ON THE DOORSTEP_AND THE BUILDERS_
On The Doorstep_ and The Builders (Al Portal de Casa_ i els Constructors_) is a project directed by Jordi Canudas for cross-collaboration among students of Escola La Sínia in the Remei district of the city of Vic, students of Escola d’Art i Superior de Disseny de Vic and ACVic Centre d’Arts Contemporànies, and with support from Pla de Barris i Participació Ciutadana de l’Ajuntament de Vic and the Generalitat de Catalunya, Consell Nacional de la Cultura i de les Arts.
21.06.2011 - 25.09.2011 [Download PDF]
Place: ACVic. Sant Francesc,1. Vic
Guided visits to the exhibition
On The Doorstep_ and The Builders (Al Portal de Casa_ i els Constructors_)
Every Saturday at 12pm. Guided visits available by appointment. Telephone ACVic on 93 885 37 04 . Free service.
Parallel activities
Presentation of works realised during the workshop AL PORTAL DE CASA_ From the place: artistic practice and context, by Jordi Canudas with students of the Escola d’Art i Superior de Disseny de Vic: Laura Batriu, Judith Bravo, Alicia Campo, Sara Costa, Lucía Ijurco, Marina López, Neus Martí, David Reche, Aina Roca, Meritxell Serrallonga i Àlex Vélez.
Exhibition at Sala d’exposicions de l’Escola d’Art i Superior de Disseny de Vic (Rambla Sant Domèncec, 24. Vic).
From 21st June to 22nd July 2011.
On The Doorstep_ and The Builders_ This project arose from an initiative to start collaborative projects among different institutions based on the idea of crossing art-education and territory. ACVIC takes an active interest in its programming in the relationship between arts projects and schools. The project wove Jordi Canudas's experience in the district , the involvement of teachers and students from elementary school and art school (education), together with elements of planning, representation and articulation of contents (art).
Is it possible to create an educational and an aesthetic project at the same time?
The exhibition aims to respond strongly and positively to this question; proposing a working model developed by students and teachers of the school La Sínia, with a large group of collaborators under the direction of Jordi Canudas. During the working process, between February and June 2011, students, supervised and led by teachers, continued a normal curriculum, other than the fact that one of their projects was structured as an artistic work, bringing together different fields of learning.
Many people, some from the School of Art and Design of Vic, others from the Pla de Barris, joined a working group, where teachers, students and volunteers shared in creating an arts project based on cross-sectional learning, exploring the everyday environment, exchanging experiences with family and neighbours, and representing formal elements which focus as much on the interior of the house as on the street outside it. Other objectives included generating a different way of examining a district's social reality, analysing and understanding the social and architectural spaces which configure it, or leaving the district altogether to compare, evaluate and explain it to other people living in other districts or other cities. The research and contents generated were synthesised, formalised, and permeate the exhibition's different elements.
Is it an artistic practice or an educational practice?
The educator and theorist Paulo Freire said that education is not neutral, is always political, and educational practice does not exist without ethics or aesthetics. In this project, we find an example of the possibilities within art to discover relationships between various places, to reconstruct histories and narratives articulated by people who live in a specific location. A community configured by many communities where the common element among narratives, people and space is the neighbourhood . The neighbourhood is also the place from where the school teaches how to learn. This experience can be understood from artistic and educational points of view, but mostly from a cross-disciplinary perspective that brings them into relationship.
Why is it a collaborative project?
All the participants took part in an artistic and educational project. They contributed creative material, vitality and life experiences, dynamised the project's narrative direction, and were part of a learning process while constructing the project. They were both content generators and transformational agents for the suggestions made by Jordi Canudas, who as project manager, was responsible for the global conceptual direction, for managing the schedule in different stages of the process, and for maintaining the enthusiasm of everyone involved in the project. An eminently educational, analytical, relational, ethical, political and aesthetic project. In fact, the aesthetic element is the result of the sum of the other components. In this case we wish to emphasise the possibility of generating an artistic work in a collaborative context, and in which neither party has refused to accept that role .This process, and the work, adapted to the methodology which the school itself already practises, a method that incorporates cross-disciplinary project work to develop skills, encouraged a positive attitude in learning and enhanced knowledge of the environment in which the pupils live.
The exhibition is a part of that amended process, presented as an interactive installation which can be mounted in other exhibition spaces.
Ramon Parramon
ON THE DOORSTEP_and THE BUILDERS is a two-pronged project which, from the starting point of contemporary artistic practices, proposes a dialogue with the current social reality of the district of Remei in Vic. A site-specific project, working in the context of the neighbourhood, after an important part of the transformation plan promoted by Pla de Barris has been completed.
