[-empyre-] Some local cases, maybe with a global implication, sort of (forward from Ricardo)

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Hi Christina and all

I am entering this discussion just now and I am really impressed by  
the diversity of points of view on the topic of education and the  
whole packet of questions it brings with.

Given my background of work with grassroots groups, art collectives  
and media activists, I tend to have a less instutional approach to  
education, instead of some views presented.

I come from this country, Brazil, where education is a basic and deep  
problem, amongst many others, but where there have been also many  
projects or attempts to overcome a situation of poverty, ignorance  
and difficulty. Not only that has appeared in theorizations like  
Paulo Freire´s Pedagogy of The Autonomy, where the learning process  
is a process of raising counsciousness with the construction of both  
the one who teaches and the one who learns, but also in very  
grassroots projects dealing with open source and digital inclusion  
which I´ll talk later.

So from this point of view, education, as much as it, in a way or  
another, may involve art, can happen in many situations outside  
institutional contexts or market-driven interests. I believe  
education is a very broad term, and if we talk about art, (or  
activism, in another guise), why not see an artwork that intervenes  
in the public sphere as educational, or else an activist  
manifestation as a form of "critical pedagogy" as in Freire´s idea?

The projects I´ll talk about here in a way or another run away from  
the "closed" idea of education and in their own manner provide  
dialogue, information, teach and instill ideas working as art or  
either activist actions. As part of Documenta´s publication project,  
reports and articles on some of them will be published in the  
magazine I run in Portuguese, Rizoma ( www.rizoma.net).

The first ones are strongly related to the artwold as most of its  
authors come from the art circuit from Brazil but most of them  
created their projects in a grassroots or community-based way.

The first one I may have in mind is JAMAC (Jardim Miriam Art Club),  
which is sort of a association (it has indeed now become an NGO)  
founded by a famous Brazilian Artist, Monica Nador and other artists  
in the periphery of São Paulo, more specifically Jardim Miriam, a  
very poor region full of criminality, police persecution of the poor  
and black young guys and such. One thing we must have in mind is that  
São Paulo´s Periphery is "said" to be ugly and without aesthetics. It  
in part is that. But Jamac´s work tries first to ask, to investigate  
what are the symbols, what are the images that matter the most to  
those communities and persons. That can be the flower vase in the  
towel, a picture in a book, whatever. That "symbol" then becomes a  
pattern that is painted and adorned both inside and outside the  
house. Monica says her proposal is to bring beauty to those so  
suffered people. Jamac is also a space, so it gives courses and  
teaches how to paint and such. Two of its "students" became monitors  
in the last São Paulo Biennial and are very interested towards  
becoming artists. But Jamac itself took part in this last biennial,  
as it was mainly directed towards community and relational art.

The second one I want to call attention is Base Móvel (Mobile Base),  
a project created by a collective in the Northeast of Brazil, a  
region known by its poverty and poor resources. Base had its origins  
in Fortaleza and consists of an archive of the exhibitions of the  
group or the exhibitions of their network of collectives (there is a  
fever of collectives in Brazil since at least the middle of the  
nineties). This archive consists of catalogs, books, CDs, DVDs,  
posters, whatever concerning the activities and related material from  
the Brazilian artworld. The interesting thing is that all this  
material is archived in an enormous box (like one of those musicians  
that use to put musical instruments for shows) and they take it by  
hand traveling by bus all around the Ceará State (to which Fortaleza  
is the Capital) in little cities, villages and such, and contacting  
the local artists (usually very naïf ones who know nothing about the  
subtleties of the artmarket, the circuit of exhibition, even the  
production, of its Whys, Whats, and for Whats. Base Móvel epitomizes  
a need not only for Ceará but for most of Brazil, even São Paulo or  
Rio de Janeiro´s countrysides. The circuit itself is so self- 
concerned, small  and limited to the capitals, and ignorance  
prevails. So an initiative like that may bring information, dialogue  
and awareness of how the art world fuctions and how to be become an  
artist if one wants to be so, mainly those ones that would not become  
otherwise.

