I recently listened to a group of teachers collectively reflecting on the intersection of education and artistic practices. I listened attentively and filtered everything they said through my own experience and learning, gained mostly from working in the trenches, listening, making mistakes and discoveries, managing, producing, and from books, friends, and colleagues. I listened, curious to try to decipher their experience and to understand where they were coming from. I tried to imagine their daily lives, their hours at school, their rhythm. I tried to understand their words, their space of thought, as if it were a room I could enter, or rather a room I tried to discover by sticking my head in a little bit.<\/p>\n
At that moment, I was struggling to leave my room and to walk down the hallway that connected the two rooms. In the midst of an erratic movement, I saw a neon light flickering. Was it a short-circuit? Perhaps it wasn\u2019t plugged in correctly? Was the cable bare? The bulb was shaped like a word: Enable. I walked past it, glancing at it as I reached the teachers\u2019 door. Noise, oh my goodness, so much noise! \u200b\u200bAll kinds of noises: shouts, knocking, people everywhere, laughter, furniture (windows, tables) being banged around. I took a step back to return to the hallway. I looked at my door: silence, a deathly silence, distorted sounds, monotonous words, reverberations, frantic keystrokes. I decided to stay in the hallway for a while, under the flashing neon light, looking from one door to the other, pausing to think. When they saw me, the teachers would think how lucky I was.<\/p>\n
The educational and mediation programs of public institutions seem to enjoy a much broader and more extensive freedom of action than that of educational centers. They don\u2019t have to take deal with the essential, constant, and daily care of the visiting groups. They don\u2019t bear the burden of being in an overcrowded and, therefore, inevitably tense space. They don\u2019t have to respond to so many regulations, conventions, or specific guidelines. They don\u2019t have to be constantly managing conflicts.Mediation\/education within the institution is a space that is allowed a lot of leeway and can become a breeding ground for utopias (I often think of Palle Nielsen\u2019s The Model [1]<\/sup><\/a>In 1968, Palle Nielsen built a kind of playground inside the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. For one month the museum hosted a space inhabited only for children, without families or museum staff.<\/span><\/span>