[-empyre-] Critical Pedagogies from Brazil

[Sharon Daniel <sdaniel@ucsc.edu>]

Ricardo wrote: "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?"

I agree that it is useful - in this context and in general - to think 
of  community based activist art practices as a form of education. 
Freire's pedagogy is, of course, a well known and extremely 
productive approach to the problem of hierarchies and relations of 
power mentioned earlier in the month in this discussion.

In the projects Ricardo described the artist often apparently 
functions as an organizer. I was lucky enough to be able to attend a 
one day symposium led by the members of the UltraRed collective where 
there was considerable discussion of the difference between the terms 
"organizer" and "activist" in relation to art practice.  Here is 
their record of the event.
http://www.ultrared.org/publicrecord/archive/2-01/2-01-011/2-01-011.html
And here is Leonardo Vilchis's statement that addresses how he sees 
the difference between organizer and activist 
http://www.ultrared.org/publicrecord/archive/2-01/2-01-011/2-01-011-05.mp3
for him the difference has to do with the artist/activist/organizers' 
position within the community that is engaged by and in the work 
itself.

I'd like to add to the list of descriptions of work that "intervenes 
in the public sphere" as critical pedagogy an organization in Buenos 
Aires that I have had the privilege of working with - Crear Vale la 
Pena
http://www.crearvalelapena.org.ar/ The foundation was started by 
choreographer and sociologist Ines Sanguinetti in the mid 80's. Crear 
has established educational, community and program centers in some of 
the poorest neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. They use Artistic training 
for Social Transformation.

Crear Vale la Pena is an independent non-governmental organization 
based in Buenos Aires. Founded and directed by sociologist and 
choreographer Ines Sanguinetti, Crear Vale La Pena works for Art & 
Social Transformation. Crear has established educational, community 
and program centers in some of the poorest neighborhoods in Buenos 
Aires, providing nearly 1,000 children and young adults every year 
with a range of some 90 different courses in various artistic 
disciplines. The courses offer young people living on the social and 
economic fringe the opportunity to receive training in modern dance, 
Hip Hop, street dance, theatre, music and comedy from professional 
artists. These young people also learn important social skills at the 
three self-administrated cultural centers in the city.

In my opening post I mentioned two projects - one of these, Palabras_ 
<http://palabrastranquilas.ucsc.edu>, is in part a collaboration with 
Crear Vale la Pena. In August 2005 Argentine Choreographer Susana 
Szperling began working with Palabras_ at the Foundation with a small 
group of young dancers who collaborated in developing choreography 
through improvisation based on their day-to-day experience in their 
own neighborhood (a shanty town in the northern part of Buenos Aires 
called "la cava"). The dancers used Palabras_ tools to extend their 
investigation of life in their neighborhood and provide a background 
setting for a dance performance. The palabras tools are also being 
used in schools in Buenos Aires and Kiel, Germany as a platform for 
cultural exchange. In Buenos Aires these workshops are directed by 
young people who have been trained at Crear.  The Palabras_ 
collaboration is just a very small part of the extensive, 
long-standing and very successful efforts of Ines and Crear which are 
described at their site. I have included a description of/reflection 
on my work with Crear in a residency in Kiel below for anyone who is 
interested. This was cut and pasted from a piece written for another 
context so I apologize for the length - again - a brief description 
of a workshop residency collaboration with Crear in Kiel is near the 
end.

best,
Sharon

________

Palabras_ http://palabrastranquilas.ucsc.edu is a web application 
that employs tagging to generate a spontaneous or "improvised" map of 
correspondences and connections between communities in various 
locations.

The project was based on the concept of the "community computer," 
first proposed by activist Bruno Tardieu. The "community computer" is 
a social and technological system much like a typical computer in 
which words can make things happen and associative memory evolves 
over time. While the "personal computer" provides a communications 
gateway to the Internet where communities of interest can evolve 
regardless of distance, the concept of the "community computer" is 
intended not to bypass, but to strengthen, communities of place - 
particularly marginalized communities - and to enable and empower 
them.

Unlike other Folksonomic media sites (Flickr, and Utube, for example) 
Palabras_ employs tagging in the context of place-based workshops 
designed to allow communities that may not normally have access to 
the internet to use media and information technologies to represent 
themselves and their own circumstances. Palabras also adopts the 
tactics of Do-It-Yourself technology to provide low cost and context 
appropriate media acquisition tools. Through Palbras_ workshops 
communities not traditionally thought of as scholarly or academic, 
produce knowledge and interpret their own experience.

The Palabras_ website currently provides access to an archive of over 
2000 video clips created in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Kiel, Germany, 
San Francisco and San Jose, California (US) and Darfur, Sudan, 
through the folksonomies participant-communities have evolved. The 
Palabras workshop tools and database browser adopt the folksonomic 
method to give participants the opportunity to interpret and classify 
their own content. This method also simultaneously generates a map of 
semantic associations between the self-representations created by 
participant-communities across languages and cultures.

