THE WALKING SCHOOL — A Social Sculpture
FOR A PERFORMATIVE EXPERIMENTATION OF A TRANSMISSION PUBLIC SPACE
« The academic canon, or established curriculum, it is only for a society that educates just to secure it’s own reproduction. »
As many thinkers showed it, the public space is « one of those places where the power it’s affirmed and practiced, and probably on its most subtle form, the symbolic violence, as an unnoticed violence ». It is our necessity to work on counteracting these mechanisms of domination.
CONTEXT
Due to a world where we’re more and more pushed to a bitter-end specialization and compartmentalization, we realize that the possibilities of constructive criticism are being diluted.
We stand for the richness of open-mindedness to the other unknown, or hardly known. We think that to do this, the most adequate way is the movement towards the other, in all of its forms. Thus, we choose the movement, the walking movement, as a form of action.
The main issue of this artistic desire (project) is the creation of a collective trans-disciplinary artistic creation (through the transmission of knowledge) on the move, walking; crossing countries, territories, history and its specific issues.
To do this, we want to create an artistic process through a non-formal artistic pedagogy situation (in parallel and in collaboration with formal artistic pedagogies, namely, art schools and universities) to question the individual as a citizen and Art as an emancipatory approach having an impact on its environment, aiming the awareness of the public space as a support (canvas) of polity.
It is about emancipatory performative walks.
The frame of this project is an ensemble of nearly insurrectional situations that culminated in mass walks creating a civil emancipation context. These are walks that happened during the 20th century in different European countries, as the Larzac peasants walk of 1973 in France, the anti-nuclear walks around Lemoiz from 1974 to 1980 in the Spanish Basque Country, the Yugoslav Partisans walk in 1941, the Syrian migrants walk in Greece since one year… and others that we’re looking for right now.
The Walking School will take place alongside these paths and will deal with the issues highlighted on these occasions.
We truly believe in the necessity of the knowledge of past issues to more efficiently understand and act on present issues.
RESEARCH TERRITORY
We consider the educational theory according to which the student learns as much from the teacher than the teacher does from the student to be an auxiliary to democracy. In this experience, education must be as far as possible from instruction and any other form of enrolment of students, from taming to conditioning. The idea that learning is teaching by oneself throughout experience is the core of our reflections. It’s about pedagogy centred on experimentation ➝ Learning is doing and vice versa.
Experience is not something that comes to us; it’s a manufactured thing. It consists on the establishment of a connection between the fact of feeling, and engaging consequently on an activity. Without the orientation and focus that provides the fact of being affected and reactive to it in consequence, an action is just an agitation.
This pedagogy lies on the implication of the subject in the object of his/her knowledge. Exploring him/her environment, the being explores him/herself. By observing the nature, he/she develops his/her senses and through them all its faculties: “To train the senses it’s not only to use them, it’s learning to judge wisely through them, it’s, so to speak, to learn how to feel; because we know to touch, see, hear, only as they taught us to do it .”
Our proposition is an experimentation of the issue, learn to learn: become autonomous through multidisciplinary artistic creation.
It won’t be a sublimation space of the individual, but the setting of collective mechanisms in order to achieve an awareness of the common thing and the political being of oneself through artistic and knowledge transmission experimentations.
We want to develop individual constructive criticism in order to generate a deep analysis of the common thing through arts.
We consider that constructive criticism is an objectivating approach aiming the reduction of judgement mistakes. It’s for us an intellectual honesty discipline allowing to struggle against mystifications and to take a step back from its own convictions. It’s about preferring reality, even hard or complex, to confortable illusions or abusive simplifications and not to rush on interpretation of facts before being positive about their reality. Constructive criticism isn’t scepticism and even less a form of relativism.
The psychological states and mind approaches characterized by the constructive criticism are analysis, doubt, assessment, discernment, evaluation, judgement and reflection. The antonyms of the constructive criticism are confusion, abstruse texts or ideas, contradiction, credulity, superstition, dogmatism, sectarianism, ideology, scientism, discontinuity and incoherence. The main quality of a person endowed with constructive criticism is lucidity. It is about an acquired disposition based not on a particular psychology (unhealthy doubt or sense of persecution) but on logical and epistemological imperatives.
ACTION
This project is a direct continuation of our previous project “Mechanisms for an Entente”. We want to continue the research and deepening on the issues of democracy within artistic creation. This time we want –by composing a living, performative social sculpture- to approach pedagogy directly as a form of citizenship and compose a pedagogical multidirectional trajectory with an ensemble of researches on issues concerning the relations between individual and structural, collectivised dynamics, in order to create in a co-construction basis, conditions for the emergence of the critic space.
We intend to produce a series of two-months long workshops (each workshop being located in the specific European region where each walk took place), where through a walking movement approach we will create a multidisciplinary collective creative process. In each workshop we will handle a particular set of issues linked to the historical reality of its particular region. To do this, we will invite visual artists and researchers in different domains (anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, historians, philosophers, geographers among others) to participate in those walks working on their respective domains to enrich the common objective: the production of a collective and multiform transmission and creation process.
We are willing to make this process sustainable. To make it exist further than ourselves.
