The Space in/of Art and in/of Education as (Re-)Existence

Abstract:

When looking at the relationship between art and education based on language, we delve into the space occupied by art within the universe of education inside and outside the school, focusing on everyday practices, in the ordinary space granted or not as a space of art. The interferences produced in the daily lives and in teaching spaces associated with the arts, understood as aesthetic and poetic production imbued with the senses of desire and presence, are addressed as practices in which aesthetic creation and fruition lead to the weaving of other forms of knowledge, towards the ecology of knowledge, understood as a powerful way for democratizing human development, (re-)existence to the coloniality of knowing/doing/being.

Keywords:
Art in/of Education; Art as Resistance; Poetic Occupation

Resumo:

Ao pensar as relações entre arte e educação a partir da linguagem, abordamos o espaço ocupado pela arte no universo da educação dentro e fora da escola, focando nas práticas cotidianas, no espaço ordinário outorgado ou não como espaço de arte. As interferências produzidas nos cotidianos e nos espaços disciplinares contemplados às artes, entendidas como produção estética e poética e imbuídas dos sentidos de desejo e de presença, são abordadas como práticas nas quais ocorre, por meio da criação e da fruição estéticas, a tessitura de conhecimentos outros, em direção à ecologia de saberes, compreendidas como potente meio para a formação humana democratizante, (re)existência à colonialidade do saber/fazer/ser.

Palavras-chave:
Arte na/da Educação; Arte como Resistência; Ocupação Poética

We begin our reflection on art and education spaces, attempting to understand how both fields, of diverse accomplishments, can be thought. Also, how their intersections can mean sources of possibilities and strength of their own specific territory as porous and permeable to diverse assemblages beyond disciplinary modes. We follow Kristeva’s steps (1969, p. 15) when she proposes, in relation to language, to replace the question What is language? for How can language be thought?

The use of the Bulgarian-French thinker’s proposition occurs to us due to the important approximations, separations and frictions that the art field suffers in relation to the language field and, consequently, affects language in the education universe. If art can be considered without great risk as a human dimension beyond what can be said, the visual image outside the artistic intention, on the contrary, has an intense relation with the language, contributing, slowing, reducing and amplifying statements. The image in art would elude the discourse, refusing to be reduced to its meaning; while the image, outside strictly poetic creation, a tiny fragment of the iconic oceans of visual culture, desires, affirms, nullifies and reiterates, opposing, being an accomplice and inseparable, the word. Eager of senses, the image is permeated by the word, challenging its intensity and reaching. Deceiving and fascinating, the image corroborates, interrupts and diverts discourses, inoculates desires and intercepts intentions. All under the ability of the aesthetic management and the capitalization of pleasure. As if under the jungle of images, the spontaneous desire should be rediscovered as basal condition for the subjects’ integrity. The seriousness of such world configuration would require careful consideration and effective intervention of the formative processes, providing effective invention plans, especially in spaces and curricular times of greater thematic affinity and vocation. Art and image would form the centrality of the interest of the disciplinary space concerning the arts, inasmuch as it would fit, in the best sense of the word, to enjoy the cultural heritage in all its nuances of manifestations. Also, the enjoyment beyond cognitive aspect, from the experience of the creative practices to the experiences with the unspeakable, from the knowledge of the risks and tastes of the iconsphere¹ to the prophylaxis of the look in favor of the confrontation of the images with as few sequels as possible.

Obviously, when using such health-related terms, we take the process of school education, in several aspects, as a process of corporeal strengthening. In other words, schooling, in this perspective, comprises the student body as oscillating between the individual and the collective, whose oscillation intensifies its symbolic, social and imaginary density. A body defending itself in its plurality and multiplicity of risks and benefits that both the visual culture and schooling impose on it, as we understand that education takes place through the intertwining of diverse aesthetic currents, some complementary and others opposing ones. Such contrasts are necessary to the warp, always ready to the becoming of human formation whose weaving is constituted of experiences to be explored through said contrasts, experiences from other worlds, not always close to the official curricular terrain.

