AütuaCifn odblioa: al caraaonial

Marginal and experimental the Nucleus was also tactical. As already noted, Morais argued in the late 1960s for a museum to be “a programmer of activities throughout the city” where “the concept of workshop is more extensive” and can refer to “any place in the city where teachers and students gather.”²³⁰ This sense of the museum as proposition out in the world can also be redeployed back into the site-specific context of the museum itself. Here the institution – exhibitons, collections, context etc – is understood as material to be “used” that is read, explored, and reconfigured by publics themselves. The notion of users rather than publics is a key observation in diverse critical analyses. Librarian David Carr draws a parallel between museums and libraries and invokes Umberto Eco when he says that the museum is an “open work created only in the play of its users.”²³¹ More recently, critic Stephen Wright has provocatively written about the “offline 3.0 museum” that would be like a kind of “walk-in toolbox for usership.”²³²

Understanding the museum as a toolbox out in the world and in situ was usefully deployed by another program of the Nucleus led by the educators Ana Paula Chaves and Gleyce Kelly Heitor that aimed to explore new ways of thinking about the museum/school relationship where all involved – museum educator, teacher, student, school, museum – were seen as creative agents and authors. One pilot initiative, developed in partnership with the city’s Secretary of Education and the Emílio Carlos School in the north of the city, fostered affective links and experimental practices by working with teachers and classes in a truly transdisciplinary manner across subject areas: English, Portuguese, Geography, Science, Music, History, Maths and Art.

One of these projects, called “The Museum Insideout,” deconstructed the museum and its context via engaging directly with the diverse professionals that make up the institution’s day-to-day life:

Using the interview format and documentation in video and photography, we created an investigative route where the internal and external structures of MAM were approached “inside/out,” via statements of diverse professionals – exhibition guards, curators, educators, cinemateque technician, research and documentation assistants, cleaners, administrators – sharing different perceptions

229 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 54.

230 Morais. “Chronocollage: Rio de Janeiro, 1967 – 1972,” in Río Experimental.

231 David Carr, The Promise of Cultural Institutions (Walnut Creek/Califórnia: Altamira Press, 2003) 11

232 Stephen Wright, “Museum 3.0.” Toward a Lexicon of Usership (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013) 39-40, 40 http://museumarteutil.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Toward-a-lexicon-of-usership.pdf

about the museum, their professional roles, and the context of work. Reflections generated in this encounter were then in turn applied in the school context and we proposed the same route/strategy where students and educators would present the school, drawing on their own stories and perceptions of the locale including the school garden, classrooms, library, courtyard, dining hall, parking area etc., and we saw many points of convergence between the two institutions.

Ana Chaves, educator, Núcleo Experimental²³³

In a manner similar to the Irradiações program, the idea was to create a two-way engagement rendered possible by a mutual dislocation, a sort of “happening between” entities, as Ana Chaves suggested. A practice that favored co-produced creative interventions in the daily experiential life of the school and museum, effectively deconstructing traditional curricular and reception models that, as Gleyce Kelly Heitor noted, sought to find their own form and produce desire amongst those involved. ²³⁴ A testimony to this process is the English teacher Jorge Luiz Peçanha’s reflection on his own shift from estrangement to amazement in the evolution of the project. His collaboration with the school’s Music teacher and students produced “raps” about the museum from the youth perspective. The day of their visit to MAM they met the artist Cabelo whose exhibition Humúsica (October 18^th – December 2^nd 2012) – a play on humus and music – was on view at MAM at the time, mixing poetry, music, drawing, sculpture, and performance. The artist listened to their raps, sung with them, affirming a kind of micro revolutionary sensibility, as Peçanha notes “showing that it is possible for all of us to see life with the eyes of an artist.”²³⁵

Another aspect of the museum/school initiative was to foster a network of educators, university researchers and schools public (state and municipal) and private, as well as NGOs engaged with youth education. As a means of inaugurating this process a series of study groups was developed as a method to create links and to debate critical issues and new possibilities for museum/school relationships via overarching themes: “Museum-School-City” – exploring where does the museum and the school begin and the city as a territory of learning;