El Remei is a neighborhood to the south of the city of Vic, which has been the host district and a detailed portrait of different migrations, the first of these being internal migrations from within the Spanish state in the sixties, and more recently from all around the world.
Through this project two distant moments of neighbourhood life, the sixties and the present day, are connected. A relationship formed through my personal experience , as someone who lived his childhood and adolescence in the neighbourhood, and who in recent years has been attentive to changes with regard to both the physical and social contexts. It is from this intimate knowledge and a profound sense of neighbourhood that the project has arisen.
The project goes from particular to general, arising from the need to produce and share experiences, weaving links between the reality of the neighbourhood some decades ago and the neighbourhood nowadays. From my family experience in relation to the house where I lived for years, to the knowledge and exchange with the family or people who live in the house now. From my personal experience as a child , to the knowledge and the collective construction with the children who now live, play and attend school there. From the house and its inhabitants to the district and its neighbours.
From these two premises derive two lines of work:
ON THE DOORSTEP_ This part of the project, still in progress, is based upon experience in relation to the house where I lived for years, opening up a whole series of relationships that facilitate knowledge and exchange with the people who live there today. Starting from this relationship, the work Portraits and Stories has been developed, interlacing languages, traditions and objects. All these people have one thing in common, which is to have established a link with the same doorway, the same stairwell, the same floor, the same walls. The resulting work will be formalised as photographs, text and objects.
For this project, the School of Art and Design of Vic, has conducted a workshop entitled "ON THE DOORSTEP, context and artistic practice" aimed at art and design students . The workshop began a work of reflection and production, approaching from artistic practise the possibility of proximity, of weaving links between participants, both as art and design students and then as residents of Vic, and their intimate social reality, as well as that of their next-door neighbours, of their street, of their neighbourhood.
The builders_ The other part of the project, presented at ACVic Contemporary Arts Centre, runs in conjunction with the district school, CEIP La Sínia.
La Sínia gathers together the district's current social reality, with a total of 387 pupils and a significant number of children from various geographic, cultural and linguistic origin, with 25 different nationalities and understanding the learning of the language of utility and communication, Catalan, as an essential element of cohesion and equality.
This part of the project focuses on infancy and playing games as experience and formative activity. THE BUILDERS_ This relates on the one hand, an activity that has been deeply engraved on my childhood memory: building worlds with pieces of wood in the backyard ... and, on the other, the opportunity to conceive and create together, with the children of La Sínia school, a big construction game with wooden parts, shapes and sizes which correspond to real elements of their immediate surroundings (house, school, neighbourhood ...). A game which, besides being practicable and having an educational function – this proposal integrates into the regular curriculum for pupils of primaries 1 and 2 - also stresses the symbolic dimension involved, since these children of today, with the possibility of diversity and cultural richness, are the true builders of the district and the city of the future. The Great Game THE builders_ focuses on the possibility of weaving collectively the relationship between children, district and city. The children of La Sínia School will build and install their proposal at ACVic, which will be accompanied by documentation of the working process and a video, The Builders , which will give a face to the creators, one hundred students who participated in the project.
To carry out the great game THE builders_ Students from the School of Art and Design worked in collaboration with the children and the team of teachers from the La Sínia school.
The Great Game THE builders_, realised by students of La Sinia school from Vic's El Remei district, was created with the intention of exhibiting outside of its immediate district. It was intended as a platform to establish links with the social reality of other schools, other districts, other cities. From this project with the children of La Sínia school, educational material will be prepared, and the great game THE builders_ will be passed on to other schools to make use of, so that the children of La Sinia school themselves will communicate their experience to other pupils.
Jordi Canudas
References and credits
Jordi Canudas
Visual artist and professor at the Massana School, Art and Design Centre, UAB. His work reflects on the identity and location of the subject confronted by today's environment of hyper-expressiveness and rapid transformation. He has used many different artistic languages and supports such as sculpture, drawing, photography and installation. He has realised exhibitions and in situ projects in cities such as Barcelona, Girona, Vic, Reus, Mataró, Madrid, Oviedo, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Marseilles, Florence, Aalst and Brussels, among others. In recent years, approaches related to notions of place and time, of location, of context and territory, have taken on greater importance in his work, such as the Hospital 106, 4t 1a (1995-2005), co-created with Isabel Banal, on the social and urbanistic transformations of the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona, or the project 1021 days. Mercat i Memòria_Mercat de Sant Antoni (2007-2009) Barcelona, a dialogue from contemporary artistic practice regarding place, people and objects at a time prior to the redevelopment of this iconic market. In 2009 he was involved in the project Màcula. La vida en blanc at the exhibition Mirant des de fora , was organised by the ArtAids foundation, which works with several organisations linked with the Raval district of Barcelona focusing their activities on HIV / AIDS issues. In 2010, he realised the same project, this time at the UTE of the Penitentiary Centre at Villabona, Llanera, Asturias. His work attempts to approach everyday life, with the intention of preserving memory and experience outside of official records.
