Registering practice is the thread that weaves the history of our process. It’s through it we can be for each other […] but it’s not enough to record and keep to oneself what was thought, it’s fundamental to socialize the content of reflection to each and every one of us. This individual offering is fundamental to the construction of the collective archive. As Paulo Freire clearly pointed out, the record of such reflection and its public socialization are “founders of conscience”
[…] and also the tools for building knowledge.
Madalena Freire, Educador, Educador, Educador220 Many, many, many thanks to make me stop now and talk about this, you know, and not keep this in thinking oh how great, but publically express just how fabulous this was, enriching, I’d like to see those tapes together, because I don’t remember what I said, I think that I transformed so much that the Gabriel of the 1st tape doesn’t exist anymore, at some moment he was lost, now I only am afraid of not making mistakes, if I do something and don’t make mistakes, I am going to be worried.
Gabriel Bartz, mediador Casa M221
Geopoetic Essays strove to break rules, be consequential and re-territoralize pedagogy within the visual arts and the artistic imaginary in the field of pedagogy. Our task as researchers/evaluators was to explore how this might be recognized. We asked ourselves: what kinds of strategies could evaluate and document these processes and how might we accompany this critical geopoetic zone of contagion? These questions motivated and mobilized the idea of a collection of multiple voices engaging those directly involved in the expanded field of pedagogy of the 8th Biennial and their experiences, concerns, desires and questions have filled the preceeding pages.222
Given the potential scope of such a collection project, we naturally were required to set limitations. Together with the pedagogic team we determined a process of interviewing approximately 40 people including curators, educators, cultural producers, artists, community members, teachers, and administrators, many of whom had previously collaborated with the
220 [Author translation: Portuguese original: O registro da prática é o fio que vai tecendo a história do nosso processo. É através dele que ficamos para os outros […] mas não basta registrar e guardar para si o que foi pensado, é fundamental socializar os conteúdos da reflexão de cada um para todos. É fundamental a oferta do entendimento individual para a construção do acervo coletivo. Como bem pontuava Paulo Freire, o registro da reflexão e sua socialização num grupo são ‘fundadores da consciência’ […] e também instrumentos para a construção de conhecimento.”] Madalena Freire.
Educador, Educador, Educador. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2008, p.55 & 60.
221 [Author translation, Portuguese original: Muito muito muito obrigada me fazer agora parar falar disso, sabe, e não fica aguardando isso pensando ah como foi boa, mas bota para fora como genial isso foi, enriquecidora, queria ver aquelas fitas juntos, por que não lembra o que falei, acho que transformei tanto que aquele Gabriel da 1ª fita não existe mais, algum momento se perdeu, agora só tem medo de não errar, se faço alguma coisa e não erra vou ficar precupado.]
Interview Gabriel Bartz. “Coleção das multiplas vozes: Perspectivas e horizontes.” op cit
222 This text draws and expands on essays by myself and Luiz Guilherme Vergara: “Collection of Multiple Voices” in Pedagogia Expandida 2011 and “Collection of Multiple Voices” in Revista MESA.
Biennial. To facilitate this process and further establish evaluation parameters, we focused on four representative and diverse areas of the pedagogic project’s work: the pedagogic project in general; Mediation; Casa M; and two of the artist residency projects of the initiative Travel Notebooks. Certainly, in order to have more completely evaluated the full extent of the pedagogic project in all its expanded intentions, it would have been necessary to augment the scope and process of the project. However, we choose to work deeply rather than broadly. To do so we focused on maximizing the reflective possibilities of a “micro” collection of voices by interviewing the same group of people in three distinct moments – beginning, middle, end - over the Biennial’s six months duration. At each interview we asked the same questions about motivations and risks related to each interviewee’s involvement with the Biennial. In this way we opted to accompany the pedagogic project in its poetical and political dimensions, breaking away from evaluation models based on critical distance, objective parameters and quantitative impact.
We opted to be “beside,” inversely adopting proximity as a basis for an evaluation/research intervention, via what we called “an invitation to reflect and a collection of voices.” In so doing we also recognized and welcomed the mutual contagion between interviewees and interviewers.
