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Francesca Guerisoli
Today, it is evident that pedagogy has become a factor in numerous works by Italian artists, as part of their process of conceiving, creating and formalising their projects. Generally, artists are engaged in community-based practices. But rather fewer are those artists for whom, in a systematic sense, the pedagogical project is an integral and substantial part of their work. In this article, we will point out some of them, born over the 1970s and the 1980s, whose practices, although showing important differences, seem to be brought together by certain characteristics. These include their cooperation with a local or temporary community that works alongside the artist, also in the authorial dimension; the collective definition of the contents, and the community’s influence on aesthetics during the workshop phase; and — to a different degrees from artist to artist and from work to work — of the work’s eventual final formalisation.[1]
‘Didactics dictates what you have to think about, as if you were a child being told what shape to fit a wooden cube into; whereas pedagogy is a process where certain shapes are made available, but giving you the freedom to put them together as you wish’. This comment by Adelita Husni-Bey (Milan, 1985) outlines the pedagogical practice which is regularly applied in her work. Her projects consist of three phases: research, the workshop as a moment of collective interaction that invites critical thinking, and post-production, which often consists of making a video. “I try to apply a pedagogy of decolonising the mind and body from being a liberal subject, raised in a capitalist society, which induces them to passively accept ever worse social conditions. The art thus obtained highlights how these conditions are also our responsibility.”[2]
Process and formalisation are also in balance in the work carried out by Marinella Senatore (Cava de’ Tirreni, 1977) since 2013 with The School of Narrative Dance. The project relies on self-formation, pursued through actions that combine forms of resistance, popular culture, dance, music and mass events. The School, described as multidisciplinary, nomadic and free, has so far involved around six million people in twenty-three countries, including activists, dancers, choreographers, actors, poets, students, artisans, pensioners and politicians who share their knowledge horizontally. Its didactic method, based on emancipation, inclusion and self-education, gives rise to a collective creativity that takes form in public performances based on the aesthetics of processions and village festivals, as well as in videos, drawings and works on paper intended for exhibition.
For some years, Francesca Grossi and Vera Maglioni (Rome, 1982) have been dealing with the controversial problem of how sustainable it is to be both artists and mothers. Under the name Grossi Maglioni, since 2006 they have been conducting workshops, which are often designed to take the place of object-based artistic production. The products of the workshops, such as the participants’ drawings, are never considered as works in their own right. As mentioned above, the duo explores the condition of being a woman, mother and artist in today’s society, drawing on their own experience and by weaving together dialogues with groups of mothers and children during meetings and workshops. Their latest work, which is still in progress, is the result of an urban regeneration commission regarding Rome’s Quartaccio neighbourhood: a square will be redesigned with fantastical inter-species and inter-gender figures, resulting from workshops for children and young people. The aim is to make this square an inclusive meeting place through the empowerment of the community, which will be entrusted with caring for it.
Of a different register is the practice of Eugenio Tibaldi (Alba, 1977). It is result of the cross between anthropology and pedagogy pursued to varying degrees in his projects, through the investigation of particular contexts and the involvement of associations, schools and other communities. While the methodological approach remains unchanged across his different works, the practice nevertheless changes, and the result can never be defined a priori. The great collective work Questione d’appartenenza (2015) is the one that best represents his practice in this context. At the heart of this project is the construction of a psychogeography of places through a series of situationist ‘drifts’ in the neighbourhoods of the historic centre of Naples. Using their mobile phones, the participants took photographs that were then assembled by Tibaldi into large-scale prints, cut out and suspended. From this, the relationship between the multiplicity of informal environments clearly emerges, rendering a choral image of the city through the eyes of the participants.
The format is, however, always the same in Global Education by Giuseppe Stampone (Cluses, 1974), a project started under the umbrella of Solstizio Project. Here, together, with Maria Crispal, he realises artistic actions that are at the same time didactic methods, collaborating with artists, architects, sociologists, pedagogues, anthropologists and social workers. Global Education includes the well-known abecedaria and maps, created based on an analysis of the places where the artist works, with the intention of presenting alternatives to the commonplace model of education. The choice to work on the abecedaria is explained by the rejection of the institutional learning horizon, which Stampone calls “the dictatorship of Gutenberg”, in order to propose a fragmentation of viewpoints. In this sense, the abecedaria produced by the communities that Stampone has involved are examples of how art can become social glue and a relational device within one same group.
Similarly socially engaged are the projects proposed by the Parasite 2.0 collective (Stefano Colombo, Vedano al Lambro, 1989; Eugenio Cosentino, Luino, 1989; Luca Marullo, Catania, 1989). It moves between architectural planning, design, visual art and performing arts. Their work pivots on the cosmology that is generated by virtue of the project, often translating into collective discussion forums which focus on the concept of co-authorship in producing the object-outcome. In this sense, one of the most significant examples is MAXXI Temporary School: The Museum Is a School. A School Is a Battleground, which was winner of the YAP call for proposals launched by MAXXI in 2016 for the production of a work on the theme of sustainability. For six months, the artists transformed MAXXI’s outdoor space into a school on the theme of the Anthropocene, allocating half of the budget to the setting up of an environment and the other half to a public programme to be held inside it.
One final case of special interest is that of Valerio Rocco Orlando (Milan, 1978), whose projects use pedagogical practice with great awareness. These projects are always located in specific local contexts and in a long-term perspective, using the workshop form to explore the relationship between institutions, museums, academies and the social sphere. In 2020, he won the Italian Council award with his South of Imagination project (2021-2022), aimed at creating an interdisciplinary school in Matera, which he will manage for the next thirty years through an association, thanks to a convention reached with the state. The Sassi School is currently being renovated and will open next spring. The process of constructing the educational offer, aimed at young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two, is taking place together with citizens, and through co-design workshops, in which Orlando acts as mediator. The presence, in the Sassi area, of a school founded on pedagogical forms of self-organisation is also intended to be an artist’s response to the phenomenon of gentrification, a way of restoring the city to its dimension as a space for engagement and collective learning.
[1] For a historic and critical reading of such practices internationally, see the essay by P. Gaglianò, La sintassi della libertà: Arte, pedagogia, anarchia, Gli Ori, 2020.
[2] L. Bernardi, ‘Conversazione con Adelita Husni-Bey / Per un’arte radicale’, Doppiozero, 25 November 2017, <https://www.doppiozero.com/per-unarte-radicale> (17 October 2023).