We understand that aesthetics, seen in a simplified way, would be a network of problems and postulates amongst a philosophy of art, a taste theorization and beauty theory. Asserted as a specific subject, since the work of Alexander G. Baumgarten back in the XVIII century, aesthetics has since unfolded into phenomenal conceptual production and of indispensable utility, thus magnifying the contemporary thought. It has allowed us to understand the extent, limits and language’s overcoming in the constitution and configuration of humankind. This is so especially if we understand language as capital in such achievements as in its origin, unmistakable poetic creation, insofar as a symbolic system, being dependent of arbitrary actions, does not seem to have a more elucidating approach than that of poetic creation. Obviously, we do not want to reduce the association between the language genesis, “the house of being” (Heidegger, 2003, p. 74) and an aesthetic realization, background without human background, as in Lacan when he comments:

[...] I took the schematic example of the vessel to allow you to apprehend where the Thing is situated, in the relation that places man as a medium between the real and the signifier. This Thing, of which all man-made forms belong to the record of sublimation, will always be represented by a void, precisely because it cannot be represented by anything else - more precisely, that it can only be represented by another thing. In any form of sublimation, however, the emptiness will be decisive. [...] First of all, I would like to point out three different ways in which art, religion and discourse have to do with this. [...] Every art is characterized by a certain mode of organization around this emptiness (Lacan apud Regnault, 2001, p. 15).

Therefore, this interior of the vessel, an enervated impulses dimension of existence, leads us to processes of representation, that is, to something not reducible to poetry as literature, yet to the act of self-creation inherent to the structurally human condition, the production of the symbolic system the language itself. Therefore, language would be an aesthetic and poetic production, however, of course, not a literary category. Thus, in the theoretical perspective to which we turn to, the poetic act that emerges from the so-called pre-civilization void, the desire of being, would be nameless energy or that thing which comes before the name (Carmen..., 1983), which the language would not yet contain, but would aspire and emanate before the verb is pronounced. We are not dealing here with poetry as a literature part, let alone aesthetics as a field of knowledge bestowed by a particular and private history. We allude to what creation invests, still coming from the amalgam between body, will and representation (Schopenhauer, 2001).

Considering and insisting on the aesthetic energy of human formation, which involves from the unspeakable to the prolixity of the imagery-discursive relations and the imaginary mediation, we bring to the discussion of schooling formation as a poetic act - that can be created - resisting to the hostilities of the contemporary world, in addition to other dimensions that constitute it. After all, the expression poetic act, as we have tried to clarify, overcomes the categorical floodgates granted by literature.

In this perspective, the experiences of occupying collective spaces with poetic manifestations, whether granted or not as art, the poetry contained in the bodies’ languages, ​ creation of vocabularies, voices sonority, as well as the intertwining of materialness and imaginaries, emerge as significant and stimulating means of resistance. These processes deepen affinities between exposed subjects to similar conditions, where innumerable creations of new forms of existence able rise spontaneously, able to transform each individual and its social context, therefore, breaking hierarchies, as in the knowledge ecology (Santos, 2010). By widening the sense of authorship and advancing in the provisional autonomy production, each one and their collectives create space for the affirmation of their visibilities, that is, their ways of existing/resisting, within their specificities and mixtures, their cultural manifestations, spiritualities and affections.

In these spaces, knowledge is woven from the world’s perception, from experience/presence which, according to Gumbrecht (2015), deserves priority in relation to the practice of interpretation, of the cognitive deciphering that assigns meaning to objects and in this assignment, suspends creation of sensations and understandings. The Gumbrechtian notion of presence rescues the material-spatial relationship with the world of things, considering the body as an integral part of our existence. The presence is considered by its spatial relation with the world and its objects, rather than by a temporal relation, being present the tangible things by human hands, having immediate impact on human bodies. In the art spaces, the possibility of the so-called things of the world, imbued with immediacy, to impact the bodies, events and processes in which the production of presence takes place and where this impact occurs and it is intensified, is enlarged.

We understand that it is not possible to escape completely neither the structures and rhythms that make up our globalized, mercantilist present nor its forms of communication. As Gumbrecht (2015) points out, when we firmly grasp the possibility of achieving this, we find some alternative to what we accept quite quickly as normal.

