Suchergebnisse

Murals have been used by marginalized communities to demand social justice and to reinforce the collective identity. It serves as a tactic to resist invisibilization by authority, a strategy used to marginalize and control some communities. Murals' capacity to codify ideas into an image makes this practice a tool for the collective production of knowledge and education. In collaboration with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, I co-founded an art project to employ local youth to do a community mural based on Paulo Freire's notion of dialogue. I explored the use of public space, public art, and dialogue to facilitate a decolonizing pedagogical experience. My research questions are: How is public space transformed into an alternative pedagogical space through public art? How does a public art project preserve the collective memory in new generations and inform them about local social issues? How does a dialogue based project enable youth empowerment and critical thinking? The project took place in Humboldt Park in Chicago, a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood. I worked with seven teenagers for six weeks. The first two weeks we engaged in conversations with community leaders and local socially engaged artists. The next four weeks the participants developed a concept, which included cultural symbols and images. The data was collected through journals, videos, photos and the artwork itself. The metamorphosis of the dialogue into public art is parallel to politicization in the public sphere. The intervention of public art in public space serves to articulate and expose community struggles, identity, and inequalities. Through codification, dialogue emerges as an ongoing process, constantly mutating before, during and after the mural painting. The project unveils identity gaps that the participants were not aware of. These gaps awaken a curiosity for their own culture and identity, as well as to the social issues in the local community. I noticed the group dynamic became a platform for the participants to create new social bonds and to meet community leaders. Through conversations, tacit community struggles became evident. The public space becomes the scene to disseminate arguments that will challenge the social imagination. The strength of mural painting in education lies in the capacity to produce knowledge organically, in contrast to many institutions where knowledge is prepackaged and alien to the realities of marginalized communities.