LA

ESCUELA___

LA ESCUELA___ begins its second semester of creating spaces for learning in collaboration with artists, researchers, institutions, and communities and working collectively in public spaces across Latin America. With geographic decentralization as a premise, the second semester will unfold online and on-site through formative projects in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and Ecuador.

This semester features Sara Garzón (Colombia) and Catarina Duncan (Brazil) as guest scholars, who have developed editorial and research programs on contemporary perspectives and experiences of art as education that are driven by ecological, political, and cultural issues relevant to Latin America and in line with the curatorial axes of LA ESCUELA___’s platform. Throughout the 2022—II Semester these topics will be addressed through corporal manifestations across the performing arts and street activism. Such situations, in which the body is exposed to vulnerability and risk, relate to other entities that are essential for life—such as nature, food, and the spiritual—which are necessarily political.

The platform is run by artists and thinkers for the purpose of collective making, learning, and research rooted in the experimental relationships between art and education in Latin America. Therein, editorial and research programs—gathered in the Library section of LA ESCUELA___’s website—converge with formative projects designed as Classrooms. These projects are oriented toward the development of artistic initiatives by students in public spaces and the co-creation of Laboratories in translocal virtual meeting spaces. All the programs are free and open to the public.

Environmental artist and educator Jorgge Menna Barreto (Brazil) together with artist and researcher Eloisa Brantes (Brazil) will conduct a project that addresses the fracture between food production in the countryside and in the city. Through critical-metabolic-reflective sensitization exercises and visits to different urban gardens in the city, they will produce a collective intervention in downtown Bogota. The Metabolic Disobedience Classroom is developed in alliance with the Master in Performing Arts program of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, together with Mapa Teatro and Plural Nodo Cultural; with participation from students of the Faculty of Arts UNAL, and support from the University of California Santa Cruz and the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro.

For his part, performing and contextual artist Gustavo Ciríaco (Brazil) will develop a performative proposal based on analyzing the conditions for creating visibility and invisibility in the context of public spaces, in dialogue with the performativity of their architecture and experience. Participants will embark on an investigation and immersion in the political, social, and architectural layers that are present at Barrio la Boca in Buenos Aires. Where the Horizon Moves is a Classroom developed in alliance with the Departamento de Artes del Movimiento of the Universidad Nacional de las Artes (UNA), El Asunto de lo Remoto – performance program – and Fundación Andreani in Argentina.

Curator and critic Félix Suazo (Cuba/Venezuela) will coordinate a Classroom to unfold simultaneously in three different cities with an artist from each location: María José Machado in Cuenca (Ecuador), Jessica Briceño Cisneros in Santiago (Chile), y Benvenuto Chavajay in San Pedro de la Laguna (Guatemala). Based on the specificities of each context, the artists will develop projects that address the notions of body, material culture, and rituality as relational triggers.

Political Fiction Program, conducted by artists from Agremiaçao LATIDOS (Brazil), proposes exercises rooted in their experience with performance and activism, in an attempt to discover clues and possible exits for the current choreographies of political participation in Latin America.

Soil Analysis Laboratory will be an eight-session clinic conducted by Bolivian artist Andrés Pereira Paz. It is aimed at generating resources for participants to develop a language of their own to communicate their personal work; it will delve into the practices of participating artists from each person’s life story and portfolio.

Aqualiteracies (A fluid Archive of Interspecies Communications in Hybrid Temporalities), by Colombian artists and researchers Daniela Medina Poch and Elizabeth Gallón Droste, proposes an exploration of the ways in which we communicate with water, in order to generate protocols, dynamics, and guidelines to situate ourselves within an ecocentric context, in the face of futurity and the current ecological crisis.

The space dedicated to outstanding figures in art and education in Latin America will host online lectures by choreographer Lia Rodrigues (Brazil) and director and playwright Miguel Rubio (Peru), founder of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani.

This semester, LA ESCUELA___ launches a new international exchange program: a Residency for teaching artists in educational institutions that aims to develop formative projects for educators and cultural mediators. The first artist-in-residence is visual artist, professor, and researcher José Luis Macas Paredes (Ecuador), who will work alongside local multidisciplinary artist Ana Paula Santana in Guadalajara, México. Developed in collaboration with Casa Orozco and the Secretaría de Cultura de Jalisco through the Escuela de Artes Jalisco, the project Hydropoetics – Hydropolitics will explore the presence of water in Guadalajara. The project contemplates visual, sound, and performative interventions in public spaces of the city, in terms of complementarity between the human and the material and immaterial environment.