Revista DIÁLOGOS com a arte

RAPHAEL VELLA: NON-FORMAL ART EDUCATION IN A VISUAL ARTS FESTIVAL IN MALTA

Art education that does not keep abreast of developments in the contemporary art world eventually becomes irrelevant. It is with this idea in mind that I started work as artistic director of the second edition of the Valletta International Visual Arts festival (VIVA) in Malta in 2015. VIVA is a new, modestly-sized festival, made to the measure of the island of Malta’s limited cultural budget, facilities and human resources. Yet, there are virtues in smallness, amongst which I would include the relative ease of establishing networks and creating projects that impact cultural stakeholders on a national scale. In fact, the festival was initiated to establish international connections that could contribute positively to a developing local artistic scene and to bring important curators and visual artists to Malta. In the 2015 edition, held in September-October, the festival included the work of international artists such as Yael Bartana, Femke Bakker, Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Khaled Jarrar and Zineb Sedira but, given the general title of this edition (“Communities and Contexts”), I decided to upgrade the festival by complementing its cultural events with a researched educational programme that would bring different members of the public and communities into contact with contemporary art and visiting artists as well as curators like Fulya Erdemci, Simon Sheikh, Adam Budak and others who were invited to present their ideas in a Curatorial School. VIVA would thus provide the framework for new educational encounters that would in turn advocate for the significance of the arts in our lives.

One of the most noteworthy educational projects in VIVA 2015 was unLOCK, a project by Maltese art educator Pierre Mifsud held in collaboration with a group of male inmates from the national correctional facility. Mifsud met these prison inmates many times over several months, teaching them in a makeshift ‘studio’ created to permit them to work creatively. Inspired by Ai Weiwei’s work about his own imprisonment in China—an installation called S.A.C.R.E.D. and shown at Sant’Antonin church at the Venice Biennale in 2013 (a work that the inmates had only seen in reproductions)—they decided to work collaboratively in order to “bounce back to the Light,….living a sense of inner freedom, always in continual self-discovery”, as one inmate stated. Their collaborative piece was a very large, grey box with keyholes through which individuals could look to see individual sculptural metaphors of the inmates’ desire for a better life.  Its installation in the basement of the School of Art led to its being shown to a much larger public, including family members of the inmates.

Another educational project that formed part of VIVA was What’s your secret?, conceived by curator Mare van Koningsveld and Dutch artist and educator Yvonne Blaauw. What’s your secret? was composed of a series of educational workshops held in homes for the elderly in Holland and Malta. The ‘secret’ that each elderly participant was asked for was the secret of successful ageing, which each participant was expected to represent visually and/or textually on a postcard. These postcards were then sent to their counterparts in the other country’s home; hence, the Dutch postcards travelled to Malta while the Maltese postcards went to Holland.

Two other educational workshops forming part of VIVA were intended for youths. A weeklong drawing workshop with German artist Christoph Schäfer called Imagination and the City was held in a community centre belonging to a group of volunteers working in the parish of St Paul’s in the capital city, with excursions around the streets of Valletta. The second youth project, Youth identity portraits, was organised by art educator Charmaine Zammit in collaboration with a national youth agency, and urged young participants to discover themselves through a deep engagement with works in the festival as well as other works at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta.

In the best of conditions, formal schooling can be a tool of advocacy for the arts. The problem, perhaps, is that it usually isn’t sufficiently effective.  There are various reasons for this, amongst which we could mention: the general perception that art is a ‘soft’ school subject, not meant to take up too much time from the daily timetable; the separation between the kind of activities that fall under the category ‘art’ at school and whatever is called ‘art’ in the art world; the lack of provisions for art in many schools and curricula. If we really believe that the arts contribute in a substantial way to the intellectual, emotional and social development of each human being, regardless of gender, age, cultural background and economic class, then we need to work to improve the situation of the arts in our formal educational systems. Many art teachers and arts educators based in universities have dedicated their lives to doing this. Yet, if we want the arts to be relevant to the lives of individuals and communities in our contemporary world, we need to look beyond compulsory schooling too and think of the arts as a lifelong process that reinvigorates the self and society. Hence, the implementation of non-formal art educational projects in different contexts is essential to improve the professional and social status of the arts, to develop new cultural and social networks through the arts, and to help people who have ‘failed’ during their schooling years reconnect with the world.

Raphael Vella is an art educator based at the Department of Arts, Open Communities and Adult Education at the University of Malta.  He is also active as a visual artist and organiser of arts events and workshops. The Valletta International Visual Arts Festival is organised by Valletta 2018 Foundation, St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity, Agenzija Zghazagh and Arts Council Malta.