valcárcel (Doctors without Boarders) Films: Tourtles can fly. Bahman Ghobadi La vendedora de rosas. Víctor Gaviria Poster by Hugo Alonso ODM 5. Improve maternal Health Lecture: Maternal Maternal Health at the halfway point to the MDG: realities and perspectives.

Marta O`kelly (Spanish interest group on population and reproductive health).

Films: El Círculo. Jafar Panahi Babys’ House. John Sayles Poster by Ginés Martínez ODM 6. Combat HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other diseases.

Lecture: Combating HIV/AIDS, Malaria and other deseases: a means toward development but not an end. Carlota Merchán (Prosalus) Films: Invisibles. Javier Bardem y Médicos sin fronteras. Wim Wenders, Isabel Coixet, Fernando León de Aranoa, Mariano Barroso y Javier Corcuera Viviendo al límite. Belkis Vega Poster by Salvador Cidrás ODM 7. Ensure Environmental Sustainability Lecture: GMOs up for debate. Mireia Llorente Sánchez (Ecologist in Action) Films: Darwin’s Nightmare. Hubert Sauper Apaga y vámonos. Manel Mayol Poster by Tere Recarens ODM 8. Develop Global Partnership for Development.

Lecture: The Great Challenges of the Contemporary World. Ignacio Ramonet Films: The Take. Avi Lewis The Yes Man. Dan Ollman, Sarah Price y Chris Smith Poster by Antonio Ballester The Migrant Woman and Technology I Coordinated by Belén Sola Organised by Isadora Duncan Association May 2007 Forum on Art and Territory Coordinated by Belén Sola Organised by Espacio Tangente November 2007 1st Seminar on Animal Equality Coordinated by Belén Sola May 2008 In collaboration with PACMA (Anti-bullfighting Party against Mistreatment of Animals) Lectures given by Nuria Querol and Pedro Pozas.

Screening of documentary Animal by Ángel Mora.

Seminar on Men and Gender Equality Prometeo Association Coordinated by Antonio G. Chamorro 10 and 11 October 2008 The main objective of these seminars was to provide a space for proposals regarding the need for a tranformation to take place in men as a means to achieving gender equality. Discussion and debate. Priority was given to those aspects deemed of greatest importance. Comparing and contrasting male and female perspectives, examining their experiences and needs are extremely important exercises. With this in mind, committed experts of both sexes, working at the forefront of the struggle for gender equality in our society, lead the seminar.

The Migrant Woman and Technology II Organised by Isadora Duncan Association November 2008 VIII Symposium of the Castellano Leonesa Mental Health Association Coordinated by Nadia Teixeira May 2008 MUSAC added speeches by the collective Radio Nikosia and filmmaker Vicente Rubio to the Association’s programmed activities. Including presentation of video jointly produced by DEAC and Santa Isabel Hospital: The Mad Strip Club Story along with a presentation the project that gave way to the theatre production.

Seminars on Diversity: Mental Disabilities Held in conjunction with FEAPS Coordinated by Nadia Teixeira December 2008 FEAPS is the Spanish Confederation of Organisations in Favour of People with Mental Disabilities. These seminar sessions have allowed DEAC to learn about disabilities such as autism, Down’s syndrome and cerebral palsy. The department was also able to exchange creative experiences with Spanish institutions and associations and share the their projects with them. At the closing event, the documentary by Lola Barrera and Iñaqui Peñafiel was shown, entitled ¿Que tienes debajo del sombrero? [What is Under Your Hat? about the artist Judith Scott.

Crisis Of Values In collaboration with the Mutual Support Network Coordinated by Mariola Campelo and Olga Sánchez May 2009 Project about current labour structures comprising a series of talks, debates and a film series approaching different viewpoints on the nature of current economic systems and their impact on new labour organisation schemes.

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LIST OF ACTIVITIES

Talks and Debates: The Crisis and the Working Class Mentality. Javier Sádaba The Crisis and the Situation of the Working Class.

Xavier Gracia. La Xarxa Collective Impact of Neoliberal Policies on Social-Labour Rights. Enrique Ojeda and Morad el Habchi.

Ciudad Linea Collective Screenings: The Corporation. Jennifer Abbot and Mark Atchbar The Method. Marcelo Piñeyro In a Free World. Ken Loach Rosetta. Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne Seducing Doctor Lewis. Jean Francois Pouliot Time Out. Laurent Cantet La mano invisible. Isadora Guardia Hálito Durruti Seminars Coordinated by Belén Sola Organised by CGT León.

November 2009 The two sessions were held in MUSAC. A day dedicated to these women anarchists with a film session of the documentary All Our Lives by Lisa Berger and lectures by Cristina Escrivá, Marga Roig and Ana Carrera. Another day was dedicated to anarchism in history with the participation of Octavio Alberola, Francisco Zugasti, Rafael Cid and Javier Rodríguez.