233 [Author translation, Portuguese original: “No planejamento, criamos conjuntamente com os professores um percurso em que os alunos fariam um reconhecimento do museu pelos profissionais. Por meio de entrevistas e registros em vídeo e fotografia, criamos um percurso investigativo, em que as estruturas internas e externas do MAM foram reconhecidas pelo seu ‘avesso’, ou seja, identificamos através do depoimento de diversos profissionais – salão de exposição, curadoria, educação, cinemateca, documentação, setor de limpeza, administração – diferentes percepções sobre seu local de trabalho e sua relação com o museu. A partir das reflexões geradas nesse encontro, para a ação na escola, propomos o mesmo percurso: alunos e educadores nos apresentaram a escola a partir das histórias que compõe os espaços do jardim, quadra, estacionamento, sala de leitura, sala de aula, e refeitório e foram percebidos muitos pontos convergentes entre as duas instituições.”] Ana Chaves. Report on the Museum/School initiative, Nucleus Blog:

https://nucleoexperimental.wordpress.com/category/colaboracoes/

234 “Museu/Escola aprendizagens em rede.” Reconfiguring the Public: Art, Pedagogy, Participation II. Panel discussion: Gleyce Kelly Heitor, Ana Chaves, Anita Sobar, Jorge Luiz Peçanha, Luiz Lima, Teresa Cristina, Moderator: Mara Pereira, November 2012, organized by the Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art, MAM-RJ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4JK7S2hdHE&list=PLO-GRBBoQZriGcpgVzQM_TNalnDm3kG3K&index=3

235 [Author translation, Portuguese original: “mostrando que é possivel para todos nós ver a vida com olhos do artista.”]

Jorge Luiz Peçanha. Ibid.

“Transdisciplinarity;” and “Artistic Practices as Learning Practices.” The study groups worked both in the museum’s gardens and galleries featuring the reading of texts in small groups and creative lab workshops. Educator Mara Pereira notes that the groups were a micro collective action, an attempt, not to deny, but rather to propose a different model from the traditional teacher training sessions offered by museums with the intention of generating student publics for the institution. Recalling education philosopher Silvo Gallo’s notion of “minor” education, in her essay on the groups Pereira suggests they were a form of micro militant activism. That is, a practice immersed in everyday life, micropolitics, de-schooling, and resistence to established flows, but also one that embraces a search for common ground and direct action.²³⁶As a form of

“minor” agency, the study group model potentializes new critical readings and awareness. Pereira draws an analogy with site-specific pieces by Richard Serra at the Municipal Hélio Oiticica Art Center in Rio de Janeiro, 1997, featuring large black circles drawn on the ceilings and arched hallways, clearly visible yet strangely easily missed, where such “minor” presence affects “the impression of a movement that did not exist, but was there. A discrete and potent subversion.”²³⁷

The embrace of the “minor” as distinct from Domingos mass scale events is a distinctly contemporary turn. Occupying institutional site specificities – place, collection, history, and human relations – as experimentally “minor” possibilities in all their diversity and transversality, with criticality and affection, may offer the most radical of political pedagogic praxes. As education scholar Teresa Esteban noted in relation to the study groups, it is not where the school or the museum begins but rather “that is it possible for the experience to go beyond in a process of multiple weaving encounters with the other.”²³⁸ Yet discontinuity and necessary scalability jeopardize such “going beyond.” Like the exhibition “tight rope” the tensions of quantitative reach and qualitative depth challenge one another but also must be in play as dimensions that simultaneously enable the other. The experimental counterpimper needs to work both sides.

Links, affections, networks require time. Events, numbers, scale requires resources. Increasingly for the Nucleus these struggles seemed to create impasses rather then “cracks.”

236 Silvo Gallo, “Em torno de uma educação menor,” Educação & Realidade (July/December, 2002): 169-178.

237 Mara Pereira, “A Minor Education, A Minor Art, A Minor Museum: The Study Groups Run by the Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art at MAM-RJ,” Revista MESA no 4: Past as Blueprint: Hybrid Practices/Limit Zones (May 2015) http://institutomesa.org/RevistaMesa_4/portfolio/arte-mam-03/?lang=en

238 [Author translation, Portuguese original: “[…] mas saber ser possível a experiência de ir além em processos múltiplos tecidos nos encontros com o outro.”] Maria Teresa Esteban. Statement via email to the author. April 2015.