Genuinely emancipated spectatorship rolls up its sleeves [...]
Stephen Wright173 September 2011, it was the final evening of the 8th Biennial’s three month long mediator course.
Featuring workshops, lectures and debates with artists, educators and curators involved in the Biennial as well as other invitees, offered both on site and online, the course was a veritable free university. Choreography, role-playing, cartography and performance were just some of the many artistic, pedagogic and mediation strategies explored. The last few weeks had comprised a mini
170 Sedgwick draws on Silvan Tomkins’ Affect Imagery Consciouness published in 4 volumes over several decades from 1962 – 1992, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham/London:
Duke University Press, 2003) 19-21.
171 Hoff, “Publicness at the Mercosul Biennial,” Revista MESA.
172 The “casa” engaged many of those involved in the 8th Biennial: Luciano Montanha, Gueibe, Marcos Sari, Ernani Chaves, Leticia Castilhos, Fernanda Albuquerque, Carla Borba, Giuliano Lucas among many others.
173 Stephen Wright, “Disinterested Spectatorship,” Toward a Lexicon of Usership (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013) 20-21, 21 http://museumarteutil.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Toward-a-lexicon-of-usership.pdf
residency in a local school called “Vivencias nas Escolas” (Lived Experiences in Schools) involving collaborations with teachers, specific classes and neighborhoods. The atmosphere was animated and tense. The biennial would open the following week and the “real” work would begin. As evaluators we were present to engage the almost 200 strong group in a discussion about highlights and key learning points since the beginning of the course. Given the size of the group, the strategy was to present images and comments the mediators had themselves produced to reflect on the course in a collective context, allowing the mediators to pick and choose elements they wished to expand upon. The emotional tenor of the evening shifted completely when one young man and future mediator stood up to say that that very day he had given up his tech day job because from here on out he wanted to work with art education. The group exploded.
The course had begun in May of that year. The plan was to prepare participants to offer mediated experiences for school groups and the general public for each of the Geopoetic Essays components over the two-month period of the biennial. The three month course would comprise two parallel sessions meeting respectively in the mornings and evenings twice a week offering training to a total of 300 mediators, some via distance learning, each selected via an application process with a few to encouraging a diverse range of disciplines and backgrounds. The ultimate number working in the biennial would be 200.
At that first meeting José Roca presented the overall concept, each component and the artists involved. We followed with a brief introduction to the “evaluation” project as an invitation to reflect. Critically, as an inaugural moment to that process, we invited participants to create their own mind map, putting the word mediation at the center of a blank page and jotting down associations with the word, concept and practice as they currently knew it. All of the “maps” we then collected. This was, as-it-were, an attempt to create a kind of ground zero to enable us to recognize and explore future learning, changes and impact and, as such, it was vitally important that this reflective moment was enabled at the very beginning of the course.
After this exercise Helguera then presented a performative lecture positioning and exploring critical questions, modalities and stereotypes of mediation. He also distributed a workbook style publication edited for the occasion comprising a selection of national and international reflections on various aspects of mediation. The following day, director of education at the Frick in New York and former choreographer, Rika Burnham, presented a special inaugural lecture weaving together knowledge gleaned from over three decades of teaching in art museums.
Subsequently Burnham and Helguera facilitated hands on workshops in one of the local museums and planned exhibition sites of the biennial. The artful mix of their mediation styles, drawing extensively on their own art practices, for Burnham choreography – a play of silence, movement,
positioning and timing – and, for Helguera performance – a potent use of the possibilities of role-playing and theater – was an extremely useful foundational contrast that simultaneously offered high quality mediation strategies, distilled and refined over many years, and, importantly, legitimized different approaches. Also, in their very distinctness, Burnham and Helguera’s methods suggested that each must find their own singular mode of mediation.
