A museum the place you possibly can sing and run by means of the corridors | Art and Action | EUROtoday

In a museum you do not run, you do not shout, you do not sing and, in fact, you do not arrange a dressing up parade or go tenting. When confronted with a baroque panorama or portrait, you do not invent what occurred within the portray or think about who the bearded man within the portray may have been: what would he be excited about whereas he was being portrayed, what can be his favourite meals? Those issues aren’t finished, are they?

Who says it?

“I defend another way of entering museums,” explains Susana Gómez, Strategy Director of the Banco Santander Foundation. “If we bore children, if we expel childhood from the corridors of an exhibition hall, how are we going to generate a young audience?”

The flawed questions

The paradigm, Gómez says, has luckily modified within the final decade and a half. Today’s museums give as a lot significance to the exhibition house as to their pedagogical initiatives, an evolution of which Gómez herself and the Banco Santander Foundation have been protagonists, virtually pioneers. It all begins, he says, by asking your self the suitable questions, when standing in entrance of a murals: “We don’t want children repeating what they might have learned by reading Wikipedia. We want to offer them an experience, make them feel that the museum also belongs to them.” Gómez particularly emphasizes this level: contain them, invite them to really feel and touch upon what it evokes in them, to mirror out loud with out complexes; to interrupt the barrier that leaves them out.

They are the authors of the questions that encourage younger audiences to leap over the fence that retains them away from artwork: Estefanía Santiago (left) and Carlos Almela, from Hablar en Arte, the affiliation that the Banco Santander Foundation has commissioned for some years these cultural mediation actions. They often work with college students from faculties in weak environments or with establishments devoted to the care of individuals with bodily or mental disabilities.

—Before going across the room, I needed to ask you just a few questions. Imagine: How many pigments can there be in all these work? How many individuals can have fallen in love on this room? […] Among the olive bushes and holm oaks exterior, 20 species of birds reside. Would you dare to mimic their songs for the following guests?
Carlos Almela and Estefanía Santiago get them to beat their preliminary shyness, they document them chirping and whistling, and the group of scholars from the Ciudad de los Muchachos college in Madrid and the 2 lecturers who accompany them begin the exercise with enthusiasm.

They have simply paraded in costume – “Didn’t Beyoncé do it at the Louvre? Come on, everyone cheer up!” – and the youngsters are actually searching for which work evoke probably the most in them, to reply these applicable questions that the individuals from Speak in Art:
-This? Isn’t it very darkish?
—But what do you see right here?
—I do not know, loneliness, an extended unhappiness.
—Oh, lady! How intense you’re.
This is how two of the scholars, youngsters of their ultimate years of ESO, speak in entrance of an summary work by José Manuel Broto from 1989. Are they flawed in what they observe?

Then, every group stands earlier than the chosen work and tells the remainder. And right here tales of all types emerge: some gracefully assemble probably the most implausible plot of a Hollywood catastrophe movie, others query themselves, leaving listeners astonished: “In a still life, why are only deer or deers food? chickens and not dogs or cats?” Indeed, it’s a cultural attribute. Art speaks about us, and we are able to dialogue with it.
Once the tip of the exercise has been declared, everybody runs to the exit, completely satisfied as a result of they’ve escaped the classroom for a few hours, as a result of for the primary time they haven’t been scolded for talking in a museum…

Two many years in the past, inventive sponsorships principally consisted of paying for the manufacturing of an exhibition after which displaying, very giant, the payer’s brand subsequent to the vinyl with the artist’s identify. This is how Gómez, who joined the Santander Foundation as an intern and who, after just a few years devoted to technological innovation, ended up resulting in the trail that appeared most favorable for her, remembers it with a frown. Gómez can also be coordinator of the grasp’s diploma in Cultural Management. from the Carlos III University of Madrid—, the intersection between artwork and pedagogy. “We wanted to leave a mark, more transcendent projects. And so we gradually proposed them to the institutions with which Banco Santander had an agreement.” This is how they arrived with that philosophy so nicely obtained within the establishments themselves to locations such because the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid or the MACBA in Barcelona. And, on this second decade of the twenty first century, all of the entities that collaborated or obtained funding from Fundación Santander sooner or later had been incorporating this imaginative and prescient, which is already a actuality for almost all.

Gómez remembers and might cite dozens of initiatives conceived on this method, an limitless string, however he stops at one which, in his opinion, exemplifies the best they championed. Yeast, it was referred to as. For two months, the chosen artists lived with college students from college school rooms to current the results of their plastic analysis to the viewer on the finish of that interval. And, to attain this, they managed to mobilize public faculties and municipal areas in Madrid equivalent to Matadero or CentroCentro. “It was a before and after. We always remember the professor who, to a certain extent, changed our lives. Can you imagine the impact of an activity like this? Thanks to the existence of the initiative, many boys and girls from vulnerable contexts had the opportunity to get closer to art and culture.”

Art speaks to all of us, if we all know find out how to pay attention

Costa Badía, artist, performer, curator and cultural mediator, introduces herself to the group of members, all younger individuals with cerebral palsy from the Bobath Foundation, and tells them what they’re about to see projected: the documentary Crip Campa few revolutionary camp within the seventies that opened the way in which to equality for individuals with disabilities within the United States. Badía has been combating towards these limits or impossibilities for years, working commonly with museums just like the Reina Sofía and has even promoted a gallery in line that promotes the work of artists with disabilities: Tullida Gallery, he determined to name it.

The plan is sort of an identical to the one which the schoolchildren developed a few days earlier than: stand in entrance of the chosen portray and ask themselves the specified questions, as quickly as they’ve completed watching the documentary. Caregivers and members stroll by means of the hallways: “Is this painting where you would like to see a sunset?”, “Is this where you would like to come and give you a kiss?”…

The 1,200 sq. meters of room are there for themselves, a particularity that makes this Banco Santander house in Boadilla del Monte particular. Gómez says that they’re very fortunate, as a result of they might not have the ability to do what they do if on the finish of the yr somebody quantified the variety of guests or measured the success of those applications in figures. “No one demands them because here we all know that there would be no way to do this with 6,000 or 10,000 students a year. That we manage to bring 400 people in these conditions means truly improving 400 lives without opportunities. We have had to learn to tell it, of course; what do we say? That art serves to put people we tend to push to the margins back into the center of society”.

All the teams have already instructed what work they’ve chosen and why, they’ve already been in a position to reveal their confessions and desires to everybody. And, lastly, Carlos Almela asks you one last item.

—Do you see this tent that now we have arrange on this sculpture by Anish Kapoor? Like within the camp within the documentary. I would like every one to come back up and depart right here a particular object for them, that they might wish to take to that camp it doesn’t matter what.

One by one they strategy, go with the chair between the granite halves of the Indian artist’s sculpture and place their objects: little by little they pile up an Atleti shirt, a cameo, one other pendant, a flashlight, photographs of a pet…