The microsillons collective and Sophie Vögele presented their ongoing research named ’Reinventing the Pedagogy of the Oppressed to facilitate cultural participation in Swiss contemporary art institutions’. Based on preliminary investigations about the critical pedagogue Paulo Freire and the years he spent in Geneva between 1970 and 1980, this project (hosted by the TRANS– Master at the HEAD – Genève, developed in partnership with the ZHdK and the supported by the Federal Commission on Migration) aims at developing new experimental tool to reduce social selectivity in art institutions.
Concretely, in four institutions (MAMCO and Centre d’art contemporain in Geneva, MCBA in Lausanne and Centre d’art Pasquart in Biel), collaborations are developed – in dialogue with the institutions’ gallery educators – with groups of people with a migration background to produce works that will be publicly presented in the institutions. To do so, the freireian approach (a dialogical pedagogy based on allowing the emergence of the participants own “generative themes” and directed towards socio-political transformations) is translated for the current context.
In the process, the gallery educators involved will be trained to new approaches and the institutions will have to position regarding the content produced. The results of these experimentations will then be shared with professional in Switzerland and abroad through a toolkit designed to facilitate the multiplication of such experiments.
During the workshop microsillons and Sophie Vögele introduced the Freireian approach and presented some of the results of the preliminary research (historical facts, experimentations with gallery educators, artistic performances) and will discuss the ongoing project. Then, two tools developed during the research were tested collectively: an “Unchronological Timeline” produced with the international network Another Roadmap for Arts Education and a bundle containing 57 answers to the question: TO WHAT SUBJECTS, TOOLS OR TACTICS SHOULD WE URGENTLY EDUCATE OURSELVES TO REIMAGINE THE WORLD IN COMMON?
http://www.microsillons.org
https://www.hesge.ch/head/en/programs-research/master-fine-arts-trans-art-education-engagement