The project Collection of Multiple Voices was developed in response to an invitation from Pablo Helguera, Pedagogic Curator, and Monica Hoff, General Coordinator of the pedagogic project of the 8th Mercosul Biennial, Essays in Geopoetics, to evaluate the expanded field of pedagogy planned for this biennial. As the main curatorial premise of the Biennial aimed to break established formats by expanding in both time and space its artistic, curatorial and pedagogic reach, we similarly strove to find new forms of evaluation that might parallel the organic and symbolic practices being adopted in this emerging curatorial “expanded field” of pedagogy.
To do this, we opted to break positivist models of evaluation mostly based on notions of critical distance, objective processes and parameters, and quantitative impact. Via what we called an “invitation to reflection and a collection of voices,” we inversely adopted proximity as a basis for a research-evaluative-intervention. Approximately forty people were interviewed including artists, curators, mediators, cultural producers, community participants and public school teachers. Interviews were conducted at three different moments (beginning, middle, end) over the six-month duration of the Biennial. The process acted as a kind of temperature taking of motivation and critical reflection for each interviewee, accompanying their engagement with the pedagogic project. Our camera rather proposed to listen to the various voices involved in the pedagogic process from the inside, much more than look at an exhibition or program from the outside. Results of the project included: an evaluation report Um relatório geopoético: reflexões sobre o campo expandido do projeto pedagógico da 8ª Bienal do Mercosul (A geopoetic report: reflections on the expanded field of the pedagogic project of the 8th Biennial – Portuguese only) and five different videos, each archiving a collection of voices reflecting on a different aspect of the Biennial’s pedagogic project or related activities.
A short essay and 15-minute video drawing from this material is published in the 1st issue of MESA magazine.
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Film & Editing
Camera: André Oliveira
Editing: Leandro Almeida
Presenter
8th Mercosul Biennial
Coordination
Instituto MESA
Jessica Gogan & Luiz Guilherme Vergara
Collaboration
Renata Montechiare