We emphasize the power of the poetic act in all its possibilities of emergence for, if not the overcoming of strategies of domination and social constraint, the practice of political and cultural tactics of resistance, insofar as the aesthetic creation and its enjoyment are inalienable plans of life in any of its dimensions and orbits. Thus, the creation of means of support and daily life conduction, implies in the spontaneous appeal to the aesthetic creation that configures the aforementioned power, indispensable to the exit from the confinement in the spaces of any order of violence. The pertinence of such an assertion is evident in the pasteurization, erasure and coercion imposed on many cultural knowledge and productions, whose authenticity and originality contradict hegemonic interests. Therefore, simultaneously with the activity of the forces of annihilation or entropy, solidarity networks, aesthetic enjoyment, the sharing of the sensible (Rancière, 2009) crack the shields of whatever opposes them, imposing power displacement through new networks of knowing/doing/empowering, even in discreet and fleeting hunting operations (Certeau, 1994).

Obviously, in the approximation of the irreducible to a single term or concept, an aesthetic creation understood as art to the political actions, here taken as affirmation and resistance of the human diversity in the wide planetary panorama, it is still important to discuss the meaning, among the complex polysemy of the term, to which we relate to. Art, aesthetic or poetic creations are of central importance in many aspects of the elucidation effort and study factors of the human condition, which are often confused or strategically shuffled. The art, according to the hegemonic strategic understanding and action, is defined by a set of legitimized works by a skillfully articulated system, constituted by its specific market, cultural cities’ equipment, either public or private, and a sort of an academic machinery specialized in the production of discursive apparatus that elaborates a certain history, theory and criticism of art. This production is originated in XVI century Europe that supports today a network of cultural equipment of western matrix that influences almost the whole world.

However, we are interested in the poetic and aesthetic production, not necessarily similar and identified with the set of works granted as art by the art system itself, that is, by its specific criticism, commerce and history, noting that the location and commitment of each term is political and inseparable, of course, in accordance with some ideological adherence and a certain set of desires (Victorio Filho, 2013). The cultural productions location in the exhibition spaces in the various artistic instances, and their labeling, is inseparable from population administration and its localization in the city space. The collectivization and recognition of any given aesthetic production and its cultural crediting, are part of the government strategies that displaces the artistic and cultural production not accepted in the place of the hegemonic artistic and scientific knowledge, defining their reach and political eloquence. Such a cultural economy regards a particular work in ethnology place and not necessarily that of art’s, linking it with some popular knowledge and common sense, clearly separated from the guarded and privileged level of scientific knowledge. Thus, cultures historically considered lesser than the Eurocentric model, the one originating from daily life and popular traditions, are unseen or reduced to images that are dramatically weakened in comparison to what they would represent.

In any case, whether it is recognized as art or not, every production structurally fed with aesthetic force and symbolic importance, as any work of art would, the popular poetic achievement is a human production that produces experiences that in turn, move its authors and those who will enjoy it, regardless the categorizations and other meanings associated to them. This is what allows us to consider it a bet on existence, a fundamental reiteration of the links of social consistency (Maffesoli, 2009), links that overtly connect the inseparable educational and political dimensions. In other words, the artistic creation would reiterate social resistance to whatever opposes and tries to disadvantage it. Thus, the so-called other popular productions are exposed to the crossing over of different knowledge and interests on the other abyssal side (Santos, 2010), whose colonial procedure is to render it invisible, undermining, silencing and even annihilating them worldwide, reaffirming territories that are remote due to abyssal depth, inherent to the colonial game.

When we think the artistic making within a post-abyssal epistemological-methodological frame, in which sensitivities, subjectivities and otherness would be contemplated by the visibility and the listening, therefore, being acknowledged their aesthetic and creative powers, would be urgently needed to the compatible training with the contemporary challenges. Recognizing mainly that there is an abyssal, unjust and unequal point of view that divides artistic and cultural production in a binary (good/bad, ugly/beautiful) way, trying to throw into the abyss various knowledge produced by individuals in their creations, circulation and enjoyment (Certeau, 1994), depriving their presence and social participation. The inevitable question is about the role of art widely practiced in the diversified ways of participating and fostering social and cultural contexts in/for human formation in a plural manner.

