Education activities

Propelled jointly from Museo Situado and the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Area, in collaboration with intercultural mediators Hanan Dalouh Amghar and Marlene Gildemeister, The School of Situated Mediation is a project which sets out to reflect upon the notion of “the situated” applied to cultural mediation and research into alternative practices of mediation which are mindful of the specific local context of the Museo: the Lavapiés neighbourhood.

This activity is framed within the artistic research project Vulnerable Cosmologies, which, from feminist positions and care, seeks to connect realities traditionally separated by the socio-health system such as physical and intellectual disability and neurodiversity.

Inside the framework of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, put in place by the United Nations General Assembly, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Area organises a forum to discuss functional diversity and to problematize accessibility as a mechanism of inclusion.   

Museum by Hand offers anybody with impaired vision the possibility of participating in various tactile visits giving access to a series of original sculptures from the Museum’s Collection, offering a perspective on the revolution in the traditional concept of sculpture that took place throughout the 20^th century. The works and tours offered are renewed periodically as the Collection is redistributed.

Guernica, Testimony of an Epoch is a descriptive visit aimed at blind or partially sighted people and their companions, the object of which is to create easier access to works which, while being of major importance in the Collection, are not suitable for tactile exploration due to the technical characteristics of the pieces.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Department organises a conference to debate the contemporary reshaping of the relations between education and art, featuring participation from Mónica Romero and Oriol Fontdevila. In open dialogue with the speakers, we will discuss the friction and hybridisation between the identity of the artist, educator and curator at a time when the rise in notions of “education shift” and “mediation”has problematically displaced the relationships between these roles.

If it was a Movement… is an ongoing project which, for the fifth consecutive year, is directed at Special Education Schools in order to present an intuitive and essentially sensorial approach to the works of art. A dancer and an instrumentalist lead a journey around various rooms and works in the Museum, during which music and dance are the languages used to experience the form and the content inherent in each work, looking into ways of communicating other than the verbal.

As part of the <18 programme, the Museum Reina Sofia offers its younger public an exhibition room and workshop experience, within the framework of the Biographical Forms. Construction and Individual Mythology exhibition, which runs from November 27, 2013 to March 31, 2014. The various possible connections between art, life, creation and narrative are dealt with through the young people’s own experiences and input, bearing in mind the range of possibilities explored by the artists to communicate stories of life through plastic representation.

As part of the Cinema On Course initiative (a programme run by the association A Bao A Qu), this academic year we will be offering a school group the chance to work on an educational project based around cinematic creation. Over the course of several working sessions, all of which follow a highly practical methodology, participants work collectively on the processes of documentation, scripting, directing, planning, filming and editing, leading to the production of a documentary short.

The starting point for this activity is the exhibition Biographical Forms (November 26, 2013 to March 31, 2014). The exhibition’s focus is the various elements concurrent in any biographical construct or story, such as childhood and relatives, places and spaces one has lived in, travel, recollections and memory, expectations and the various relationships one is involved in over a lifetime. After a visit looking at the way that these elements are dealt with in selected works, the pupils will have the chance to develop their own creative processes based around biography and autobiography.

During the academic year of 2013-14 we are starting up a new activity aimed at upper Primary Education. This new project incorporates a number of elements taken from drama such as gesture, body language, staging and the expressive potential of lighting, in order to use them to achieve educational objectives. This means that the theatrical becomes a method through which the pupils can get involved in the works and create new experiences based on them.

The Museum has been running its If it was a Movement activity for the past four academic years. This is an activity that offers an intuitive and essentially sensorial approach to the Collection’s works. A dancer and an instrumentalist lead a journey around various rooms and works in the Museum, during which music and dance are the languages used to experience the form and the content inherent in each work. This is an approach to art through art itself, searching for ways of communicating other than the verbal.

Echoes is an experience based around active listening and sound production as ways of approaching the Museum’s contents. It is an activity that enables the exploration of the sounds implicit in certain works, as well as establishing connections between the world of sound and that of specific avant-garde movements such as Abstraction. Echoes is an attempt to find new methods and routes of art appreciation.