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VOLUME 7
Arts Education
__________________________________________________________________________
artsinsociety.com
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Background
Being opposed to Plato's Republic that aspired to an unfair, hierarchical and totalitarian
monarchy, Epicurus proposed a philosophical community built on friendship; a place for those
who aspire to rule over themselves; a community for individuality. Epicurus garden is founded
on an ethical contract and a personal commitment for individual transformation.
The Onfray (2008) project was an initiative of collective marginalization through an
unmentionable artistic intensification in a radical community in order to become differently
equal. Onfray proposed a similar place, an Epicurus garden, located out of ordinary time where
one could practice sweetness, searching tirelessly for demystification and defamiliarization.
Nietzsche wished a laboratory of friendship and philosophy, a place where the teacher learnt
and taught how to be free and emancipated, aspiring to friendship, where neither teachers nor
students accepted their role in a strict sense.
Freedom is spontaneity; it is autopoiesis; it is learning how to act out, to unveil the genius, to
treat with nymph, to create characters; to flow without thinking; to deal with the strange, in
unprejudiced ways, accompanied by the music of life.
Along with this project, we wanted to form a cavity inside the strict academic program of
the architectural studies a place where this kind of unprejudiced behavior to strangeness could
take place.
We chose hands as the study object, because we considered that they are the first mean of
our work as architects and artists. Hands are the organs that connect our minds with the outside
world in the process of making. We believe that our hands are capable of transforming our
conceptions of living and of producing new and unknown things. Their way of moving, acting
and making, enriches our intentions.
Once the students got their eyes blindfolded in the corridor outside the classroom, they were
guided inside it and were introduced by shaking their hands without seeing. Then, they had to
choose a pair and model each other faces using their hands to perceive by touching and then
forming the clay.
When they could finally see what their hands had produced, they couldnt express their
impressions as they were left without voice. We asked them not to speak; they had to
introduce themselves only by making signs with their hands that belong to an unknown language
for most of us. We realized the difficulty of exploring the freedom of hands because our
imaginary sign language is also ruled by stereotypes. We could feel for a while the silence and
the loneliness in our world.
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. (Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones
prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658. On Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis
Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley)
Every act of knowledge is a constructive activity. Following the bright metaphor of Borges
on maps and territories, we can say without doubt that our knowledge is always a map that tries
to represent an unknown territory, which is reality; and by definition, the map cannot be but an
outline of the territory, however it can never be identical to it. (Pozo, 1996; 130)
In order to create our map of hands territory, we wrote a list of all those dispersed variables
that could describe them. What is a hand? Which are the limits that define it? Is a hand with no
fingers still a hand? Through multiple associations of images, the unknown variables could be
joined in new categories, in an attempt to make our cartography of hands. Smell, identity,
capacities, abilities, experience, final aspect, shape, distortion, surface, angles, feeling and
parametric characteristics of hands were pointed out and helped us to fill in our conceptual maps,
generating our hands atlas, inspired from the method carried out by Aby Warburg (2010).
The Atlas, as Georges Didi-Huberman points out is:
a visual form of knowledge (...) whose destiny is to offer systematically to our eyes a
multiplicity of things gathered by elective affinities (...) from which one can get a new
kind of knowledge, which shows unnoticed aspects of the world. This is not to establish
a definitive classification, nor a comprehensive inventory, or catalogue once and for all,
as in a dictionary, a file or an encyclopedia, but collecting segments, pieces from a
fragmented world, respecting their multiplicity and heterogeneity, and providing clarity
to the relationships, now put in evidence. (Didi-Huberman, 2010)
Without Thinking
In the meantime when we were not manipulating anything, we were knitting; an action that
joined together all workshops activities. The first day we learnt how to knit just looking at the
necessary movements carried out by the eldest members in the group. Once we managed to do it,
like our ancestors we were unceasingly making textiles in different colors and shapes; without
thinking; just leaving our hands to move, repeat and produce.
Knitting was one of the actions that had mostly impacted the participants who couldnt stop
knitting throughout the workshop. We couldnt understand that reaction but then we found out
what Richard Sennet said about the experience of repeating.