Our proposal was much more one of listening from the inside to the voices of those engaged in various aspects of this “expanded” pedagogy than watching from the outside. In this way the
“collection” project unfolded as a genealogy of motivations, exploring how and where the expanded nature of the pedagogic project was reaching, beyond the exhibition warehouses, in the schools, at Casa M, in the public interventions of City Unseen, as well as the interior of the state.
A number of contemporary researchers informed our proposed project – one of these was the work of Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, mentioned previously. His concept of “flow” describes a synthesis of the psychology of optimum experience, a word and state of being that his interviewees often used to express the feeling of being optimally immersed and fully engaged in a particular practice – be it making art, cooking, chess playing or mountain climbing.223 In his “flow” research, he points out important aspects that need to be present to conciliate those experiences. Amongst them, the most important are: intrinsic motivation, constructing with previous knowledge, and autonomy, each organically interwoven with the possibility for immediate feedback. Finding ways to follow this flow is also part of the research-intervention strategies of cartography, a methodology deployed by scholars Eduardo Passos, Virgínia Kastrup, and Liliana Escóssia as a means of engaging with processes from the inside as
223 Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, Flow and the Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perenial, 1990);
Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi & Kim Hermason, “Intrinsic Motivation in Museums: What Makes a Visitor Want to Learn?”
in Public Institutions for Personal Learning: Establishing a Research Agenda, eds. John Falk and Lynn Dierking (America Association of Museums: 1995). Also see Ted Talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/por_br/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html.
they are unfolding.224 Inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, cartography as a method works to dissolve subject/object positions and engage with the world, events, contexts and people.
Another reference was the work of Fred Evans and his proposal of an ethical dialogue that creates itself via elliptical open events (mutually affecting all parts of a process).225 This elliptical event was one that was constructed and recognized as such, via the very fact of the collected statements, enabling an exchange of impact and perceptions, constituting and supporting an emerging body of multiple voices. Another useful conceptual reference in reflecting on the hybrid possibilities between artistic practice and an expanded pedagogy was the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and his exploration of art as play, symbol and festival.226 A dynamic that was richly operative in the mediator experience.
From the perspective of evaluation methodology, a key reference was the work of Harvard Project Zero, an educational research group affiliated with Harvard University in the United States, and one of its recent projects that sought to identify key indicators of quality in art education programs throughout the country.227 Besides important factors, such as participative learning, the environment and quality of materials and professionals involved, they found that the best indicator of quality is the actual pursuit of quality itself. In other words, the more you see a pursuit for quality, the more quality is found.
This research amongst others influenced our choice to transform the mechanism of evaluation into an invitation to reflect – to create a kind of ombudsman, a resonant “listening”
camera inside the process. In this manner, we were able to follow the ways individuals saw themselves, and how they were (re) nurturing and questioning their engagement, expectations and concerns. We were as much participants as well as listeners. More than an evaluation project, this invitation to reflect was taken on by participants as a kind of “third time and space” an
224 Eduardo Passos, Virgínia Kastrup, and Liliana Escóssia eds. Pistas do Método da Cartografia: Pesquisa-intervenção e produção de subjetividade (Porto Alegre: Sulina, 2011).
225 Fred Evans explores the idea of an elliptical event that realizes itself in elliptical and dialogic identities. This elliptical dimension (a geometric figure with two centers) translates the dialogic condition inspired by Bakhtin, where the subject of an enunciation is also affected by the return from his/her interlocutor. Evans also refers to Deleuzean territorializations and causal reversibilities, in the sense that events inaugurate a state of mutual transformation. All dialogue is then a mutually impacting relational construction. To be open to this elliptical condition of identity and event is to bring to the other the expansion of him/her self. From here Evans also develops the ethical elliptical proposition of a body of multiple voices – of engagement in solidarity, heterogeneity and creativity – here used for our collection project as a qualitative parameter as much for the pedagogic project as for the processes of collecting multiple voices. These points were instrumental in how we saw the motivations and experiences of the pedagogic project as a political and ethical instigation of the Biennial’s “geopoetics.” Fred Evans, The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
226 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Relevance of the Beautiful: Art as Play, Symbol and Festival,” The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, Trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 3-53.
