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For the past thirty years, the notion of reciprocity within teaching processes has been at the center of Laura Anderson Barbata's practice, which has unfolded in pedagogical spaces ranging from the Escuela Nacional de Escultura, Pintura y Grabado “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City; the project STRUT! in the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA; the project The Experience of the Common, in collaboration with Ciudad Abierta and the PUCV in Chile, in 2022; all the way to the seminar that she teaches presently at the Massachusetts Institue of Technology, which discusses the relationship between objects, bodies, and their surrounding physical or cultural environments.

At the heart of her pedagogical philosophy lies the role of embodied experience: thinking about knowledge and learning as a process that brings together the brain and cognitive skills, as well as the body—that of the artist, the collaborators' and the public.

With this perspective as our point of departure, the conversation between Anderson Barbata and the curator Madeline Murphy Turner (Emily Rauh Pulitzer Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Drawings, Harvard Art Museums) will explore the possibility of defying certain techniques (drawing, sculpture, performance) to question—from both within and without—the limits of institutional definitions of art.