Graner’s educational programme was framed within Caixa d’Eines, an initiative promoted by the Barcelona City Council’s Pla de Barris, and during the 2019–2020 academic year it was mediated by Arte Factum, which under the title Contact Zones, designed and activated a programme of workshops, training sessions and artistic experiences in various early childhood, primary, and secondary schools in the Marina neighbourhood.
Contact Zones brought together three nursery schools, one family centre, four primary schools, one secondary school, and several artistic collectives in a space of experimentation around education and live arts. The schools involved in the project were Ramon Casas, Bàrkeno, Seat, and Enric Granados; Institut Montjuïc, the family centre La Casa dels Colors, and nursery schools El Cotxet, Collserola, and Niu d’Infants in Barcelona’s Marina neighbourhood, as well as the artist collectives Big Bouncers, Iniciativa Sexual Femenina, and the duo Alba Rihe and Laila Tafur.
The map of educational actions developed during that 2019–2020 school year was conceived in several directions: on the one hand, each educational level worked with a different artist (with a strategy where research took place not only within each school, but also within each educational stage in a shared and networked manner). On the other hand, emphasis was placed on working with teaching staff to provide them with contemporary artistic tools that could be creatively applied to the school curriculum. The aim was to move away from the concept of “training” to propose “spaces of encounter between artists and educators,” fostering the exchange of methodological resources that support transdisciplinary practices, such as the notions of “translation” and “displacement.” In doing so, a space of mutual listening and emancipation was created to navigate live arts, education, and critical thinking.
Graner’s educational programme is part of Caixa d’Eines, a programme promoted by the Pla de Barris of Barcelona, which introduces artistic practices into the school curriculum with the aim of reducing inequalities between the city’s neighbourhoods. Graner delivers its Caixa d’Eines-related educational activities in primary and secondary schools in the Marina de Port neighbourhood.
Arte Factum is a collective formed by Esther Blázquez and David Pérez that moves between live arts, education, and critical thinking. Their proposals explore the capacity of the arts to develop devices, structures, and situations that question the present —culturally, socially, and educationally—, opening spaces for invention and fostering multiple, situated, and transversal learning processes.
“We would like to revisit Vera Frenkel’s image of string games to frame mediation as a space where the languages of art and education can be collectively interwoven. Between play, listening, and provocation, this image suggests an unexpected choreography of movements, positions, manoeuvres, and visions that stretch, cross, and compose themselves into a shared exercise. Through this choreographic metaphor, we invite you to enter a contact and resonance zone where artistic and pedagogical practices merge to create another place we are only beginning to imagine. Starting from the symmetry between the performative act and the educational act, our line of work proposes a continuous dialogue between the body, presence, thought, and limits — generating contact zones that provoke transversal learning and spaces to rehearse new ways of doing in the classroom. Based on observation, listening, and attention, we propose a gaze-based practice that shifts the places, positions, and roles between who observes and who acts, who teaches and who learns, who moves and who rests, who knows and who doesn’t, who speaks and who stays silent so that we can hear their inflections.”
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