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Abstract
The aim of this article is to examine some of the difficulties, paradoxes, and challenges involved with developing community-based collaborative artistic and pedagogical practices, both in museums and galleries and within the context of the so-called educational turn. The author, who is a scholar and educator at the Es Baluard museum (Spain), focuses on one concrete case in which she has been involved, together with renowned artists, in collaborating with a group of sex workers. This article presents the findings of this case study, which was conducted from a phenomenological approach, in order to reflect on the complexities and potentialities that arise when running programs of such kind. Going beyond the rhetoric of success in which practices are usually represented, it gives the reader important keys towards developing horizontal relationships between cultural institutions and the communities they are situated in. The analysis is undertaken using the framework of critical mediation and the concept of “contradicting oneself”, as stated by theorist and educationalist Carmen Mörsch, wherein the mediator’s positionality is a key aspect.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Further into the article, the term “social inclusion” will be discussed.
2 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s chapter “Plimoth Plantation” (Citation1998) examines how heritage sites can be performative places to enter a completely reconstructed world, allowing the visitor to live and explore history without necessarily realizing to what extent such reconstruction is or is not accurate. She shows how many museums and historical sites have managed to reach a wider public and spread their message by taking an edutainment role, using technological resources such as apps, augmented reality and other high-tech features, for instance, to engage the visitor.
3 These British governmental policies to tackle social exclusion have also been problematized by authors such as Emily Pringle (Citation2006) and Janna Graham (Citation2010), who cast doubt on this rhetoric about culture as a guarantor of social justice, as they fear it might be used to displace the responsibility of social justice from the government onto the cultural field. Moreover, Carmen Mörsch (Citation2003) and Sara Carrington (Citation2004) state that within this new model, cultural agents might feel they are excessively made the accomplices of political interests.
4 http://www.esbaluard.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Estatutos-Fundacio%CC%81-Es-Baluard.pdf
5 Her contract terminated in March 2019 and the museum has a new director now.
6 http://www.esbaluard.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/plan-estrategico-2018.pdf
7 To read more about the education department’s aims, visit: https://www.esbaluard.org/en/education-and-formation/educacion/
8 Throughout our careers as museum mediators, we have developed a variety of ongoing programs to work with schools, the elderly, and people facing mental health issues. Moreover, within this framework of pedagogical projects with a curatorial or public aspect, we have carried out several one-off projects with other communities such as HIV-positive people, immigrants, and museum neighbors.
9 Mörsch explains (Citation2015b) that the affirmative function of education departments of museums and galleries consists of communicating the museum as it is actually understood by its mainstream visitors: Its goal is to address art visitors who are already interested in art and who identify themselves as art connoisseurs. On the other hand, the reproductive function focuses on providing access to culture to those who are not typical museum audiences by providing a diversity of tools and resources that facilitate them to overcome any sort of barrier (intellectual, physical, social, cultural). In both cases, hegemonic art history discourses are reinforced.
10 As stated by Soto-Lombana et al. (Citation2013), Mörsch understands that deconstructive and transformative discourses are strongly linked to critical museology and are intimately interconnected. Whereas deconstructive discourses aim to critically examine jointly with the public both art discourses and the museum, as well as the educational processes taking place within the museum, transformative discourses are centered on going beyond analysis and adopt a propositional stance: Education departments are understood as agents for social change.
11 It is important that cultural institutions’ interest in tackling social exclusion is also related to the need to justify themselves through developing this new social role they can embrace. In such a way, the criticism they are receiving these days, when the economic crisis has led to a revision of public expenditures and to a rescaling of the value of money, can be quelled.
12 At first it was our belief that prostitution is another form of gender violence and implies a power relationship of domination that violates human rights and that it therefore needs to be suppressed. However, feminists activists such as Grisélidis Réal and Beatriz Preciado made us revise our perspective. The latter states that, in recent years, a new feminism has arisen which aims to transcend traditional feminist fights for achieving legal equality for white, Western, heterosexual and middle-class women (Preciado, Citation2007). This new wave serves women traditionally left aside and fights the causes that produce class, race and gender differences. From the eighties onwards, what has come to be called the critical awakening of the “proletariat of feminism” has flourished, and its subjects are “whores”, lesbians, transgender people, non-white women, Muslims, and other marginalized identity groups. The change of the subjects of feminism correlates to a change of feminist perspectives and discourses. Ellen Willis, one of the pioneers of feminist rock music criticism in the United States, was the first to criticize the complicity of white middle-class abolitionist feminism with the patriarchal structures that repress and control women’s bodies. This new transcultural, punk, and post-porn feminism argues that the best protection against gender violence is not the prohibition of prostitution but the seizing of economic and political power by women and by migrant minorities. The goal of these feminists would not only be to liberate women or achieve their legal equality, but also to dismantle the political devices that produce differences in class, race, gender and sexuality, thus making feminism an artistic and political platform for women.
13 Here it is important to clarify that we actively worked to avoid an understanding of identity in generic terms or fall into essentialist notions of what it means to be a “woman” or “immigrant”. As stated by Ochy Curiel (Citation2002), universalist positions regarding identity categories have been widely questioned for being reductionist and exclusionary, as well as for their political inefficiency. Curiel argues that in order to tackle social inequalities it is not enough to deconstruct ideological values assigned to particular social groups; also needed are a broad reflection on and change of the structural and economic issues that subjugate these groups. Gender, race, social class, etc., should not be considered in isolation from each other.
14 Anzaldúa, G. (Citation2004). Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan [Rebellion movements and cultures that betray]. In B. Hooks, A. Brah, C. Sandoval, & G. Anzaldúa (Eds.) Otras inapropiables. Feminismos desde las fronteras [Inappropriable Others: Feminisms from the Frontiers]. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Mapas.
15 Throughout the sessions, a collective process took place, and empathy and confidence grew among the participants, including leaders. This helped to create a good climate and working atmosphere that made things smoother and led participants to lose their fear of talking about prostitution.
16 However, they maintained that videos had to be in Spanish so that their message would reach people in the local context.
17 https://vimeo.com/album/3374879
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Irene Amengual-Quevedo
Irene Amengual-Quevedo Since 2005, the author has worked at the education department of Es Baluard Museum, Mallorca, Spain. In 2012 she received her doctorate (Summa Cum Laude) in Art Education from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Barcelona. In 2008 she was awarded “La Caixa” Foundation Fellowship to undertake postgraduate studies abroad, where she earned a MA in Museums and Galleries in Education from the University of London in 2010. In London she undertook a work placement at the Whitechapel Gallery. Author of the book A ras del suelo. La educación en museos como encrucijada de discursos, pedagogías, experiencias compartidas y mucho más [At Ground Level. Gallery Education as a Crossroads of Discourses, Pedagogies, Shared Experiences and Much More] (TREA, 2015). She has also published in several specialized journals at a national and international level.