Another art-related project is Arquivo de Emergência (Emergence  
Archive). It was crated by artist Cristina Ribas and is an authorial  
project fed by many collective projects. From the 3 projects ere  
presented till now, its is probably the more institutionally linked  
of them, once it is shown in collective exhibitions. And what does it  
consists of? To explain that we may understand a very specific  
situation as for the situation of Brazilian arts. First, as I  
mentioned before, the fact that there is a whole alternative circuit  
of collectives and urban intervention artists with their own  
networks, discussion-lists, urban art festivals, activist gatherings,  
actions with social movements, and art works all made and disappeared  
in the streets. All this material is yet to be researched and a  
history (if so) is yet to be written. Cause the question is that the  
majority of those collectives and individual artists are, in a way or  
another ignored or excluded from the normal art circuit. Critics don 
´t write about them, in fact we could say "they don´t exist". A  
project like the Emergence Archive tries exactly to document a lot of  
those actions describing the actions, the group (ar individual  
artist) and putting a photograph in a paper covered with plastic.  
Along with that, a collection of texts concerning art and politics,  
collectives and magazines produced by the groups. Its an unvaluable  
and important material for this generation and also future ones who  
may look at Brazilian art from the beggining of the 21 st Century and  
that not everything meant the market or the international jet setters  
and stars like Ernesto Neto and such.

Well, I may be a bit longer still (just a bit), and I hope I may not  
leave you tired. I also hope you understand that all those references  
to local situations (at least for other participants of empyre that  
come from other peripheral countries but not only), also contain  
symptoms that reflect global situations.

So I make a shift towards more grassroots-activist practices that  
also deal with art (in a tangential way) but very much represent  
efforts to educate or bring awareness and raise critical  
consciousness to disenfranchised communities.

The first one was a project made by a network I was part of in 2004  
and it was composed of tactical media activists, electronic sound  
producers, graphic artists, open source programmers, computer  
recyclers and Indymedia-Brasil activists. All those people gathered  
together, after some actions in group like a festival and such, to a  
project of giving classes of sound production, internet access,  
recycling of computers and all those specialities quoted before, all  
these using open source softwares. Chosen were 3 regions from São  
Paulo´s Peripheries, very poor and lacking basic resources. 300  
youngsters from those districts were selected by an ngo that decided  
to work with us and even Unesco decided to help us with some funding.  
Those labs of autonomous learning were called Autolabs. Most of the  
students were women and course lasted around seven months. It was a  
very rewarding experience to all the participants once what they were  
teaching was not based on school books but in their own experience,  
so we may imagine the problems, the adaptations, the changes during  
the classes and such. None of the workshop givers were teachers, but  
the knowledge acquirement was also essential for some of the  
attendants. It may be said that the Autolabs were the very first seed  
for the known Cultural Hotspots promoted by the minister Gilberto Gil  
and his open source approach to Brazilian Culture, as most of the  
group that worked on this project came from the Autolabs.

The last one is for me the most significant of them all. It was born  
inside of a homeless ccupation in São Paulo´s downtown, the Prestes  
Maia building. An abandoned building from the 1950´s, that building  
is drowned in billionaire duties by its owner. As the problem of  
homelessness is a terrible problem in São Paulo, some of those  
homeless people organize themselves in movements and invade abandoned  
buildings. That was the case of Prestes Maia, invaded and commanded  
by women. The question is that never before had artists or artistic  
groups merged with those homeless movements, what started to happen  
by the end of 2003, with an exhibition inside the occupation. I won´t  
go too deep in the history of this movement (one part of it is being  
told by Gavin Adams in an article for Rizoma in the Documenta  
project) since what really interest is one of the outcomes that  
became a focal point for a lot of changes both in the relation of the  
artists and collectives with the movement and the society in general.  
Many events were realized in the occupation during the years of 2004  
and 2005, most of them concerning the possibility of expelling by the  
police as the city government wanted them to be out and also because  
of the attempt to gentrify downtown. What happens is that most of  
those events uniting artists and homeless people did not call proper  
attention to the problem be it by the media channels, the society,  
the intellectuals, whatever. Someone between the artists discovered a  
space in the subterranean of the building where people got books and  
dumped them there. What was the brilliant idea following? Creating a  
library, with all those humble, abandoned, dirty books, there inside,  
organizing them, collecting more books, asking for donations,  
involving institutions, alternative schools, and so that was the  
first time the "marginalized" Prestes Maia started to appear in  
national newspapers, magazines and media in General, calling  
attention to the problem of homelessness and also showing that those  
people were not the dumb ones they were supposed to be but they would  
also like to consume culture and such. More than ever, from that  
discover on, intellectuals started to visit the building and promote  
debates and conferences, the society at large accepted the movement  
with more tolerance and problems with the police diminished  
extremely. The library was organized by artists and homeless people  
who live there and is currently being used by the inhabitants.

I just wanted to think with some of those examples that education may  
have a much broader field of discussions that not only concerns  
algorithms or philosophy but can be linked to very real and painful  
problems, i.e. concerning the most immediate reality that many of us  
may not know – maybe.

Best
Ricardo