Graner’s associate artist Mariona Naudin was responsible for leading the Performative Classroom during the second and third trimesters with 1st and 2nd-year secondary school students at IES Montjuïc.
“It all begins with a rectangle drawn on the floor. Mariona arrives on the first day and, without saying a word, marks out the space with this rectangle while the students play, distracted and scattered across the gym. Slowly, they start to notice: Mariona is a new face to them. They pause, observe, and for a few moments, fall silent. They’re attentive; the novelty and silent action keep them curious. The silence breaks: Mariona asks them to enter the space inside the rectangle — and that’s how it all begins. This is the starting point for sessions where the delimited space becomes a pillar of safety for a reconstruction of their bodies. And this is where Mariona digs deeper: in each session, she works to help those bodies connect, activate, self-discover, lose shame, move closer, listen to one another, and be fully lived. The group moving inside the rectangle is now guided by a new rule: when one person stops, everyone stops. A collective listening process begins to take shape.
Anyone quietly observing from the outside can see how, day by day, these bodies transform and renew — they become more alive. The rectangle that marks the space is still there from day one, but its boundaries grow less sharp, more diffuse. Does that mean we’re on the right track? Most likely, yes.” (Observation text by Sandra Artero, intern at Graner)
Opening of the Performative Classroom: ‘Manual for Thinking Together’
Open presentation of the Performative Classroom as part of “En trànsit”, a showcase of creative projects from Montjuïc Secondary School, held on June 5, 2019
“What you’ll see over the course of this half hour is not a performance, nor a finished work. It’s something that could become — an embryo, a manual, a set of shared practices we’ve learned and exercised over the past four and a half months. In the beginning, we didn’t know how to form a circle — now we do. We also didn’t know where our pelvis or tailbone were, let alone our classmate’s. Over these months, we’ve learned to work together (a little), and to get to know ourselves (also a little) — and each other — better. Now we present to you this Manual for Thinking Together, because thinking is movement and movement is emotion.”
Young creators:Pol Abad, Nadia Alcario, Miguel Cañadas, Berta Collado, Lamin Fatty, Marc Font, Carl Gian Fordan, Darío García, Maikel Garzón, Natalia Giménez, Inés Gómez, Natalia Filomena Guzmán, Fatima Zohra Larossi, Alejandro Martínez, Keiska Gabriela Meneses, Xavier Moya, Aitana Navarro, Marc Pereira, Irene Puri, Sara Rojas and Yara Santos.
Artist: Mariona Naudin
Teacher: Imma Solé
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