Art as aesthetic, political, poetic and cultural resistance produces meanings in the networks where dialogues are established, and encounters of experiences and exchanges of knowledge happen. Being of great fertility for speech stimulation and to the listening, therefore, it is favorable to problematic dominant silencing in a present marked by social experiences fugacity, excessive imaginary harassment, numbing consumption of shallow aesthetic experiences and even, icons pasteurization of the dominant culture. Such circumstance increasingly demands attention for the art teaching on the curricula concerning traditional cultures, like the indigenous one, African ancestry values and its developments in America, as well as feminine aesthetics and knowledge historically omitted, distorted and erased since the Middle Age.

An ensuing question concerns to the possibility of an immanence plan with multiple and diversified escape routes for the updating of art understanding, in order to promote the valorization and democratic uses on its plurality, despite discrimination and other symbolic violence common to spaces of artistic fruition. That is, we propose decolonization of art and knowledge as a promising path to a democratic realization, as main purpose of education. In order to do so, it is necessary to reflect on what kind of knowledge has characterized the art in the public spaces officially dedicated to it and contributions that museum projects, sound and scenic spaces as well as other institutions dedicated to the art may offer and that, indeed, represent a joint efforts for citizenship formation.

The resulting cartography from such effort will neither offer a single answer to the questions that have been set forth nor solve the subsequent problems of art participation in education. However, there is an effort to reconsider and recover trajectories and conceptual changes, consonant with the idea of processes that art can promote, either of meanings or of exemptions from them, or, finally, by the framework of inventions and ordinariness (Certeau, 1994), as something new and potent for the human formation of those who circulate in the spaces politically destined to the poetic, sonorous, performative, dancing, and imaginary fruition of the subjects and collectives. They institute such productions and enjoy their enjoyments regardless of any territoriality, guidance. Subject creators of possible, via disobedience, indiscipline and refusal to the norms that do not have any affinity with their packs (Deleuze; Guattari, 1997).

The political-epistemological aspect that gives rise to the topic, to catalyze the artistic practice or at least to give it a post-abyssal thinking perspective (Santos, 2010), may be a way against the violence that is applied in the spaces of cultural validation, as well as a loosening of their fences. Santos’ post-abyssal thought is based on recognizing that “social exclusion in its broadest sense takes different forms determined by an abyssal line that, as long as the abyssal definite exclusion persists, no progressive post-capitalist alternative will be possible” (Santos, 2009, p. 43). Thus, for the benefit of the human formation compatible with the challenges of the present time, it is necessary to create artistry forms of encounter with whatever is new and ordinary in the complex web of daily life. In the same action of inexorable relation of perceiving/feeling/living the art, it would result the production and recognition of singularities, senses contradictions and meanings constituting the social consistency and not a platform of cultural hierarchies.

Starting from the idea to which Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010) has drawn our attention to, related to the post-abyssal act of seeing and being in the world, we believe that this perspective is directly linked to the idea coined by Mignolo (2017), when proposing a process of decolonization of the modern thought, from three paths: those of power, knowing and being. As Mignolo says, these structures are mingled and generated in the individual, who is immersed in this entanglement constituted by exclusionary layers that do not legitimize the knowledge produced in everyday life. It is in the validation of certain knowledge that such subjects are dominated.

Global political society is constituted not by thousands, but by millions of people grouping together in a project to resurface, re-emerge and re-exist. This is not only to resist, because resisting means that the rules of the game are controlled by someone we resist to. The challenges of the present and the future consist in being able to imagine and build, once we have liberated ourselves from the colonial matrix of power and have launched ourselves into the creative void (Mignolo, 2017).

Considering the art scopes that legitimize the dominant discourse, the resulting criticism assumes to decolonize whatever would be imbued with hegemonic, Eurocentric, patriarchal and capitalist knowledge as a way of breaking the power process instituted and bestowed in artistic practices. A rupture which is necessary so we can go to another place, to realize a plural knowledge, in a drawing of effective knowledge ecology. That is, a field of connecting possibilities with whatever is ordinary, new and to what is, abysmally, on the other side, away from the dominant place where beings relate to another approach, opening up others constituting perspectives of themselves as individuals in the world.

We have walked along this path of art production, for so long demarcated by an epistemicide conception², which exterminates ideas that are distinct or questioning to it, insofar as it articulates with the worst face of capitalism, patriarchal and colonialism systems, thus mechanically producing invisibility and silencing other aesthetic productions, especially those that defend a democratic plural knowledge and its unconditional recognition.

