Cerezales del Condado and A Coruña,
Since he undertook his artistic career almost twenty years ago, one of the most interesting branches of the work of Colombian Nicolás Paris has been pedagogy. He began to develop educational projects, based on the implementation of temporary study groups, in 2000, after training in architecture. He did it in a school in the Vereda Brisas de Lozada, and has not stopped carrying them since then, in different artistic centers but also in the purely educational, as in the schools of La Macarena (goal), where he tried to instill in the children that the drawing could be for them a tool to express themselves, to communicate their ideas and experiences, not just a technique of representation. The experience worked: the little ones used basic structures such as the curved line, the line, the circle and the point to understand abstract ideas, a procedure that also demonstrated to be useful in grammar, mathematics or music.
Teaching has been for Paris a chance, in turn, of learning; In addition, the artist understands that the teacher has some architect, because he articulates environments for the exchange of knowledge and collaboration, and that the meeting itself is a drawing that incorporates temporal dimensions. Among the challenges of your proposals, to create the creation of who contemplates the desire to widen and sharpen your gaze, to learn to see above all the smallest.
In the summer of 2022, Paris visited the Antonino and Cinia de Cerezales del Condado (León) Foundation and its meeting with the team of that institution gave rise to a series of conversations about the construction of enriching experiences from collective learning and cooperation, basic notions in the day -to -day life of this center. The exchanges of ideas between them were maintained when the artist returned to Bogotá, in the form of texts and reading suggestions, until these dialogues ended up germinating in a free study group to which those responsible for the María José Jove Jove Foundation Center, in A Coruña.
Finally, they would put calendar to their work sessions (Thursdays) and also a name to the initiative: Third teacher. The origin of its debates is a question as concrete as broad: how learning occurs; The classrooms would be the conceptual environment in which to reimagine the codes of knowledge transmission without respect that the exhibition halls or certain disciplines can raise. This proposal raises such learning as a Continuuma process consisting of establishing relations between times and places and in collective participation.
That conversation to so many hands (to so many minds) remains open, has already printed some turns in the activities offered by these spaces and new agents have joined it. In sessions linked to Third teacher They have participated, intentionally, people of diverse ages, professionals and general public; And both forests and crops, trades workshops and the same exhibition rooms have been taken as material environments. In their light, four basic research concepts have been extracted: balance, symmetry, bifurcation and impermanence.
Specifically, in the Cerezales Foundation, the contributions of this collective process have been manifested in the start of a pedagogical strategy that will have to take its professionals to rethink its operation from the attention to the environment where that institution is, in a broad sense: physical, symbolic, relational and sensitive. That environment has always played a fundamental role in different learning processes; Now you get to understand how Third Masters to water, mud, seeds, bacteria, worms, yeast and, also, to the eyes or game. And to the connections between them; It is intended that it be throughout the stations.
As for the María José Jove Foundation Center, a space has been built at its coruñesa, which alludes in its forms to the Millo Corvo (Corn crow of Galician tradition), in which blocks that refer to the grains of a mabler give rise to a staggered stand. This structure houses part of its educational program, which will make greater emphasis on impulse of continuous learning processes. It is also projected there, a video of Nicolás Paris centered on Earth and its vital cycles, along with records and results of some of the actions fruit of Third teacher.
The next activities of one center and another can consult them here:
Cerezales Foundation: https://fundacionzaslesantoninoycinia.org/programacion/
María José Jove Foundation: https://centrodarte.fmjj.org/
