The project "The Experimental Legacy of Hélio Oiticica for Education" aims to develop an in-depth study of the artist’s work and its potential as a corpus of experimental pedagogies. Embracing different modalities and potentialities of molecular learning, this initiative will engage artists, educators and diverse researchers in a series of site-specific projects embedded in a variety of contexts – school, community, public square, study groups etc. In collaboration with the Projeto Hélio Oiticica, this exploration of experimental pedagogy will be anchored in a deep exploration of Oiticica’s work and writings, the ethical and esthetic legacy of post neoconcrete art practices, and, in particular, via a critical re-reading and re-enactment of a little known course called “Experimentaction” that the artist developed and taught at the 92nd St Y while living in New York in 1972/73. This re-reading is not actualized, as art historian Irene Small’s recent critique on the artist advocates, “by simulating its provocations but by developing a paradigm of methodological elaboration from procedures embedded within the work.”1 Here each re-reading and molecular learning project will explore “the work's capacity to act as an epistemological device, that is as a material, embodied model of emergent knowledge.”2
The first part of this initiative was held in June 2016 in collaboration with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. The course "Experimentaction: Hélio Oiticica, Contemporary Art and Education" was taught by Jessica Gogan and offered as a three week intensive immersion in Oiticica’s ideas and proposals as outlined in the Experimentaction “curriculum.” The course featured practical workshops, experimental actions in the city, special laboratories with the performance artist Robin Deacon and the choreographer Peter Carpenter, readings of the artist’s texts, and a final installation/performance/happening. The course also featured the participation of artist and School of the Art Institute exhibitions director, Trevor Martin, and teaching assistant artist and graduate student Noel Madison Fetting-Smith. The students were: James Pepper Kelly, Joey Asal, Raffa Hoffer Reuther, Kayla Nicole Cook, Zixin Zhang, Daniel V.C., and Kyuhyun Lee.
Presented here is a small selection of photos of the three week long process together with shots of the final installation and a re-performed version produced by a group of the students involved in the course for the fall 2016 semester. Courtesy School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Plans are afoot to reflect, write and continue experiments with this project in Chicago as well as develop a version of the Experimentaction course in Rio de Janeiro in 2017 and 2018 in tandem with inaugurating other “molecular” learning projects including diverse special events, research initiatives, collaborations, study groups, and poetic-pedagogic actions with the goal of publishing a special edition of Revista MESA focusing on the experimental legacy of Hélio Oiticica in 2018.
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1 Irene V. Small. Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016) 7.
2 Ibid.