This presentation seeks to open a discussion on current museum education practices which focuses on questioning relational processes and public engagement, and proposes an exploration of museum education as a space for critical possibilities that challenge and transform the monolithic system that, to some extent, the museum traditionally is.

Making use of the questioning device is an important ingredient of the mediation labour. Having that in mind, Cocktail of Questions is a performing strategy designed to trace – in a non-hierarchical manner – some of the issues that are presented to the educational and relational work in museums and cultural institutions. It was built as a collaborative process between Serralves and Culturgest and it started by chance. Both Denise Pollini and Raquel Ribeiro dos Santos, Head of Education in two different Learning Departments, had coincidently the initiative of collecting instigating questions on the different relations that we may have with the work of art. The result is an immense collection of fascinating questions that were written and spoken in the last years in several countries.

A conversation about the definition and development of the educational project Núcleo de Arte da Oliva an emergent art centre located in the small industrial city of São João da Madeira. Taking advantage of our young age we’re going through a process of rethinking the identity and territory of action of the project in which education is paramount. The presence of a multifocal thinking leads us to places of daily research in an experimental field where the curatorial and the educational walk together. We want to share and discuss this (de)balanced platform of action where artists, curators, educators, audiences, politicians and others are constantly crossing boundaries.

While museums increasingly adopt the language of social justice and go so far as to claim they are adopting a rights-based approach for social change, the fact is that change is something with which not all museums are comfortable. Lynch argues that such claims in support of social change must be interrogated for the extent to which museums enable those whose lives are affected the most by inequality, prejudice and social injustice, to articulate their priorities – and to make change happen.

Gallery education sits at a crossroads, at once an apparatus upholding the colonial and affirmative aspects of museum culture (Mörsch, 2009), an agent in the whirring of an increasingly dislocated set of trendy and consumable political themes (Holmes, 2004), and a site for ‘allyship’ and other kinds of radical and socially transformative work.

This programme offers a set of pedestrian routes along the Corgo River, devised and led by Landscape Architect Carla Cabral. This route aims to foster an experience of the landscape that prompts a wider awareness of every sense summoned by a specific time and place.

This work aims to contribute to complexify the discussion about art education practices in close relation to landscape and arts (performing arts, in particular). Both landscape and participants are challenged with resort to theatre, dance, video, animation, writing and biology, geography, anthropology and literature, landscape design and cinema, engineering and drawing, photography and sound design.

In times of social, economic and political unrest, collaboration emerges as a driving model for art institutions. Drawing on a series of case studies from the Whitechapel’s past and recent history, I will discuss the intersections between collaborative art practices and the politics of institutional programming, within and beyond the space of the Gallery. Can collaboration and performativity foster new communities and forms of collectivity? Can artists’ propositions act as a productive counter-model to an accelerated global context? How are artists enabling us to re-imagine the art institution and its social relevance?

‘All these things…’, a seven year old asks the educator in an ethnographic collection display, ‘did you make them yourself?’ Besides saying ‘no’, what can the educator reply? Each possible answer, what it highlights, what it omits, implies taking a position regarding key topics of postcolonial museum critique: histories of objects brought to Europe in a colonial context, issues of ownership, of representation and power of definition in narrations of culture and difference.