To repeat again and again an action is stimulating when it is organized looking ahead.
The substantial thing of the routine can change, transform and improve, but the
emotional compensation lies in the personal experience to repeat. This experience is
nothing strange, we all know it: is rhythm. Already present in the human heart
contractions, the artisan has extended it to his hands and eyes. (Sennet, 2009; 216,217)
Human intelligence is the ability to discover, weigh up and relate facts in order to anticipate,
plan and resolve questions. We observe two types of strategies that human use to be in the world
and act on it. On one hand, the invention and construction of specialized tools; that is, technology
as the basis of our survival. On the other hand, the language; symbols that represent the states of
the world. Tools, language and thoughts are always connected (Dunbar, 2002). Throughout the
workshop we wanted to work with these elements always related with hands in order to cover our
field of work in both strategies.
Others Hand
Once we had successfully covered our first aim, to make a representative map of the territory we
decided to explore, it was easy to guess that time for imagination had come to take place in our
defamiliarization process. Although nobody noticed it, we accurately followed a designed
pedagogical strategy through a continuous action scheme which was crossed by different inputs
and diverse rules.
We had specified the common limits of hands so now we had to jump over them in order to
produce monster hands. We wanted to think about the others, considered as those elements
that certain ideology does not allow to be integrated, and are set apart because they have
something different in an unacceptable scale.
When the established codes of some reality are being questioned, unsuspected and ignored
variables are being revealed, threatening its integrity and restructuring its fragments. When we
use both images and words in an unusual way to describe usual subjects is when we are suffering
our first reaction and we learn to look on a strange way, making strange descriptions using
different media and new codes referred to everyday matters.
And again that old question expressed by the Situationists: the essence of art is the artistic
activity. The artworks are just material waste, residues of something that is much more important
and essential. We create and communicate through performance, building situations or objects as
if it was the first time, as if there were no formulas and methods. We dont try to understand
through the resulting images the significance they are linked to, but to create a particular
perception of the object. This attitude leads us to share alternative stances with creators that
decide to be deliberately segregated from the status quo, keeping always prepared to launch into
space.
After a walk along Prado Museums corridors, detecting significant alterations in the
paintings made by past artists, we enjoyed altering measures, modifying structures, textures and
colors; changing proportions and geometries of our imaginary hand. Where the limits of the
representation begin to vanish is where the art and the thought progress towards new horizons.
The hand becomes a monster hand when its stereotyped image changes, and let us look at it
under novel, unknown and creative aspects and properties.
New and strange hands not only had unusual beauty, they also had capacities and developed
skills wed never dreamt about.
Hands in Motion
We wanted to explore this new situation and we needed to set our monster hands in motion, but
they were almost immobilized. Handicapped and disabled hands amplified our desire to move
them under non - habitual gestures. In silence, we learnt about the basic movements of Sign
language in order to establish short conversations.
The single most remarkable feature of Sign that distinguishes it from all other languages
and mental activities is its unique linguistic use of space... We see then, in Sign, at every
level -lexical, grammatical, and syntactic- a linguistic use of space: a use that is
amazingly complex, for much of what occurs linearly, sequentially temporally in speech
becomes simultaneous, concurrent, multileveled in Sign... (Sacks, 1990; 88)
Then, sound came in our space. Flamenco music led us to a flamenco dancing session where
we discovered a different language of our body and hands while we continued with our
defamiliarization process. That night, when we joined a tablao spectacle, nobody felt like a
stranger. Dance is constructed with movements that have nothing to do with the habitual
gestures. If art uses the ordinary, its just a material within an unexpected interpretation, or
under a sharply deformed mask. (Tafuri, 1994; 11)
Didi Huberman (2008) is refered to the dance as a poetry inspired in action, exploration on
distortion and questioning on existence. To be in motion means to stay out of matter, forming
fragments of time and pieces of configuration that are developed in an act of metamorphosis. To
be in motion is to transform a situation into an event. The "bailaor" structures the time in his
dance gestures by his extended extremities in that deep space that invents. You cannot be-in-theworld if you are not projecting yourself to it.
