Staff Training Porto
The Body that Leaves a Trace
This staff training event was organised by University of Porto, attended by the working group members as well as additional staff from Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and Iceland University of the Arts.
Workshops
The staff training included the drawing workshop The Body that Leaves a Trace facilitated by the working group members Samual Silva and Fernando José Pereira. With the use of instructions present in the space when the participants entered, the participants experienced drawing as a tool of several dimensions of a relationship: as a radical intimate act, as a vehicle for communication, and as a political statement. In this sense it presents an itinerary composed by three moments:
_me and myself
_me and you
_we and society
Drawing, as one of the most primitive gestures of expression, will always be an event for self-discovery and a manifestation of the presence of our body in a common space. This movement from the individual to the collective, from intimate thinking to group discussion, was one of the main objectives of this workshop. Any project involving interdisciplinarity, relational and collaborative work in the social field will inevitably have to go through similar two dimensions. In the opinion of the workshop leaders, there is no social thinking and civic participation without a solid construction of individual subjectivity. This workshop introduced possibilities of artistic experimentation in educational environments (even if non-formal): from the initial previous organizer inspired by Lygia Clark's work to the careful design of a spatial environment, through the actions guided by instructions that call on the conceptual practices of the 1970s. There are several examples of the multiple possibilities of using creative tools inspired by contemporary art.
The staff training event also included the following lectures:
Fernando José Pereira: Contemporary Art Practices and the lack of memory. Not as pathology but as a social disease.
Susana Lourenço Marques: On Elvira Leite's Pedagogy of the streets — images of method.
The Arts in Social Settings in Porto
The SWAIP staff visited to CIJ - Centro de iniciativa Jovem (Youth Initiative Centre). The idea of visiting the CIJ was twofold:
To provide the SWAIP staff with the possibility of having close contact with the social ground of Porto, in particular with a unique project in a neighbourhood with considerable social problems, run by young residents.
In the programme that is being developed there, they incorporate with multiple artistic expressions, from dance to music, visual arts and street art, to empower young people who are at risk in the neighbourhood.
At the end of the staff training the SWAIP staff met with Denise Polini, Head of Education at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. The aim was to understand the work of one of the main Portuguese museum institutions within the social context through their projects developed by the Educational Department. This proved to be an informative presentation about social well-being and the work of a contemporary museum. A project in a prison was presented and challenges of a potential exhibition of prisoners was discussed. Above all, it was important to understand the difficulties, limits, intelligibility, dangers and weaknesses of the institutional actions in this field. Also noted was how much remains to be done in this area in Portugal, particularly at the institutional level.
