The pedagogy of art in ISA: A colloquium on the basis of gender mainstreaming in artistic creation.
“The university is going to be an educational apparatus of the state (…) or more benevolently, a place of critical and innovative thinking, a place among many others, perhaps an increasingly important place due to the production and transfer of information exchanged worldwide.”
According to Maquard Smith the university model associated both to the Kantian idea of reason as to the paradigm of culture advocated by Humboldt, has fallen into crisis. This is mainly attributed to the loss of specific contents experienced by such concepts (reason, culture) in the current era, emptiness that extends to the notions of creativity, timeliness, originality and innovation, etc. historically validated by the artistic higher education as its main promises.
These criteria, far from wonder us, seem to offer some sort of incentive when recognizing that our claims with ISA (Spanish acronym for the University of the Arts in Cuba ) are supported by theoretical discussions of international order. However, suspicion of not insisting from this institution in the empowerment of discussions on the expansion of the concepts, the redesign of pedagogy and the redefinition of academic disciplines stands almost a certainty. This is serious, if it is found the debate to be insufficient and the simple recognition of the disciplinary horizon to subvert the verticality of our traditional thought structures. The decentralized mentality must be rooted from the praxis. In this sense, it would be valid the conjectures such as rethinking the curricular program and its diversification in terms of informational accessibility and cognitive-referential strategies to boost mainstreaming as organizational principle.
Given this situation and aware of its responsibility to those guidelines, the project Orbita will favor reflection around them proposing, for the framework of the 12th Havana Biennial at ISA and with the collaboration of Dr. Mayra Sanchez and MSc. Yenie Rodriguez (teachers of the institution), the Symposium: “La pedagogía del arte en el ISA: entre la nostalgia y la incertidumbre” ( Pedagogy of art at ISA: between nostalgia and uncertainty). It will become “an open way to generational dialogue and shared responsibility; to the exchange of knowledge and identifying always inexhaustible gaps in the curriculum; to find dreams and visions, inexcusable guarantee of continuity of Pedagogy of Art at ISA.”
Certainly, nostalgia has been often recapitulated matter even when validity remains for the development of the current dynamics of creation. However, it is assumed as primary the insistence on uncertainty, understood as an opportunity that combines present and immediate future and that must be thought and which has the power to influence. This reveals not only the reflective-dialogical character given to the event, but also ensures the purposeful gesture so necessary for modifying the current logics. Logics that have been even subverted from the organizational structure of the symposium, once validated along with interventions by specialists and teachers, the judgments of the students themselves (both active and graduates) with respect to their methods of symbolic production and the dismantling of how they tax or are inserted into the volition of displacements and transfers. The greatest attempt of marginalizing in keeping with the conceptual premises defended by the organizers lie there.
Similarly, the realization of a “constructive radiography” of the operational modes of our pedagogy of art also includes discussion on the achievements experienced at the laboratory of new means, in the discipline of research methodology with its renewal and the debut of the subject of Textual Practices as an introduction to the inquiry in the Visual Arts and in general to “(…) the openings of the new curricula; works and projects that concern and obsess us today, approached from a kind of reverse engineering, which makes visible that hidden curriculum that makes it possible. “
In short, this conference will provide an updating guarantee to ISA. Our artistic and educational institution may become a leading space that prioritizes transdisciplinary accumulation of information, based on a creative act where the overflow of limits and hybridization of different practices is evident. Thus, ISA would gain ground in the handling and management of multiple knowledge and scenarios, extremely advantageous fact in these times when the transfer of information exchanged worldwide, as Miller says, cancels the cultural hegemony of the university.
