This research project involves gallery educators in the development of participatory projects with local groups and activists departing from the pedagogical experiences and learnings developed by Paolo Freire. Thereby, the involved gallery educators go beyond the narrow role that is too often attributed to their field of practice. Doing so will be a way to favour the development of cultural participation beyond art institutions in a sustainable way.
This project develops educational formats that inherently address diversity by re-reading – and thus reframing – Paulo Freire’s pedagogical principles through a post-colonial, feminist, ecological and queer lens. By taking into consideration broader cultural perspectives and explicitly addressing groups of people currently excluded from the cultural sphere, re-imagining Paulo Freire’s pedagogical principles has the potential to be transformative for the whole setting and self-understanding of contemporary art institutions.
“Towards a Transformative Gallery Education” – initiated by microsillons and conducted by a multi-disciplinary research team – foresees a participatory action research led in four French-speaking Swiss contemporary art institutions. These are: (MAMCO (Geneva), Centre d’art contemporain Genève, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, and PasquArt (Bienne)). Departing from the pedagogical experiences and learnings developed by Freire, different projects and initiatives are initiated within each institution involving the gallery educators as well as local groups and activists who articulate their view and understandings of the cultural institution. In a participatory working mode, the developed project designs are realized and eventually evaluated by the group. In a final project phase, the learnings are shared with a broader public in multiple formats. This allows producing experimental projects in the local context nevertheless contributing to a broader national reflection.
Overall, the aim of “Towards a Transformative Gallery Education” is to test the hypothesis of the practical applicability and transferability of Freirean notions after their reframing to contemporary art education: how can projects of cultural participation be built around ‘generative themes’ rather than being predetermined by the institution? Can existing works of art, selected by a specific group, function as ‘coded pictures’ to reflect the situation of marginalisation experienced by the group and to review its relationship to the cultural institution? What ‘untested feasibility’ might be conceived, within or outside the institution? Can a collectively produced codification of the contradictions experienced by a group (for example in a visual or performative form) become an audible discourse inside the institution? Can the fact of working with these principles facilitate the work against social selectivity?