Intercambios gestuales: cuerpo y diversidad en el arte. Reflexiones desde el proceso de un laboratorio de creación

Abstract

As an artists collective we have participate in the National Program of Visual Arts Creation Laboratories in Colombia for seven consecutive years. These are non-formal educational spaces spaces to exchange knowledge and experiences around both academic (from universities), traditional and community art practices. We focused more on the latter, since the laboratories we make do not address only artists but arts teachers, professors, promoters, social workers, therapists, community mothers, social leaders, caregivers, peoples with disability and other professionals working with diverse communities.

This has meant that we constantly review the social incidence responsibility in the educational process, the capability of creative and critical dialogue with different people and their contexts.

The activities generate collaborative creation projects, where collective work becomes vital, as well as the ability to research and create alternatives that affect the transformation of existing exclusion conditions. Through the body, both of facilitators and participants (roles that alternate), diversity is experienced by questioning imaginaries and dominant discourses around it.

It is from this particular experience and their reflections we expect to contribute to the debate between arts education and diversity from the body.