Escola La Sínia
La Sínia school is a relatively new school. It began its activity, in the academic year 2007-2008, to develop an educational intervention focused on the quality of education and linked to the pupils' immediate surroundings, family and community. The shared responsibility between the school and the immediate environment, opens a new network of knowledge from a perspective of cultural, artistic and social richness that validates their role as citizens. It also proposes to consolidate networked learning as a basic work structure to create places of interprofessional relationship and to consolidate channels of communication to encourage the creation of common strategies of attention to pupils' needs.
Escola d’Art i Superior de Disseny de Vic
Vic's School of Art and Design is a public centre for artistic education that offers qualifications in arts, vocational training in arts and design, and higher education. Vic's School of Art and Design distinguishes itself through three pedagogical principles: promoting interdisciplinary and team work, dealing with individual projects as a process of learning and training, and the implementation of cultural projects related to the immediate surroundings. These principles form the starting point, setting as a strategic objective participation in projects bringing together art, social interaction and education with an aim to fostering social cohesion.
Pla de Barris
The District Plan is a project that foresees the realisation of social and urban development in different neighbourhoods which require special attention. It is funded equally by the city of Vic and the Generalitat of Catalunya and its main purpose is to improve the quality of life, social cohesion and relationships around the neighbourhood. For this reason, the plan relies upon the involvement of all citizens to advance its agenda.
Credited participants
Project concept and direction, Jordi Canudas (visual artist and professor of arts in the Departament d’Arts Visuals de l’Escola Massana Centre d’Art i Disseny-UAB), with the collaboration of Laura Batriu, Idoia Pascual and David Reche (students at l’Escola d’Art i Superior de Disseny de Vic) Mia Guiteres (visual artist ACVic), Montsita Rierola (visual artist and professor of the Faculty of Education UVIC), Cristina Ribas and Mireia Tortadès (Activists Vic Sud), David Pujols
and Magda Solà (Occupational Workshop, Pla de barris Vic Sud), Mercè Casellas, Laura Carrasco, Elisabet Franquesa, Mercè Godayol, Roger Pich, Marta Puigdecens, Emili Quiles and Mireia Serra (teachers at l’Escola La Sínia) and the pupils of primary 1 and 2 at l’Escola La Sínia: Mohamed, Favour, Iman, Gloria, Arpi, Bilal, Fatin, Ibtissam, Olakunle, Hawa, Souad, Youssef, Nawfal, Wassima, Omar, Naomi, Jesús, Pau, Sergio, Mohamed, Martí, Jennifer, Mary, Ernest, Victoria, Harsimran, Faizal, Wiam, Mohamed, Ricardo, Christiana, Amine, Yasmina, Sara, Soulimane, Sekouba, Adama, Mohamed, Anokyewa, Aisosa, Victory, Harmandeep, Asse, Paola, Francisca, Clement, Gurpartik, Lordling, Miracle, Judit, Rania, Amine, Fatima, Mohamed, Ayoube, Vanessa, Younes, Zakaria, Amal, Nihad, Anass, Aicha, Joel, María José, Aaron, Olawale, Ayoub, Sabrina, Marouane, Francisco, Adrià, Yesenia, Clifford, Nihad, Soufian, Anass, Bilal, Nihad, Jiafu, Ángeles, Javier, Josep Maria, Mohamed, Umaima, Illiass, Khadija, Mamadou, Lin, Zakaria, Sevior, Amrit, Farah.
Thanks to Lenka Týcová and the Remei old folks' day centre, Club Sant Jordi de Caixa Catalunya, Vic. To Manolo Gómez, María Ruíz, María Baños, Ana Mari Cámara, Juli Pérez, Rosita Verdaguer, Joaquín Poyato, Núria Ratlló, Aurora Coma, Joan Canudas, Bouarfa Aharrou, Fabiola Mora, Cristina Vilaró, Gina Codinachs, Guiomar Vargas, Anissa Lamzabi, Assumpta Ordeig, Mar Dotras, Carme Carbonell, Ramon Ricart, Marià Dinarès, Carmen Garcia, Toni Garcia, M. Lourdes Bagué, Elisenda Gabaldà and Jaume Roca.
Photography during the process: Laura Batriu, Jordi Canudas, Idoia Pascual, David Reche i Montsita Rierola. Video during the process: Mia Guiteres with the collaboration of Carles Arumí. Children presentation video: control [Z] visual. Carpentry: Fusteria Roca Fitó.