In the three months of the course that followed from local based art education collective Coletivo E to Geo Brito director of Augusto Boal’s Teatro de Oprimido in Rio de Janeiro, a slew of different artistic and pedagogic practices would become the mediators to appropriate, refract and “anthropophagize.” The mix of lectures and hands on workshops was vital to giving depth and range to the mediator experience and as Etienne Nachtigall, course coordinator and mediator supervisor, noted the mix of “reflection and experience” was a key differential in the course.174
In a provocative short essay entitled “Why Mediate?” curator Maria Lind critiques staid mediation models that focus on cultivating the educated consumer or the participatory individual rather than fostering “any practical overlap between the sphere of art and the sphere of social and political action.”175 Lind laments that most mediation methods are derived from modern art, drawing on individualist and formalist elements as opposed to collectivist approaches to spectatorship influenced by Constructivism.176
By contrast the 8th Biennial mediators took their cue from the multifarious practices of contemporary art. In contrast to perceiving their role as some sort of “rear-guard action,” they rather saw themselves as engaged cultural citizens.177 Their collective experience – participation in the course, their (often collaborative) mediation of different aspects of the biennial, the exchanges amongst themselves on site, socially, and online – as Mônica Hoff has often stated, meant they were the first, and one could add most engaged, public of the biennial.178 This critically distinguishes the ambition of the mediator program from traditional models, a dynamic that may have frustrated those expecting a format of information, guiding, or customer service.
The mediators were their own self-generating and self-engaging public so-to-speak. Here, the mediation process and experience can be read as a kind of constructivist collective spectatorship model, where, like critic Steven Wright’s truly emancipated spectator, with their sleeves rolled up, the mediators jumped in to “use” the 8th Biennial – its exhibitions, programs, and practices –
174 Interview with Ethiene Nachtigall. “Vídeo: Coleção das múltiplas vozes: Mediação.”
175 Maria Lind, “Why Mediate Art?” Ten Fundamental Questions About Curating (Milan, Italy: Mousse Publishing, 2011) 100-104.
176 Ibid., 101.
177 Hoff, “Publicness at the Mercosul Biennial,” Revista MESA.
178 Ibid and also Mônica Hoff, “Educational curatorship, art methodologies, training and permanence: the change in education at the Mercosul Biennial,” in Pedagogia no campo expandido, 389.
as a space of encounter, authorship, learning, creativity and reflection, in turn, embuing the Biennial with a collective geopoetic spirit.179
Mediators at Casa M hosted talks, gave workshops, baked cakes, grew gardens, held sleepovers, and invited neighbors for coffee. For City Unseen’s public art interventions they created poetic routes and nighttime participatory corteges through the city. At the port warehouses the Geopoetics exhibition became a field for nomadic peregrinations and performances ideas. As Casa M mediator Gabriel Bartz noted, “there was so much difference, it ended up becoming one thing.”180 To understand this potent collectivity, in our essay on the biennial, we draw on the philosopher Fred Evans who explores this kind of phenomenon as a body of multiple voices, one that simultaneously embraces solidarity, heterogeneity and creativity.181 Similarly, Brazilian geographer Milton Santos’ “acontecer soldirário” (happening of/in solidarity)locates this phenomenon within a territorial context.182 Suely Rolnik’s notion of the “corpo vibratil”(resonant body) activated by “precise processes of contamination and contagion” emphasizes the organic nature of this collective territorialized body.183 A time slowed down, more textured, where different subjectivites, as she provocatively notes, “breath the same air.”184 This collectivity both animated and energized the transformative experiences of the multiple individuals involved. Paula Luersen who acted as a mediator at Casa M described going to a school on the city’s outskirts as part of her mini residency for the mediator course:
When I was presented with the list of schools, I didn’t know where I was going.
We had to just go for it, which was part of the experience, to be open to whatever happens. So when I got there they said ‘look you came here to bring a notion of art from the Biennial, but look at all the art we have here.’ So it was the most amazing of things. I arrived with my notion from the Biennial with all of the concepts developed by the curators and I had to connect this with the notions they already had and really they had well formed notions of creativity, of using mosaics to reflect on their neighborhood and to think about their school, life, and reality. I went with a notion to transform a space and bring an idea of the Biennial and what I ended up discovering was that much more than transforming, I was transformed by the discovery. I went without direction and ended coming back amazed by the place […] I think not knowing where your heading sums up what the Biennial means to me. The notion of the frontier that is imaginary, the image we create of the places we don’t know. Experiencing this you gives us another notion.
179 Stephen Wright, “Disinterested Spectatorship,” Towards a Lexicon of Usership.
180 Interview with Gabriel Bartz, “Collection of Multiple Voices,” Revista MESA.
181 Fred Evans, The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) in Gogan and Vergara, “Collection of Multiple Voices,” Revista MESA.