As for the democratic construction of a process whereby art is a reflection of what is produced by human diversity, we understand that broadening the knowledge and appreciation of artistic productions in a continuous South-South dialogue is inseparable from any emancipating project. Therefore, it is essential to build possible paths and opportunities, which allows the emergence of decolonizing and sliding forms of configuration in a new culture and art agencies, different scopes of action as spaces of diverse epistemic production. Obviously, our ambition could not be the reconfiguration of the art system, but we can aim to contribute to the effects neutralization of its elitist, recklessly cloaking commercial discourse in school and artistic formation. Strengthening the relations with art, free from the cultural postulates related to the market is one of the steps of strengthening the idea of community, as we recognize in this context of “vernacular cosmopolitanisms” (Bhabha, 2013), the emergence of new social actors in art, culture and science.

We try to rethink the center-periphery relations, also, understanding how the periphery zones of which would to be where these other productions are usually displaced, are at the same time too culturally vigorous at the beginning of the third millennium, some promoting and welcoming environment of unspoken aesthetics that are disseminated, packed by the energy at environments where difference production and diversity are rife. By denaturalizing the term periphery and recognizing that in a spherical planet, centers and peripheries are political determinations, both spatially and symbolically, we have the periphery zones where social benefits are concerned, spaces of exclusion in which creative action is what enables material and symbolic survival emerging in these areas, scenarios of aesthetic productions that reinvent the city which is allowed to them to inhabit. These practices of daily creation are based upon situations that assume a re-signification of the traditional ways of belonging, using, frequency and participation of/in the polis. We refer to what imposes, in turn, the shift of the eye to what was happening outside jurisdiction and reach of bourgeois hegemony, which, uncontested, reinforces their domination ties of access and power over the media machines and all political-partisan apparatus, in order to continue appearing as the avatar of a periphery.

The auscultation movement of this artistic-cultural production emerging from the city’s peripheral zones corresponds to a path of apprehension and reading, that proposes to think about the multicultural status of its creations, its strategies of inclusion within the hegemonic cultural circuits, as well as the ways of reinventing cultural production which become more demanding with the sector increasing professionalization. Finally, we highlight its political dimension from the extensive subjective processes, that are unveiled in the special moments of artistic creation and consolidation of new cultural city’s territories. It should also be noted that such productions are located in arenas shaped by the cultural cities’ polyphony in post-modernity, in which all territorialities, especially the symbolic ones, are disintegrated and refashioned at every moment, in the wake of the emergence of new social actors that affirm all kinds of dissent.

The senses, resistances and reinventions in the everyday life allow to be scrutinized under a post-abyssal epistemological approach, since they produce diverse but not incompatible knowledge in the amalgam of contemporary culture. In this complex cartography of everyday practices and paths, we see the promising possibility of power decolonization, knowledge and of being, in the midst of counter pedagogical practices, not as a negation of the pedagogy of knowing/doing, but as a way of thinking relations of knowing/doing in relation to our peoples of the south condition, that is, colonized, exterminated peoples and heirs, at the same time, of the greatest kidnapping in history, a result of a Diaspora and autochthonous as well, the greatest extermination in history that happened to Amerindian peoples who inhabited the Americas. Therefore, engaging in the critique of teaching and training in art, requires considering the genocides and slavery that inhabit us and mark each formation to the limit of its self-criticism. Without such pain, the critique of the bestowing discourses on art and science, would be emptied before its projection against the dominant panorama.

Therefore, pedagogically thinking the ways of art teaching in the South is, necessarily, to think it in relation to the South itself. In other words, doingthinking³ pedagogical practices is, precisely, to make them lesser knowledge. Hence, doingthinking pedagogical practices in relation to the teaching of the arts must start from readings in the counter flow of the hegemonic knowledge coined by the North. There will be neither questioning nor refusing or even swallowing the other, but rather constructing other practices and pedagogical procedures. After all, every radical and insurgent art that emerges among us from the South is in some way orientated by a becoming-other, in a micro political perspective that involves practices allied to its poiesis of resistance to regulatory oxidation that threatens every emancipating process, according to Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

