Utopia, education and artistic practices: lumpenperformance as pedagogical strategy to create hope in the context of abandonment in the urban periphery

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic work, this article analyzes how a committed pedagogy in a public school, located in the urban periphery of Mexico City, uses artistic practices such as performance in order to help students to explore the abandonment that prevails within their communities, triggering at the same time the possibility to imagine a hopeful future. These actions are understood as lumpenperformances where students recur to objects of waste, creating bodily images to metaphorize precarious conditions that prevail in their context, and revealing afterwards an image that conveys hope when they get rid of the disposal at the end of all these actions. Thus, the article posits to think lumpenperformances as research/creation pedagogical process where students learn collectively to articulate a utopic gesture that is not banal optimism, but it is a material imagination: a sort of agency that configure ways of doing through images of disposal that become images of hope, generating a critic and sensible learning about social life in the urban periphery.