To explain the great flexibility, mobility and expressiveness of hands, several studies came
to the conclusion that the human brain cortical fields for hands and fingers are much more
extensive and differentiated than those corresponding to other segments of the body members.
They are ten times more important than those of the feet (Schinca, 1988). Gradually, we became
aware that we can get 700.000 different positions, using combinations of arms, wrists and fingers
(Davis, 1998). Depending on the cultural, natural, social, familiar or personal experience, these
positions will have different meanings, allowing multiple options for hands action in dance.
Marcel Mauss in his essay Techniques of the Body observes that man's first and most
natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body. Before
instrumental techniques there is the ensemble of techniques of the body (Mauss, 1973; 76, 75).
He supports the idea that certain ways of doing things or moving our bodies are cultural
outsourcing rather than natural ways of doing or moving - walking or sitting.
By moving our hands in unusual ways, with or without control, we amplify our mental maps
and knowledge on them. We realized their potential abilities to open new possibilities not only in
communication through sign and dance but also through all kind of making.
This was the point we wanted to stand out, by forcing our hands to move outside of the
ordinary in order to provide us with a new and more creative way of understanding what we are
doing and at the same time, dissolve all our prejudice on certain practices we did not use to know
or practice.
After reading Gesture and the Nature of Language (Armstrong, Stokoe and Wilcox, 1995)
we deduce that in learning, sensory perceptions must be combined with movement, emotion and
action. Movement allows all perceptual categories and when it works together with feeling, they
become the background of significance. Previously Bell (1806) in Essays on the Anatomy of
Expression dealt with the anatomic development of human being and the relationships between
movement, perception, learning and expression.
In the exploratory actions from ludic and creative standpoints, we get the opportunity to
discover unknown worlds that belong to a Global World of humans where the common subject
are the hands; even without one, two, three, four or five fingers.
REFERENCES
Armstrong David F. Stokoe William C. Wilcox Sherman E. 1995. Gesture and the Nature of
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brcena, Fernando. 2006. Hannah Arendt: Una Filosofa de la Natalidad. Barcelona: Herder.
Bell, Charles. 1806. Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting. London: Longman,
Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Accessed August 23, 2012.
http://archive.org/stream/essaysonanatomyo00bell#page/n7/mode/2up
Bem, Sacha. Keijzer, Fred. 1996. Recent Changes in the Concept of Cognition. Theory &
psychology. SAGE Publications. VOL. 6(3): pp. 449-469
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Davis, Flora. 1998. La Comunicacin No Verbal. Madrid: Alianza.
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contra el reduccionismo constructivista. Anuario de Psicologa, no 69: pp. 127-139
Sacks, Oliver. 1990. Seeing voices: a journey into the world of the deaf. New York: Harper
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Schinca, Marta. 1988. Expresin corporal. Madrid: Escuela Espaola.
Sennet, Richard. 2009. El Artesano. Barcelona: Anagrama.
Tafuri, Manfredo. 1994. Formalismo y vanguardia entre la NEP y el primer plan Quinquenal, on
COHEN, Jean-Louis, Constructivismo ruso: sobre la arquitectura en las vanguardias
ruso-soviticas hacia 1917. Barcelona: Serbal.
Warburg, Aby. 2010. Atlas Mnemosine. Madrid: Akal.
Katerina Psegiannaki: Architect from the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece (DUTH,
2005). Diploma on Advanced Studies from Department of Architectural Graphic Design of
Madrids School of Architecture (UPM, 2009). Currently developing PhD at the same school and
department with title Theoretical Study for the contextualization of the pedagogical act in
teaching architecture. Has been collaborating with UPMs research group HYPERMEDIA in
several projects of educative innovation and in UPMs research Group DISCYT in bilingual
projects relative to the scientific and technical discourse. Since 2009 is founding member and codirector of HipoTesis magazine (www.hipo-tesis.eu).
ISSN 2326-9944