Taking into account the mentioned aspects, we are still faced with some questions arising from the search for displacement, restlessness and the production of other ideas. Thus, the epistemic economy is set in question, precipitating us in its genealogy. Even in the face of the answer obviousness to certain questions, it is appropriate, in the intellectual adventure posed here, to interrogate the actuality of the reasons for teaching and learning on the basis of past certainties, but still dominant. Within this confrontation we may achieve a contradictory and encouraging awakening, by facing the crossover cartography between what individuals learn, what are effectively the teachers’ expectations concerning their students and, the senses and meanings of an hypothetical and concretely multiple school in their plans and practices, study and artistic productions. We argue that some findings would be unavoidable, such as the survival of the desire to educate for emancipation, through the promotion of knowledge networks, which in turn implies the recognition of the thoughtpracticed curricula⁴ (Oliveira, 2012) as a reality of tensions, negotiations, conflicts of otherness and originality. Therefore, the aforementioned cartography would convince us that the school still longs to be inhabited by the honest and generous action of diversity, in order to return to the educational and artistic spaces as meeting places aimed at collectivities vocational actions, fusion between apprentices and teachers, which would create or adjust the world accordingly to the networks flows of knowledge that are woven and energized in such spaces.

The discussion between ethics and aesthetics is necessary, as we understand, to start from questions about on which plans, ideas and/or practices are based the artistic actions that we experience, produce and defend through teaching. Such questions, which we have discussed throughout the previous pages, touch some others visible and invisible actions, epistemologies, practices, poetics and actions.

The role of living the participant learner and practitioner, according to Certeau (1994), as someone deprived of control of everything that comes afterwards, who learns at the same time as the coordinate participants in the collective teachinglearning process and enjoyment, as well as of the artistic production, mobilizes memory of practices, conceptions and beliefs of ideas. In this boiling of internal conflicts and negotiations, the action of catalyzing and promoting reflections and opposing understandings requires attention, tension and approximation of affections that emerge more or less conscious or orderly constituting, one way or another, the schools’ realities.

In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière (2012, p. 18) points out that “spectators see, feel, and understand something as they compose their own poem, as do actors, playwrights, directors, dancers or performers in their own way”. In this perspective, since art is a collaborative process between creators and spectators and in the certainty that we have the creative potential because we reinvent ourselves every day, we return to the different places where we live. But we also live where we stay for a period and we produce culture with the people with whom we interact. Thus, it would be the inexorable process of humanization for whose effectiveness we approach, we seek to apprehend, to comprehend, however achievable or not those longings.

Following Rancière’s idea by having as reference the sharing of the sensitive or reducing it to its democratic aspect of collective aesthetic experience, we seek to support our dialogue, in order to think about how society is dealing with the binomial rights and duties in this field and, the gradations always retracted between this polarity. Returning to school, art, poetics and the achievement of each of these characters, we question education in its possibility of political process that also constitutes society and, therefore, aspires to other understandings beyond the mere critical eye that reduces such positioning towards the hegemonic issues.

Art is a space of continuous meanings production and practiced by all. Practitioners as artists, spectators or technicians and the whole network involved in the artistic act, move from their pre-established places and become practitioners, interfering, producing unexpected, imponderable doingknowledge. It is inevitable to think that art produces these displacements. With Gumbrecht (2010), we perceive experience not only as attribution of meaning, but as presence that is articulated in the movement, provoking bodies in a space where something happens. Presence is intensified as a spatial relationship with the world and its objects, where an unveiling of being happens, the emergence of something that has an articulation in space.

It is also in the between-places (Bhabha, 1998) of art and schools, in the spacetimes without a commitment to the production of knowledge and the artistic product, where it is possible to be outside the demands in which these universes of the given sense to art and teaching are placed, spaces of the everyday where everything passes without nothing seeming to pass, as José Machado Pais recalls (1993). In the schools, beyond the classroom where artistic production is legitimated, in this same space, other artistry forms of production reverberate the simplest core art that the collective is capable of producing, that is, sliding forms and practices, ecological echoes of doingknowledge, which are configured as destitutions of the crystallized art format.

