Conference Agenda

This work is part of a research project that intersects the fields of design and arts education. ‘Reenactment of Materials of Arts Education’ draws on an archive of past pedagogical materials and seeks to update them. It aims to critically reinscribe such body of practices in the field of arts education, starting from the Portuguese territory of the second half of the 20th century and looking at it from the present. Design methodology is used to study the materials and propose revisions. Educational issues and the revision of materials are intersected, in terms of the critical intentions of this proposal, by a feminist perspective.

The work we now present contextualizes and initiates one of these studies of materials. Emerging in a secondary context in a peripheral European country, at the hands of two female educators, Elvira Leite and Manuela Malpique, little known at the time, Jogos Visuais (Visual Games) constitutes a unique case in the panorama of Portuguese arts education, receiving increasing media interest in recent years. The visual grammars and discourses contained in these materials will be problematized in our paper, as we believe they continue to inform conceptions of arts education in the present. How should we consider the modern expression of visual purity, solid colors, and formal minimalism in Visual Games? How can we review these and other aspects conveyed by the sociopolitical inscription of design practices and how can we use design as a critical tool to reformulate the premises that in 1974 translated into these devices? Which school of thought should we stick to? The usability-driven modernists and their “form follows function”; the attention to detail and craftmaking, of arts and crafts, por example, aiming to slow time; “the art of looking sideways” Alan Fletcher brought to us or the “fuck logic, bravo to instinct” both Björk and David Carson live by?

The paper considers the notion of archive, firstly, as an effort to record and catalog proposals, solutions, and objects and, secondly, as a possibility for questioning their subjectivation effects, while reinterpreting and updating these same proposals, solutions, and objects. This implied subjectivity production that occurs in the configuration of the archive is also at stake in its re-activation. The re-activation gesture will be supported by Andrea Fraser’s reflection on reenactment and performativity, as she states that every enactment is directed towards a body that is invested and at stake, and such enactment “(...) performs itself and in so doing structures a recognition of and reflection on the relations produced and reproduced in the activity and, above all, on the investments that orient them” (p. 127).

The feminist gaze operating in the reactivation of past pedagogical materials will call on a large spectrum of gender issues. The authors start with the work of two female educators, Leite and Malpique, and intend to appropriate their work and use it nowadays in educational contexts to develop themes like female labour, sorority, rummage and attentiveness in everyday flow

into reviewed versions. The conviction is that anti-dicriminatory themes largely surpass personal interest and are a social and political duty towards a more equal and fair society. As teachers, the authors of this investigation are also interested in revisiting and recontextualizing these archives from a perspective of resource ecology and dilution of authorship: do we need to always be closed in our classrooms, presenting proposals that have not been tested, discussed, or thought out together? Or can we make use of the experience of those who came before us and those who accompany us, look back at their proposals in a critical way, use them, and update them?

The presentation focuses on Hungary's first state art education institution. The school is the nearly 250-year-old Secondary School of Visual Arts. In the 19th century, the institution operated as a drawing school providing training for craftsmen, and at the beginning of the 20th century, workshop teaching was introduced. From then on, drawing training and design were complemented by execution, and the school offered increasingly complex art education. The lecture examines the work of the very first art classes at the school through the Schola Graphidis Art Collection, a collection of artworks used and created during the course of education that has been preserved at the school. The museum-quality art collection, preserved in the school environment and still used in teaching today, includes a collection of photographs of historical value. These student works, created in the photography department founded in 1914, continuously documented school life, the work going on in the workshops, and student exhibitions. With the help of photographs supplementing written sources, we sought answers to the following questions: 1. What international influences shaped the development of the first secondary art education in Hungary? 2. Are guild traditions and the tradition of the drawing school function still valid, and if so, to what extent? 3. How did the institution's art collection, which was constantly expanding with student works, determine the work going on at the school and how did it define the institution itself?

The paper presents a study analysing students' different visualisations of the North and the
Arctic was made in web-based collaboration during the autumn semester of 2019. The art-based approach and crossing the school and classroom borders in teaching by connecting classes from different schools aimed to broaden the students’ idea of the Arctic visual culture to broader perspectives.

The participants were upper-secondary students from the compulsory visual
art course in four regions in Finnish Lapland and one class from South Finland. The
collaboration was part of a larger research project, ArkTOP (2018–2020), developing new
forms of cooperation in teachers' education and schools in Lapland. In conclusion, I
summarise the impacts of contemporary art-based learning by analysing contemporary art
examples and making and sharing their artworks. The project encouraged the students to
learn from each other’s experiences and artworks and to understand how many sides the
Arctic is connected to their identities.

What does it mean to make a film with a school rather than about it? To Make Film, To Make School: The Bolex in the Classroom approaches this question by treating the camera as a material object whose presence, mechanics, and demands allow the conditions of school to appear. Working with the Paillard-Bolex H16 and the grammar of filmmaking itself, the project investigates how the act of filming itself can enact the conditions of school as scholè: a temporally and spatially organized situation in which things are withdrawn from immediate instrumental purpose and made available for study.

The Paillard-Bolex H16, a mechanical camera from the 1930s, requires a series of precise gestures: calculating exposure, setting focus, winding the spring, and consioucly starting and stopping the take. Each shot lasts no more than twenty-five seconds, after which the mechanism must be rewound. The ratcheting motor, clicking gears, and moving film produce a sound that can be heard throughout the classroom. Each take carries weight: the film stock is finite, mistakes cannot be erased, and the result remains unknown until development. This material presence affects how everyone in the room acts, waits, and observes, and makes the act of filming something tangible and collective.

The project unfolds as a concrete film production in which the filmmaker, supported by a small crew, opens a film atelier within a primary school. Children participate as actors, not playing a role, but themselves. Yet not in the sense of self-representation, but as pupils of the school whose actions form the material and temporal fabric of the film.

Drawing on historical links between cinema and educational practices, the work resists contemporary instrumental approaches in which film is primarily used to communicate, instruct, or enable self-expression. In this context, the Bolex mediates between classroom and filmic space: it is both an object to be studied and a device that generates a filmic environment emerging from the gestures, materials, and routines of the school. To Make Film, To Make School does not document the classroom or produce self-representation. Instead, it enacts the school as a space of scholè, where filming itself makes the school tangible and perceptible, and where meaning arises in the process of filming rather than in the final images.