Challenges of educational mediation as a dialogue of knowledge— Alejandro Cevallos
Arts education and museums were institutions –acting as tools of colonialism– that played an important role imposing ideas in the fields of aesthetics, languages and forms of knowledge overriding local indigenous knowledge.
An obvious example in our context (Andean region of South America) is the distinction between arts and crafts, which was not only a technical, technological or aesthetic consideration to classify material culture, it was mainly and continues to be a policy that underestimates and, in some cases, tries to avoid the circulation of "symbolic creative practices," and forms of local knowledge related to the reproduction of the community life.
But what does this have to do with us educational mediators of art today? Perhaps one of the greatest aspirations of an educational mediation that is positioned as a critical practice is to decolonize some of its fundamental principles. Although it might seem like a very ambitious task, some steps in that direction test our "capacity to listen" to communities with different ways of producing meaning that escape our budgets and rationality, opening the possibility to a "dialogue of knowledge".
In 2011, we started working on critical mediation processes between museums and San Roque, a popular market in the historic center of Quito. Among speeches of heritage, tourism, real estate speculation and the control-expulsion of popular sectors. Our work in this context has gone through different moments: an impulse of ‘anti-gentrification activism’, later we come to a reflection on ‘institutional change’.
In 2016, our work changed rhythm, according to conversations with educators from one of the schools in San Roque, we decided to open an embroidery workshop with working women in the market. This space allowed us to recognize the territory from another perspective, recognize our common differences, recovered the work with our hands, as a place for reflection. Of course, it also caused other contradictions.
In IMMER # 2 we propose a workshop to review some materials, stories and questions that have arisen while we were embroidering in the popular market of San Roque in Quito. This will be the starting point for a conversation through the distance of our contexts about senses, possibilities, and limits of thinking our practices as a dialogue of knowledge.