International Encounter in Medellin

The International Encounter in Medellin (MDE11) will be inaugurated on September 4 and it will center on the various forms of construction and recreation of knowledge from an artistic point of view, as it evaluates the limitations and challenges of pedagogic experimentation in institutional, artistic, and public practices. Based on an initial proposal by José Roca, the curatorial team formed by Nuria Enguita-Mayo, Eva Grinstein, Bill Kelley Jr., and Conrado Uribe, developed the MDE11 concept based on a structure defined by three nucleuses: Laboratory, Study, and Exhibition. In turn, these are subdivided into several "activation zones." There is an emphasis in the processual and collaborative work directed at assessing problematics and plausible ways to generate shared knowledge from the artistic practice and among several authors, communities, collectives, and students from Medellin and other places. MDE11 will be held in the capital of Antioquia until December of this year. The encounter is organized by the Museo de Antioquia with the support of the City Hall of Medellin. It responds to a need to work within the framework of the city of Medellin and with its social and cultural agents. This projects aims at promoting educational and cultural interaction, encouraging participation and generating reflection through a polyphonic and interdisciplinary dialog. To achieve its purpose, the curatorship of MDE11 has thought the participation of collectives and diverse agents to generate community involvement from the academia as well as from the independent venues that exist in Medellin. And the MDE11 general project is the result of such collaborations. The International Encounter in Medellin has been promoted by the Museo de Antioquia since MDE07, with the objective of reconfiguring and amplifying the discourse of the citizenry from inside out and through work with artists and communities. The MDE11 was conceived to broaden and to continue such work while capitalizing on the valuable cultural resources found in Medellin. It represented a way of moving forward while respecting the artistic and pedagogic trajectory established by the museum. Medellin offers a rich and dynamic environment full of pedagogic projects both at the institutional-municipal government-and independent levels. These practices embrace pedagogic processes but resist the appropriation of the conventional ways of teaching and learning offered in the artistic field. They recognize their condition-halfway between artistic and pedagogical-as potentially leading to the proposal of new questions that generate new answers, and to the establishment of new interdisciplinary articulations. They are subversive in that they defy traditional structures of artistic production, as they re-signify and criticize the artistic establishment. They are at once producers of an infrastructure, proactive, and constructive, as their reliance in collective authorship and learning allows them to search for an effective and lasting involvement in the local processes. This year, the MDE11 proposes a continuous and open dialog through artistic practices, research inside and outside of the academic world, and through the development of community strategies and critical pedagogies that offer an alternative to the prevalent artistic environments and traditional learning processes. In this sense, the greatest challenge was to establish a close relationship with as many communities and cultural projects as possible.