At each site Palabras_ workshop participants document their daily 
lives with inexpensive, disposable digital video cameras "hacked" to 
make them reusable. They subsequently "tag," organize, and share 
their videos online using the Palabras_ "editor". This custom-built 
web-application was designed to facilitate the discovery of 
relationships and connections between participants' personal stories 
by allowing them to label or "tag" their video content with a shared 
vocabulary that is both originated by, and familiar to them. The 
web-application also provides simple tag search, editing and 
sequencing tools participants may use to create video sequences using 
clips created by members of their community as well as their own 
clips. Participants can search for relevant clips from their site by 
tag or browse via their site's tag cloud. The tag cloud visualizes 
all of the tags that belong to a site using a distribution algorithm, 
which scales the size of a tag related to the number of times it has 
been used. For example, a participant at Crear Vale la Pena in Buenos 
Aires might scan the site's tag cloud and decide to make a sequence 
of clips tagged with "cuerpo" or "body" by which is very large in the 
site's tag cloud - indicating that there are many clips associated 
with this tag. The participant may select a tag and then choose from 
the clips that are subsequently displayed. The clip editor also lists 
related tags for each clip - all the other tags associated with the 
clip - and the participant may choose to search these tags to look 
for clips in order to construct a sequence based on this network of 
semantic associations. Visitors to this site may also add tags to 
clips and sequences in the archive.

Palabras_ workshops in local cultural centers at each Palabras_ site 
have focused on strategies for collective self-representation. Most 
recently, Palabras_ was used by participants in a ten day 
workshop/residency in Kiel, Germany. Dancers and Musicians from 
Foundation Crear Vale la Pena (creativity is worthwhile) 
<http://www.crearvalelapena.org.ar/> in Buenos Aires traveled to Kiel 
to collaborate with young people from the Mettenhof neighborhood on 
the development of a media and dance-theater presentation exploring 
the concept of "respect." Participants used Palabras_ video cameras, 
tagging and editing tools in a series of "investigations" of the 
concept which were incorporated into the media/dance-theater 
presentation developed over the course of the residency. The results 
of these investigations are accessible through the Palabras_ browser 
under the site named "respect". The Argentinian dancers and musicians 
from Crear Vale la Pena and the young people from Kiel did not speak 
the same language. For several of the young people from Kiel, German 
was a second and relatively new language. Therefore, discussions on 
the meaning of respect were conducted in several languages 
simultaneously (Spanish, German, English, Romany, Kurdish and 
Russian) first in translation and then through the development of 
extra-linguistic means of communication in exercises designed to 
develop trust and mutual respect among the participants. These 
exercises engaged the participant pairs in a joint effort to 
articulate and represent their own experiences of social exclusion 
and inclusion through movement, music making, video making, 
discussion, and analysis.

For example, the first video making exercise began with a discussion 
(translated) on the meaning of respect and social inclusion. Everyone 
present participated in developing a series of ten questions on the 
nature of respect, which were written down in Spanish and German. The 
participants were then organized into pairs - one Spanish speaker and 
one German speaker - and given one of the "hacked" video cameras. The 
partners used the camera to record each other's answers to the 
questions and then to record each partner attempting to interpret the 
other's answers. Since the partners did not speak the same language 
they had to develop extra-linquistic means of both communicating and 
interpreting meaning in order to complete the task. Over the first 
five days of the residency the same pairs were given several other 
tasks in video making, movement and music making, which involved 
extra-linquistic communication. There were also many other translated 
discussions and rehearsals. When all of the video exercises were 
complete the pairs worked together to tag and sequence their clips 
using the Palabras_ editor. The clips were incorporated into the 
public media/dance-theater presentation primarily as segments 
displayed in a projection of the Palabras_ browser between each dance 
or musical segment. During the performance each workshop participant 
triggered a clip to play by selecting a tag and told the story and 
meaning of the clip to the audience while the clip played. In the 
dress rehearsal there was a moment of confusion. One of the 
narrators, Vanessa, whose first language is Romany and second 
language is German, could not remember the tag she had used for the 
clip she was to narrate and was searching for her password instead of 
the tag. Confusion increased as the problem was translated in 
English, Spanish and German - to no avail. Finally, Cachito, 
Vanessa's video making/tagging partner, who's only language is 
Spanish, was called upon to help. Vanessa and Cachito sorted things 
out in a few seconds, communicating by means of idiosyncratic 
gestures, facial expressions and un-translated Romany and Spanish 
'key' words.

Through the tagging, editing and video exercises, Vanessa and 
Cachito, and all of the Spanish/German speaking pairs, improvised a 
method of communication that used translation, not merely in its 
linguistic sense, but in the sense of  "a motion across, a 
traversal." Their method of translation reflects its mathematical 
definition -- "a transformation in which the origin of a coordinate 
system (in this case, the complex coordinate system of nationality - 
language, cultural identity, political citizenship, class, and race), 
is moved to a new position or across a boundary, while the direction 
of each axis (in this case, each individual's subjective identity), 
is maintained (respected, recognized, accepted, and acknowledged)."

This is mode of translation mapped in Palabras_.

The "hacked" disposable cameras provide the means by which 
participants can document and represent their own experience. The 
browser interface allows a global and international audience online 
to examine the ways in which place-based communities and individuals 
describe their own social contexts. Visitors online can contribute to 
the evolving folksonomy that organizes these representations in 
clusters of semantic association.

What is shared among and between participant communities, and 
interpreted by both visitors and participants alike, is visualized in 
the tag cloud as an improvised map of correspondences across cultures.

The folksonomy generated here constitutes an emerging language - a 
common language that is associative and cross-contextual - a hybrid 
language that merges word and image into a kind of mediatized 
Esperanto. This common language - this folksonomic Esperanto - is the 
result of the use of media and information technologies and it is the 
use of technology.

The Palabras tools and interfaces translate - shifting the social 
location of knowledge to produce critical consciousness necessary to 
challenge existing relations of power.

The fundamental premise of Palabras_ is that the images through which 
we view the experience and perspectives of others should be 
originated in context, interpreted, organized and disseminated by 
those who are represented. In this way communication, exchange, 
awareness and understanding can be generated from the bottom up, not 
the top down.