Artists and Radical Education in Latin America, 1960s—1970s Event

Lecture by Giulia Lamoni and Cristiana Tejo organised by Barbara Mahlknecht and Elke Krasny.

Conceived as a radical site of individual and collective emancipation at a time of political oppression in many countries in Latin America, the creation of pedagogic projects by artists in the 1960s and 1970s, often founded in a symbolic break with the institutional space of the classroom or the museum, developed in multiple and heterogeneous directions. Started in November 2018, the research project “Artists and radical education in Latin America: 1960s-1970s”—based at Nova University in Lisbon—intends to analyse, in a feminist perspective, the intervention of women artists in the field of experimental art education in the 1960s and 1970s, a period characterized by shifting gender roles and growing demands for female emancipation.
Drawing on the project´s research territories, this lecture proposes to explore the relations between artistic practice and education in Brazil since the 1950s, with a specific focus on the role of art critic Frederico Morais and the Domigos da Criação at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro in 1971 and on the teaching activity of artist Anna Bella Geiger in the early 1970s. Furthermore, the projection of artist Paola Anziché´s film “Sur le traces…” will be an opportunity to reflect on Lygia Clark´s classes held at the Sorbonne in Paris in the same period and on the historicization of education processes.

Giulia Lamoni is an art historian exploring the articulations between art and feminisms in Portugal and Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s, the relations between contemporary art and migratory processes, and the shaping of transnational artistic networks, heterogeneous forms of collaboration and dialogue from the 1960s to the present.
She is a visiting assistant professor at Nova University in Lisbon and a researcher at the Art History Institute at the same university. She co-curated, with Margarida Brito Alves and Filomena Serra, the exhibition Co-Habitar at Casa da América Latina in Lisbon (2016-2017), and is currently working on a solo exhibition of artist Eugénia Mussa that will open in January 2017. Her texts have been published in Third Text and n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal, and in exhibitions catalogues and books from Centro de Arte Moderno / Gulbenkian Foundation, Centre Pompidou, and Tate Modern.

Cristiana Tejo (Brazil) is an integrated member of the Contemporary Art cluster of Art History Institute at Nova University in Lisbon and researcher at the project Artists and Radical Education in Latin America: 1960s-1970s. She was the co-founder of Espaço Fonte – Center of Art Investigation and co-curated the 32nd Panorama of Brazilian Art, MAM-SP (2011). She is the former director of Museum of Modern Art in Recife (2007-2008) and was the curator of Rumos Artes Visuais of Itaú Cultural (2005-2006). She was also the curator of the special room of Paulo Bruscky at Havana’s Biennial (2009) and Bruscky Invent’s at Dan Gunn Gallery (Berlin, 2015). Her main publications are Five dimensions of curating (2017), the organization of Paulo Bruscky: Art and multimedia (2014) and Panorama of emergent thought (2011). Her most recent text was published at the book Teresa Burga: Aleatories structures, by Jrp-Ringer publishing house. She has been writing for Select and Terremoto art magazines. Cristiana took part in many juries such as BACA (Maastricht 2014), Videobrasil (2013), Prêmio Marcantônio Vilaça CNI-SESI (2006), Salão Arte Pará (2007), Salão de Arte of MAM-BA (2007) and Salão de Goiás (2006). She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology at University State of Pernambuco.