182 Milton Santos, “O Processo Espacial: O Acontecer Solidário,” A Natureza do Espaço (São Paulo: Edusp, 2002) 165.
183 Suely Rolnik, “Geopolitics of Pimping,” trans. Brian Holmes, European Institute for Progressive Culture Policies (October, 2006) http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/rolnik/en/base_edit
184 Ibid.
Maria Aparecida Aliano Marques, coordinator of cultural policies at the Municipal Secretary of Education in Porto Alegre at the time, emphasized the critical value in these teacher/mediator encounters where assumptions and ideas about the periphery and public schools or art and biennials are challenged and reworked.185 That both teachers and mediators were authorized to invent and to create was key in supporting an evolving polyphony of voices, ideas and experimentations. Special needs teacher Márcia Warner stressed the increasing care and attention to these relationships as fundamental to the creation of affective links and social bonds, describing such practices as a form of potentializing proximity.186
Proximal encounters with art, city, and diverse publics were daily experiences for Andressa Argente one of the mediators of the City Unseen public art interventions project. One installation in particular thoroughly engaged her: the Garagem dos Livros (Book Garage) an old secondhand bookshop garage in the city center featuring Brazilian artist Elida Tessler’s installation Isto Orbita, named after an unpublished work by the writer Donaldo Schüler, Portuguese translator of Finnegan’s Wake. Tessler had created a 138 volume encyclopedia, each featuring one poem by the author with other pages left blank and positioned signs on the bookshelves coinciding with the names of authors, characters and artists mentioned in Schüler’s text. The garage constantly (re)staged an encounter between the orbiting worlds of city and literature, of transcience and narrative, and, for Andressa, between art and mediation:
What made me happiest was to go the Garagem dos Livros because Sr. João was there and I think he was the living artwork there … [He] would give feedback and each time I took someone there it was like: “Hi Dona Irena, Hi Sr João” [and they]… “How are you, so you’re back again.” So there was an affective relationship with them, we would shake hands and embrace them when we arrived. Sr João often brought beautiful things. He talked about storing. About storing things by means of memory or writing and that books are activated when we open them. When we close them they are just stored put aside but when we open them we give them life. Here he made mediation come alive, talking with us. Mediation is this. It’s an activation, like an open book.187
Art here is like a table around which multiple narratives gather. As Hoff notes the web of human relations is the mainstay of the mediator experience where “art is a tool that is there, that we use, abuse, desire, appropriate […]”188 Yet it is also a geopoetic north. Eugenio Dittborn’s airmail
185 Interview Maria Aparecida Aliano Marques, “Vídeo: Coleção das múltiplas vozes: Mediações.”
186 Márcia Warner is a special needs teacher at Escola Municipal de Ensino Especial Elyseu Paglioli. Her remarks, synthesized here, are drawn from the three interviews conducted over the course of the 8th Biennial. Interview Marcia Warner, “Collection of Multiple Voices, Revista MESA and “Vídeo: Coleção das multiplas vozes: Mediações.”
187 Interview Andressa Argente, “Collection of Multiple Voices,” Revista MESA.
188 Interview Mônica Hoff, “Vídeo: Coleção das múltiplas vozes: Mediações” and also in Jessica Gogan and Luiz Guilherme Vergara, “Multiple voices essays: Field notes 8th Mercosul Biennial Educational Program Evaluation [in progress],” in Pedagogia no campo ampliado, 392-405, 397.
paintings comprising collages of text and photocopied images sewn onto clothes-lining fabric, occasionally with painted marks, then folded and placed in special envelopes and sent through the mail, richly evoked the themes of the 8th Biennial, questioning issues of nation, border, periphery and its accompanying oppressions and restrictions. As symbols of mobility, the paintings, for Ana Stumpf Mitchell a mediator for the Eugenio Dittborn exhibition, became touchstones for her interactions as multiple forms of contact with self and others:
Essays and rehearsals of geopoetics. Multiple and several attempts of meeting with my multiplicity through the diversity of voices. Mediation that is Medi[t]ation. Action through the environment, space, frontiers […] I choose to work as a mediator because I had given up being a teacher and a geographer.
What a curious universe since I’ve never felt so much of a teacher and a geographer…189
These encounters with singularity and difference, locality and worldliness, and personal growth and collectivity, expanding the notion of what, where, how, and with whom art is constituted were the rich core of the mediator experience.