Migrant Women and the Crisis Isadora Duncan Association December 2009 International Day of Persons with Disabilities 3 December 2009 This year was dedicated to exploring the relationship between persons with disabilities and creativity. The Museum held the presentation events and showed videos of works produced by the associations and DEAC MUSAC.

LECTURE WITHIN SUJETO EXHIBITION Alejandro Jodorowsky September 2005 The man without face LECTURE WITHIN CARMELA GARCÍA EXHIBITION Marta Sofía López August 2008 Women at the edge of the left . Screening of Paris was a woman. Greta Schiller.

LECTURE TO INAUGURATE THE SERIES FILMS: MUSIC, CULTURE AND IDENTITY Jose Luis Fecé.

February 2008 LECTURE TO INAUGURATE THE SERIES FILM NO FICTIONS II Virginia Villaplana.

October 2008 Insurgent narratives: Documentary, gender and subjectivities in action.

FESTIVALES Y ENCUENTROS LIEBRE MEETING Directed by Nilo Gallego Coordinated by Carlos Ordás and Belén Sola November 2007 Related to the action art workshop Liebre, liebre quiero ser, lasting one weekend, this festival was dedicated to performance in its most diverse forms of expression.

With Oscar Mora, Nieves Correa, Bartolomé Ferrando, Pepe Murciego and Olga Mesa.

URBAN CULTURE FESTIVAL Coordinated by Antonio G. Chamorro Collaborators: David Santos and Javier Aguado.

June 2007 and 2008 A day dedicated to hip-hop and breakdance.

OTHER LECTURES A myriad of talks and lectures have been programmed during these years, usually in the format of workshops, symposiums or seminars.

Below are a list of some of those that have not appeared in other sections of the book.

LECTURE SERIES EMERGENCIAS April 2005 - January 2006 Nearly 20 lectures were given by scholars, experts and representatives of different collectives specialising in issues such as antiglobalisation, armed conflict and discrimination. Among the lecturers were acclaimed figures such as Ignacio Ramonet, Agustín García Calvo, Manuela Mesa, Richard Stallman, as well as MUSAC Collection artists Chus Gutiérrez and Rogelio López Cuenca, among others.

MIRAR PARA HABLAR I Y II The programmes Mirar para Hablar I y II are part of the activities offered to adult publics since the opening of the museum. It was conceived as a way to give León citizens a way to experience artwork in addition to the unguided and guided tours with an educator. The normal guided tours are offered regularly each hour on the hour during holiday seasons and weekends. The rest of the year these guided tours are offered at 19:00.

Currently the Mirar para Hablar I programme is available twice on Saturdays and Mirar para Hablar II is available once on Sundays, both programmes lasting two hours each.

LIST OF ACTIVITIES

The workshop is based on the idea that the meaning of a work of art is not single nor closedended. It can have multiple, plural meanings that are constructed in the context in which the work is staged. In this way, the educator acts as a mediator who moderates the multiple discourses elaborated by all the workshop participants. Mirar para Hablar II, arises from visitors' expression of interest in delving deeper into the visual analysis offered, the artists, trends and current art practises.

RADIO PROGRAMME MUSAC ABIERTO From 2006, MUSAC holds a weekly radio slot on Radio Universitaria of León. Each Tuesday from October to May, we hold a live programme lasting one hour. We have been able to familiarise ourselves with the workings of this medium which has been used primarily for DEAC informative and educational content. At the moment it is proving to be a first rate educational tool for working with all the collectives that collaborate with the museum.

PUBLICATIONS HIPATIA MAGAZINE Publication and joint collaboration with the women of the León Prisón.

MUSAC OFF SEGOVIA FEELING SPACE Programmed by Belén Sola July 2009 Project commissioned by the Oficina Segovia 2016 The purpose was to create a mediation process amongst four of the city’s collectives to create alternative tourist routes through Segovia, led by the citizens themselves.

This was a way of considering urban space through the particular vision of its inhabitants.

A Tour Through Personal Memory Together with participants in the Caja Segovia senior citizens activities programme.

Amparo Moroño Tour of the Democratic and Republican Memory Carried out with the Memory Forum of Segovia.

Belén Sola and Santiago Vega Tour of the Senses In conjunction with Segovia’s ONCE branch and the University’s Advertising Department Nadia Teixeira Parkour, Another Way of Touring In conjunction with León and Segovia parkour groups. Amparo Moroño

DEAC BLOG DEAC has created and currently manages a series of blogs on the different programmes we carry out. The blogs serve as a catalogue of events organised by category but also as virtual tools used to continue some of the projects themselves.

They can all be visited through the multiblog: www.deacmusac.es

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