The Social Portrait Project: what can school education learn from community based art?

Abstract

Activist art, as an art form engaged with social contexts, has an especially interesting modality in so called Community based Art. The interest in communitarian issues is shared by diverse fields of knowledge, including education and visual arts, the two main fields of interest in this paper. The new role of artist as a cultural worker, developing his project in a specific social context, is based in a horizontal and participative vision of artistic creation. The transposition of ideas and methods of community based art into scholar education is giving rise to interesting experiences in order to develop critical thinking and social engagement among young people. In this paper we report an interpretative research on the development of a community based art experience by a group of students in secondary school. In this research, we will examine narrative and visual evidences produced by participants in several moments of the process, as recorded and shared in their personal blogs. The case study will give us some insights about the efficacy of this experience to enhance critical thinking, and to evaluate the participants’ reception of the experience itself.