We understand, therefore, that there is no way to doubt or to bring simplistic and reductionist provisional solutions, as methodological resources to make the student interpret and intervene in order to provide solutions or to have proactive attitudes and other clichés, common to what would be the school of the “republic of good feelings” (Maffesoli, 2009). Understanding all processes, from the multiple experiences constituted by ambitiously emancipating didactic- practices, collective planning and creation, shared knowledge, citizen formation, we remember the always opportune lines of Paulo Freire’s thoughts (1996). Teaching requires respect for learners’ knowledge, criticism, acceptance of the new, rejection of any form of discrimination, critical reflection about the practice, recognition and assumption of cultural identity, humility, tolerance, struggle in defense of educators’ rights - and the artists also through their productions - joy, hope, conviction that a change is possible, curiosity, commitment, knowing how to listen, availability for dialogue, understanding that education is a form of intervention in the world. Art in/of education as (re)existence is also an exercise of power and experience with the unspeakable, which inevitably refers to the condition of basic societal cementing for the integral maintenance of the polis. Therefore, in addition to the abyssal depth to overcome, art and education still suggest to us, among other possibilities, resources that are useful to the displacements and strains in the spaces of politicalcultural skirmishes common to school life.

As Foucault points out, we do not take power

[...] as a phenomenon of massive and homogeneous domination of one individual over others, of one group over others, of one class over the others, but [we seek] to be well aware that power - provided it is not considered from far away - is not something that can be divided between those who own and hold it exclusively and those who do not possess and submit to it. Power must be analyzed as something that circulates, or rather as something that only works in a chain. It is never located here and there, it is never in the hands of some, it is never appropriate as a wealth or a good. Power works and exercises in a network. In their meshes, individuals not only circulate, but are always in a position to exercise this power, and to suffer their action; they are never the inert or consensual target of power, they are always center of transmission. In other words, power does not apply to individuals, it passes through them (Foucault 1979, p. 183).

Thus, with Foucault, we understand that the place where we think does not goes through a romanticized vision of the issues of power displacement. We think democracy as a circulating power, which crosses everyone in their daily lives and in the artistic and educational practices present in the spaces dedicated to them and in the other life spaces wherever they are.

At school, the place of art is built on a pre-established curriculum, but this curriculum is redesigned, reworked, re-elaborated, while lived. The power relations by those who inhabit the school tense up this unique applicability and are intertwined, through artistry, with their daily lives, implying in an amplification, extension and flexibility of this rigid curriculum. The single power legitimized by the pre-established curriculum, that is, prescribed, is a step to allocate democracy on a mobile platform at risk. For us, what is practiced (Oliveira, 2012) is potent in aesthetic creation, it is potent in artistic creation, an inherent form of how individuals relate to each other in daily life⁵.

• Translated by Nelson Santiago and proofread by Ananyr Porto Fajardo

• 1
  A term coined by the critic and film theorist Gilbert Cohen-Seát in 1959, expanded by Roman Gubern, who defines it as “[...] a complex system in the sense that this term is used in the physical sciences: a system that encompasses many interrelated variables whose behavior is unpredictable or difficult to reproduce. Another basic principle is that the iconsphere has a biological bias: the images compete with each other in the social space to attract attention and attract the public’s eye” (Gubern, 2013, p. 32).
• 2
  The term epistemicide, widely used by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1994, p. 285), deals with the erasure of knowledge that diverges from European hegemonic knowledge, “[...] the disqualification of all forms of knowledge alien to the paradigm of modern science under the pretext of being only knowledge of appearances”.
• 3
  The spelling of words without separation, adopted by everyday life researchers, presupposes the inseparability between doing and thinking, between thinking and practices, between teaching and learning, breaking the dichotomies present in the dominant thought of modernity that reduce the understanding of some questions.
• 4
  The term presented by Oliveira (2012), based on Certeau’s idea of “practitioners”, in the sense that they constantly create meaningknowledge in the development of their daily actions.
• 5
  This article is part of the Thematic Section, Resistances and Reexistences in Educational Social Spaces in Times of Neo-Conservatism, organized by Inês Barbosa de Oliveira (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro) and Rafael Marques Gonçalves (Universidade Federal do Acre).

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  30 Sept 2019
• Date of issue
  2019

History

• Received
  17 July 2018
• Accepted
  23 May 2019