227 Steve Seidel, Shari Tishman, Ellen Winner, Lois Hetland, and Patricia Palmer eds. The Qualities of Quality:
Excellence in Arts Education and How to Achieve It, Harvard Project Zero Arts Education Study
http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/arts-education/arts-classroom-instruction/Documents/Understanding-Excellence-in-Arts-Education.pdf. p.8
between space of listening and constructivity as they in turn (re) explored their own perceptions.
The resulting project “Coleção das multiplas vozes” (Collection of Multiple Voices) comprised an evaluation report and drawing from more than 40 hours of interviews, five videos each exploring an aspect of the Biennial: Casa M; Travel Notebooks; Mediation; and two general videos one on the pedagogic project as a whole and the other pointing to future directions. On the last weekend of Casa M, one month after the 8th Biennial had closed, in-process versions of the videos were presented to a group including diverse interviewees and a few invited guests. The final edited videos along with the original footage were presented to the Biennial archives. A fifteen-minute video with English sub-titles was published in the bilingual digital periodical Revista MESA.228
What became vitally clear throughout the process, and was only partially realized, is the importance of finding ways to socialize and share such research. The record of such reflection and its public socialization, as Freire noted, are “founders of conscience” and also the tools for building knowledge. This practice is key to the participatory action research that evolved out of collective public activism projects in Latin American universities in the 1960s. But also, we can go back to the earlier demands at the turn of the century via the popular universities and anarchist schools to socialize knowledge and explore collective forms of research. In this context another critical resource is the evolving field of activity theory influenced by Vygotsky and his followers.229 In conceptualizing activity as the generative process that mediates relationships between actors, subjects, communities, and systems, contemporary activity theory can be mobilized as a means to understand and explore institutional shifts and changes. Here the concept and practice of collecting “mirror material” as an elliptical device for organizations/contexts to visualize and engage with their own processes of learning is vital to engaging with critical questions and (in) visible barriers to change.230 While we certainly did not sufficiently succeed in socializing the research of the “Coleção das multiplas vozes” project, there is nevertheless no doubt that in its short published video format and archival videos the interviews represent “mirror material” to be constantly (re) visited as the histories and transformations of 8th and future biennials reverbate and unfold.
228 Gogan and Vergara, “Collection of Multiples Voices.” Revista MESA.
229 Center for Research on Activity, Development and Learning (CRADLE), University of Helskini, ttp://www.helsinki.fi/cradle/index.htm
230 Monica Lemos, Marco Antonio Pereira-Querol, Ildeberto Muniz de Almeida, “The Historical-Cultural Activity Theory and its Contributions to Education, Health and Communication: Interview with Yrjö Engeström,” Interface – Comunicação, Saúde, Educação. Vol 17 no 46 Botucau (July/Sept. 2013)
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S1414-32832013000300018&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en
Perhaps the project’s critical usefulness to offer another mode of criticism, a “critical beside,” that as contemporary paradigms increasingly shift toward the processual and experiential, offer new forms of research and researching that will become key to engage with and evaluate (or maybe more accurately narrate) the nature of such work – its ethics, esthetics and possibilities. Most vitally, the “collection” project registered the 8th Biennial’s geopoetical mix of curatorial, artistic and pedagogic practices, rendering it visible as a body of multiple voices, and hence pointing to the (possible) geopolitical legacy of Geopoetic Essays. Yet, such forms of research, as critic Grant Kester suggests, may sit uncomfortably within certain critical traditions.231 For example, in her work on participatory practices, Claire Bishop describes the shifts in her critical process as a “journey from skeptical distance to imbrication: as relationships with producers were consolidated, my comfortable outsider status (impotent but secure in my critical superiority) had to be recalibrated along more constructive lines.”232 I would argue that such “imbrication” and “constructivity” are crucial. A being beside that can accompany, tease out, explore, register, and critique the generative and consequential possibilities for such processual work and to identify and examine how and in what ways these new modes of address of art and publicness become operative or indeed “geopoetic.”