Of course, questions regarding the role of the mediator as explainer or performer-interpreter, or whether or not mediation was even needed were often raised. Indeed, Aracy Amaral, one of the Biennial’s curators, registering perhaps her discomfort with Helguera’s
“expanded pedagogy,” critiqued this focus on mediation suggesting that we may be witnessing the rise of the art educator star as we saw the curator star. 190 Mick Wilson has suggested that this desire for visibility stems from educator status anxiety, a profession traditionally belonging to the service economy characterized by serving goals of other sectors and having less autonomy over one’s work, now wishes to enter the curator/artist reputational economy where actors “produce”
themselves as special.191 As Kaija Kaitavuori notes in her introduction to It’s all Mediating this analysis raises more questions than it answers not the least of which are cultural attitudes to notions of “service.”192 Or indeed, one might add that the field of gallery education is just as reputational. Paying the rent, as philosopher and activist Rodrigo Nunes suggests, makes capitalists of us all.193 Rather what this articulation of a service/reputational frontier may reveal more potently is the desire/need for certain kinds of hierarchies to remain in place. And it is
189 Ana Stumpf Mitchell email to Vergara/Gogan, ibid., 400.
190 Closing seminar Pedagogy in an Expanded Field: 8th Mercosul Biennial. November 2011, Porto Alegre.
191 Kaija Kaitavuori cites Wilson’s talk at the Engage conference of gallery education (national organization of gallery education in the UK) in 2011 entitled “Whose Turn is it Now?” where he identified this tension. Kaija Kaitavuori,
“Introduction,” in It’s all Mediating: Outlining and Incorporating the Roles of Curating and Education in the Exhibition Context, eds. Kaija Kaitavuori, Laura Kokkonen and Nora Sternfeld (Newcastle upon Tyne/England:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) xiii.
192 Ibid., xiv.
193 Rodrigo Nunes, “Toward a Politics of Counterpimping,” Revista MESA no. 3: Publicness in Art (May, 2015) http://institutomesa.org/RevistaMesa_3/rodrigo-nunes/?lang=en
within this challenge that future growth possibilities of “expanded pedagogy” will need to position itself. Zygmunt Bauman has noted that, “at the bottom of all the crises abounding in our times lies the crisis of agencies and of the instruments of effective action.”194 For the 8th Biennial’s mediators, eventhough the lowest paid and (arguably) least recognized amidst the professionals involved, their poetic agency and collective experience were the prime motivators.
Vitally the course empowered this freedom – the emerging school, already active and gaining strength over each biennial edition, especially energized since Camnitzer’s endorsement, and even more so with Helguera’s performative touch, had ceased to be a training course to provide good service but, as Hoff notes, had become the educational project of the biennial itself.195
Like Andrade’s “joy is the decisive test” the mediators engineered their own festive border-crossings. Amidst Roca’s “zones of poetic autonomy” presenting artistic projects that structure their own autonomy and nationhood, an emerging nation was being born in the geopoetic flux of the biennial itself:196
We, the nomadic mediators, encounter in one another the necessity for transformation.197
Our choir does not complain, it claims. We don’t want flags, marks, not even a knife to say this territory is ours. We want the liberty to cross frontiers without passports or stamps.
We do not see this Biennial as an already sewn fabric, but as a loom in constant activity, and we feel the necessity to be free to move about this mutating mesh, choosing and being chosen in the trajectory of threads, its knots and twists.
Manifesto Nomadic Mediators, 8th Mercosul Biennial198
194 Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (Cambridge UK/Malden USA: Polity Press, 2013) 60.
195 She is also referring here to the increasingly experimental dimension the course assumed in the 9th Biennial as a series of mediation “laboratories.” Hoff, “Publicness at the Mercosul Biennial,” Revista MESA.
196 Roca discusses the “zones of poetic autonomy” in his catalogue essay. “Geopoetic Essays,” in Ensaios de Geopoética, 51.
197 N.T “nós” in Portuguese means “us” and “knots” this implying the we, us and knots of the network of mediators tied together in this collective nomadic endeavor.
198 [Author translation, Portuguese original:
Nós, os mediadores nômades, encontramos um no outro uma necessidade de transformação.
Nosso coro não se queixa, reivindica. Não queremos bandeiras, marcos, nem mesmo uma faca para dizer que o território é nosso. Queremos a liberdade de atravessar fronteiras sem passaporte nem carimbos.
Nós não enxergamos esta Bienal como um tecido já costurado, mas como um tear em constante atividade, e sentimos necessidade de sermos livres para
Nós não enxergamos esta Bienal como um tecido já costurado, mas como um tear em constante atividade, e sentimos necessidade de sermos livres para