New transdisciplinary program
After its first year activating collaborative artistic educational programs, LA ESCUELA___ announces the alignment for the 2023-I semester, designed from a transdisciplinary approach. With this, they seek to expand the reflection around the intersections of arts and education, fostering regional networks of knowledge exchange across Latin America. New context-based artistic and architectural projects will unfold as on-site classrooms and pedagogical residencies, carried out with students and communities. In collaboration with Juliana dos Santos, Federico Pérez Villoro, Ana María Durán Calisto, Nicolás Valencia, Nayse López, and Rolf Abderhalden as this year’s guest scholars, the curatorial axes will address the study of anti-colonial pedagogies and current discussions of native and Afro-American communities. Also, Amazonian, vernacular and contemporary architectural practices, social choreographies, and community synergies for learning. This joint effort aims to diversify perspectives and open up space for historically marginalized narratives and aesthetic experiences. Along the same lines, the platform will launch a transversal open call for all the campus programs, aimed at creators and researchers of all nationalities and places of residence.
The platform is run by artists and thinkers for the purpose of collective making, learning, and research rooted in the experimental relationships between arts and education in Latin America. Therein, editorial and research programs converge with on-site and online “formative projects”. These projects are shaped as Classrooms oriented toward the development of artistic initiatives with students and teachers in public spaces and co-creation Laboratories in translocal virtual meeting spaces. There is also the Residency program for teaching artists, focused on creating pedagogical workshops for local artists and educators. In addition, the digital campus offers online lectures by leading Latin American artists and architects with a remarkable pedagogical work. All the programs are free and open to the public.
LA ESCUELA___ is an expanding platform that grows as it weaves an international network interested in creating collective learning experiences. More than ninety collaborators from fifteen countries will organize programs and develop research for the 2023—I Semester, including lectures by multidisciplinary artist Anna Bella Geiger, artist, historian and critic Beatriz González, architect and educator Handel Guayasamín Crespo, and architect, scholar and researcher Fernando Pérez Oyarzún.
On-site Classrooms take place in Bolivia and Paraguay with performance artist Eleonora Fabião and the architecture collective Al Borde; simultaneous projects coordinated by urbanist architect Javier Vera Cubas for constructing schools in public spaces of Lima, Bogotá and Quito, involving local architects in the creation of a trans-regional network that implements education as an act of building; and ancestral weaving knowledge is explored in a textile project proposed by curator and researcher Florencia Portocarrero, connecting local artists María José Murillo and Andean collective Noqanchis in Peru, Guido Yannitto, Claudia Alarcón and Andrei Fernández in Argentina, and Hellen Ascoli, Negma Coy, and Luisa González-Reiche in Guatemala. Online Laboratories are conducted by dancer, choreographer and researcher Varinia Canto Vila; architect, activist and researcher Sergio Beltrán-García, and artist and human rights activist Malu Valerio.
This semester, the international exchange program for teaching artists has grown to two Residency projects. One will be developed by transdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator Renata Sampaio in Cali (Colombia), in collaboration with Lugar a Dudas. The other takes place in Guadalajara (Mexico) together with the Escuela de Artes of the Secretaría de Cultura Jalisco, where artist, professor and musician Gabo Camnitzer together with Yuriko Cortés will create pedagogical proposals aimed at local teachers and cultural mediators.
The joint founders of LA ESCUELA___ are the artist and educator Miguel Braceli and the international nonprofit foundation Siemens Stiftung. It is based on Siemens Stiftung’s experience with co-creation programs and artistic interventions across Latin America and the artistic and educational works of Braceli in public spaces.
To learn about the upcoming programs, visit laescuela.art, follow its social networks (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube), and subscribe to its newsletter.
*Images above: (1) _WALKS_WALKING_WALKERS_ Classroom: LA ESCUELA___ with KIOSKO Galería. Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia (2023). Conception and conduction of the workshop: Eleonora Fabião. Assistance: mariah miguel. Participation: Darwin Jheyzon Ortega Quispe, Diego Guantay, Isabel Jordán, Javo Silva, Juanqui Arevalo, Maira Justiniano, María Baltasar, María Mercedes Vaquero Soleto, Nathalya Santana and Norman Chacón. Photography: Andrés Zuñiga Sanjines. (2)
