Hyperlink. Laboratory of mediations

Training course and programme of extracurricular practices.

For some time now, the problem of mediation in museums has generated debates that go beyond the role of the museum. The precarious working conditions in the sector and the role and duties of the so-called gallery attendants accentuate a crisis that brings into question the limits of this service. If we take into account the needs of all the agents, institutions, and cultural and public workers involved, the reception of the public in museums and art centres requires urgent reappraisal, both regarding the referents of institutional practices and in the field of action.

Aware that it is a structural problem, we want to go beyond the diagnosis of the situation and offer alternatives that will dignify the role of a traditionally invisible figure. The framework that will host the internship programme and the training course is the Allora & Calzadilla project, which, in the context of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, has developed a space for experimentation. Performance, theatricality and sound require different forms of attention to the museum’s regular visitors. Likewise, the difficulty in discerning between the object of the artwork and the body of the viewer generates a problematic lack of distinction typical of museums in the neoliberal era, when the public has become raw material.

The training course aims to be a space to reflect on topics such as art and education, the reception of the public and the monitoring of visitors in the exhibition space. The programme includes working sessions that, from the beginning of the project, serve to share doubts and experiences about mediation, and to organise practical aspects of the daily functioning of the galleries; workshops designed to offer educational strategies, performative exercises around the attitudes and bodily movements of the public and gallery staff, and to relate the theoretical referents to the practice of mediation. A two-day seminar will gather experiences and research around participation, the public service that can be derived from art and education, and the artistmediator’s perspective.

TRAINING COURSE

Working sessions

Meetings to share the experiences of students who perform extracurricular mediation practices at the Allora & Calzadilla exhibition, in order to rethink the role and functions of museum gallery attendants.

Duration: 2 h. | Dates: Thursday 25 and Wednesday 31 January, Monday 5 and 19 February, 5 March, 14 and 22 May 2018, 17.00 h.

SPECIAL SESSIONS

Popular photography course

Two work sessions with Marc Roig and Rogier Delfos (Werker Collective) reflecting on self-representation and the particularities of work in the cultural sector.

Duration: 2 h. | Dates: Mondays 26 February and 16 April 2018, 17.00 h.

Round table

Round table discussion with Débora Pérez Avilés (MagmaCultura), mediator at Casa Vicenç; Cèlia Prats (Àgora Serveis Culturals), artist and mediator at CaixaForum Barcelona; and Aida Sánchez de Serdio, educator and researcher in collaborative artistic practices and qualitative research, about mediation in museum galleries and patrimonial spaces.

Moderated by Myriam González Sanz, educator, trainer and researcher in education, and Maria Sellarès Pérez, member of the Education/Public Programmes team of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies.

Duration: 2 h. | Date: Monday 19 March 2018, at 17.00 h.

WORKSHOPS

Mediation as a practic to generate meaningful learning experiences

In this workshop we will begin with theory to get to practice through three permeable phases that will allow us to approach the term mediation in all its complexity, to learn strategies that generate meaningful learning and to put them into practice before the artworks in the exhibition.

With Myriam González Sanz, educator, trainer and researcher in patrimonial education.

Duration: 3 h. | Date: Monday 12 March 2018, 16.00 h.

After hypermediation

The sociology of art and institutional criticism are wrong when they discredit the potentiality of art by focusing on the institutions and agents that make up the artistic sector. This workshop will approach a type of artistic practice that should not be ostracised for being realist. From a materialist and performative perspective, art and mediation appear as an indissoluble binomial that can help to promote a differentiating practice regarding the status quo.

With Oriol Fontdevila, curator and researcher specialising in artistic practices.

Duration: 3 h. | Date: Monday 9 April 2018, 16.00 h.

Viaggio in sala (Dramatis personae)

A poetic, theatrical and performative inquiry into what are the relationships between viewer, gallery attendant/guide/mediator, artwork, artist and institution, and how they are arrived at.

With Félix Pons, actor, stage director and visual artist.

Duration: 5 h. | Date: Monday 7 May 2018, 16.00 h. Public presentation of the results on Friday, 11 May 2018, 17.00 h.

SEMINAR

Exercicis de mediació. 99 maneres diferents de mediar el museu

Programme

Thursday, 22 March

19.00 h. Governed, Monitored and Given Refuge in the Museum, with Carles Guerra, artist, art critic and director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies.

Today’s museums can hardly be described as educational and uplifting spaces. They are places where innovations occur that have little economic value, but that will soon enter a chain of valuation that quickly forgets its origins. The most perverse capitalist experiments of our time take place in museums. They are the exception with respect to other forms of productivity and profit and as such are worthy of being considered as a case study. The obsession with mediation is nothing more than the symptom of a tension that emphasises how we deal with the bodies that pass through the door of the museum.

20.00 h. I could have done better, with Roger Bernat, artist, theatre director and playwright.

The ghost of the theatre of the last decades has been its passive, mute and tendentially absent audience. Hence, participation has become the key word in cultural policy, giving legitimacy and ultimately reality to the event (and its audience). Explaining his latest projects, Roger Bernat will show that only when the public accepts their unreality, only when they realise their inability to embody what they represent, participation, despite being a failure, becomes effective.

Friday, 23 March

18.00 h. My house is your house?, with María Sellarès Pérez and Linda Valdés, Education/Public Programmes team of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Presentation of the mediation laboratory and its background at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies.

18.30 h A Vuelo de pájaro. Agítese, un año después (As the crow flies. Shake, a year later), with Renata Cervetto, co-editor of the book along with Miguel López.

The presentation will share the process and the activations of the publication Agítese antes de usar. Desplazamientos Educativos, sociales y artísticos en América Latina (Shake before using. Educational, social and artistic displacements in Latin America), edited by the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (Argentina) and TEOR/ ética (Costa Rica) in March 2017.

19.30 h. Break / drinks

20.00 h. How art can be an educational exercise and education an artistic exercise, with Jordi Ferreiro, artist and educator.

In this talk Jordi Ferreiro will explain the relationship and similarities between the figure of the museum educator and the figure of the artist. Through his work, Ferreiro will speak about an artistic practice that aims to generate situations in which to reactivate art as a device for learning and mediating with cultural institutions.

Practical information:

Admission: free. | Limited places. Advance booking: msellares@ftapies.com. | Activity supported by Moritz.

The mediators participating in the research are students doing extracurricular internships at the Universitat de Barcelona and the Massana School of Art and Design: Carme Alcové Sardà, Eva Blanch Ferré, Andrea Díez Nin, Roc Domingo Puig, Ángela García Román, Laia Giol Carreño, Miriam Güetas Climent, Maria Losada Pérez, Pau Mondelo Martell, David Oliver San Julián, Mireia Oltra Pujol, Mireia Pons Fort, Bruna Ribas Hortal, Magí Ribot Manso, Guillermo Ropero Santamaría, Marta Rosell Chust and Airena Tahull Caubet.

Project coordinated by Maria Sellarès Pérez with the collaboration of Rosa Eva Campo, Núria Solé Bardalet and Linda Valdés, from the Education/Public Programmes team of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, and Myriam González Sanz, trainer and researcher in patrimonial education.

Image: © Sophie Köhler, 2018.

Hyperlink is the name that the team carrying out the mediation practices have chosen to designate the project: ‘Hyperlink, or link, is one of the main Internet resources, which allows us to link different contents with each other. Almost every element of the web can become a link, so with a click we can navigate from one direction to another. LIke the hyperlink in the Internet world, we understand mediation as a link between different contexts: the Fundació, the exhibition and the public. Through this link, we work towards a more attentive museum and a more attended public .’