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.
Are educational services pacifying the internal contradictions raised by the widening gap that exists between the institutional discourse of museums and their audience’s reality? In a time of false consensuses are there strategies of audience empowerment? How can we claim instability and uncertainty as a critical, reflective and gathering position?
Head of Education at the Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos – Culturgest since 2005. She studied Contemporary Art with Margarida Acciaiuoli and Raquel Henriques da Silva, among others, at Universidade Nova de Lisboa – Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Has additional training in the areas of expression, pedagogy and psychology at Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada. She has organised conferences in the area of mediation, programming for children, education and audiences in museums and art centres, such as Discourses and dialects and Team, Ethic and Error, both under the major theme In the name of the arts or in the name of the audiences? (Culturgest 2010, 2011), Mediation, Emancipation and Participation: In the name of the arts or in the name of the audiences? (Gulbenkian, 2012), Temporary Convictions: In the name of the arts or in the name of the audiences? (Serralves, 2013), Risks and Opportunities for Visual Arts Education in Europe (INSEA, APECV, Culturgest, 2015), After the Amazement (Centro Cultural de Belém – Fábrica das Artes, 2016).
Head of Education - Arts at the Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal. For more than fifteen years she worked at the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado (MAB / FAAP) in São Paulo, where she was responsible for the implementation of the Educational Sector of this Museum. During this period, she trained and coordinated the educators’ teams, developed training programmes for public and private school teachers, and also developed partnerships between the museum’s education sector programmes with various institutions such as Committee for Education and Cultural Action - International Council of Museums /Brazil (CECA-ICOM / BR), Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and Instituto Moreira Salles in the development of joint projects, seminars and conferences. At Serralves she coordinates educational projects for schools, families and adults, as well as social and intellectual inclusion projects. In 2016 she developed at the Museu de Serralves the international conference The Museums and Their Publics with speakers from the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) - United Kingdom; Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia (MAAT) - Portugal; Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) - Brazil; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) - USA and Van Abbemuseum - Netherlands.