Vista nocturna de Medellín

Since 2003 I have been involved in educative projects with different groups of people, including children, teenagers, adults, students, artists or just people interested in the projects. I have work in different institutions as well as independent projects. As an artist, I am also interested in the other, so I like to know myself more through the others, my work, my drawing. In 2004 we developed the first multidisciplinary artistic project: “La Miscelánea”. The idea is to communicate through art.

Mi taller en taller 7, Medellín Colombia

In 2006 Medellín City Council invited “La Miscelánea” group to develop a project which showed what was going on with the young people who was sleeping and living in Medellín streets. We talking about the topic for two months, thinking about the potential materializations. The first attempt was to work with an organization which worked with those teenagers, but in fact, it was not a good idea. We have different perspectives. They did not take into account what was agreed before, so we decided not to work with them and to find help somewhere else.

We had an interview with a woman who had been working with young people living in the street for more than 20 years. She is the owner of a school and a residence for them. We visited them and the movitation that he experienced after those visits helped us to design a project which we developed in one month, four visits, four workshops of three or four hours each, using ephemeral, simple and cheap materials. 1 visit: We took some pictures and talked with them. We realised how bad they felt about the fact that a lot people used to visit them but they never came back.

2 visit: We showed them the photos as a gift and they expressed their happiness and respect. We had a chat and we drew with chalk on the street. 3 visit: We created some stencils from the drawings that they had drawn during the last, and we used them in the street and also, because they asked for that, on their clothes.

4 visit: From the first visit, they told us how important the photos were for them. Is because of that why we worked about the idea of portrait, of being, of belong. We provided them with the materials and we drew them, motivating them to draw us. A lot of them wanted to keep their portraits in order not to forget the experienced that they had. Then, they hung them on the wall of their space.

when the activity was over, we shared some drinks to say goodbye and close the project. The representative people from the City Council were there and even they seemed to be so motivated with the project, it never continued. One week after that we came back to visit them and the drawing on the wall were not there anymore. They told us that as they liked them so much, they did not want to keep them safe. This project were not produced by any museum, it was conceived and developed to explore a specific group of people from Medellín. The public and the participants were the same and even they were under the effect of the “glue” that they inhale they really enjoyed the activities and they expressed it. The strategy itself was the lack of strategy, of a specific plan. We were able to read though their faces, to listen their stories and using our conclusions, we designed a simple activity each week, which allowed them and us, to share a moment in our life. Currently, thousand of young people, women and children live and sleep in the streets of Medellín. Some adults have lived in the street since they were young but if you are a child and you are in the street, is really difficult to grow up and became an adult. 20 people worked together on this project: photographers, artists, publicists, history experts, with or without experience, the idea was to share and to develop projects. Nowadays, when talking about our projects within “La Miscelánea”, we prefer not to call them Artistic Manifestations. We better talk about Esthetic Manifestations in order to avoid the discussion about if what we do is art or not. We prefer to discuss about other projects and problems.