Queer bodies and spaces

At Es Baluard Museu we understand contemporary artistic practices as an interdisciplinary and transversal means to reflect on the world around us, fostering a critical spirit. In the field of formal education, and with the aim of creating a community of teachers who develop their long-term work based on contemporary art, we collaborate with the CEP of Palma Jaume Cañellas Mut, in order to consolidate permanent training for teachers.

One of the formative lines that we have been promoting intensively in recent years is to address the question of gender from an interdisciplinary approach, contemporary artistic practices and the body. Thus, since the 2016-2017 academic year, we have been carrying out the program “Body and gender: transversal projects from contemporary art”.

This training program has been interrupted this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the consequent impossibility of working face-to-face in the classrooms. At Es Baluard Museu we are convinced, however, of the need to continue boosting teacher training around gender issues, finding new ways that make training activity possible in the midst of the current situation.

For this reason, the 2020-2021 academic year we launch “Queer bodies and spaces: approaches from contemporary art and pedagogy”. An online course whose main goal is to create a space for reflection and debate around gender issues in formal education, from the perspective of contemporary artistic practices and thought. The training will also enable to generate a conceptual map based on the diverse issues and questions that emerge from the gender matter, in order to launch, the next academic year 2021-2022, a stable investigative research group that works long-term and in an open and procedural way.

The training will consist of 4 sessions, which will be conducted by recognized experts on the subject, and will also imply that participating teachers design a classroom activity around the issues under discussion.

Programme

18 March 2021, 17.30h – 19.30h
Lucas Platero

Our educational systems tend to concernedly forget or stereotype the gypsy population, people with functional diversity, racialized, sexually diverse, migrant, or girls and women, to name just a few minority people. They are critical of the status quo and the transmission of knowledge of a part of society that we could call hegemonic (Freire, 1970). For this reason, pedagogies arise that use contestation and denunciation of social norms that generate discrimination and imply using a utopia, of that which does not yet exist or has arrived (Freire, 2001, Muñoz, 2009).

Some of these approaches have been named as queer, feminist, transgressive, radical, transfeminist, invisible, emancipatory, free, democratic, participatory, critical, embodied, dissident, subversive, transformative, of social justice, trans*, of indignation, mestizo, democratic, deranged; bastard, scavenger, or of disappointment methodologies… They incorporate the knowledge of social movements and social sciences that address feminist criticism, but also from anti-racism, critical theories with functional diversity and sexuality, decolonial and social justice. They have in common questioning that the most common knowledge and practices are neutral and objective, that they are ahistorical or universal. They are an invitation to practical application, not only do they offer a relevant theoretical framework or propose disruptive concepts, but they are possible in today’s educational practice.

25 March 2021, 17.30h – 19.30h
Ricard Huerta

Transeducar [Transeducating] through Museari. Contemporary art seen through a LGBT lens, for a more inclusive secondary education. Most secondary school teachers would like to incorporate diversity issues into the classroom, but they encounter little curricular attention given to the subject, or they find it difficult to access materials and resources. Through the Museari online museum we will approach the work of current artists who defend human rights and sexual diversity from different perspectives, thus moving towards a necessary normalization process.

15 April 2021, 17.30h – 19.30h
val flores

val flores will share with the group her practice as a writer, activist, performer and teacher who works with primary schools in Neuquén (Argentina), discussing, from the scope of feminism, sexual dissidence and queer theory, how educational practice becomes a political and epistemic experience of (un)doing sexualities, corporalities, genres and desires.

6 May 2021, 17.30h – 19.30h
val flores

Closing session to share and discuss the classroom activity proposals of the participating teachers. Moreover, lines of investigation to be developed in the future, through the research group of teachers that will be conformed the next academic year 2021-2022, will be defined.

Biography of the experts participating in the course
Call for applications and registration (Until March 1)