Education activities

Museum by Hand offers anybody with impaired vision the possibility of participating in various tactile visits giving access to a series of original sculptures from the Museum’s Collection, offering a perspective on the revolution in the traditional concept of sculpture that took place throughout the 20^th century. The works and tours offered are renewed periodically as the Collection is redistributed.

Guernica, Testimony of an Epoch is a descriptive visit aimed at blind or partially sighted people and their companions, the object of which is to create easier access to works which, while being of major importance in the Collection, are not suitable for tactile exploration due to the technical characteristics of the pieces.

If it was a Movement… is an ongoing project which, for the fifth consecutive year, is directed at Special Education Schools in order to present an intuitive and essentially sensorial approach to the works of art. A dancer and an instrumentalist lead a journey around various rooms and works in the Museum, during which music and dance are the languages used to experience the form and the content inherent in each work, looking into ways of communicating other than the verbal.

The starting point for this activity is the exhibition Biographical Forms (November 26, 2013 to March 31, 2014). The exhibition’s focus is the various elements concurrent in any biographical construct or story, such as childhood and relatives, places and spaces one has lived in, travel, recollections and memory, expectations and the various relationships one is involved in over a lifetime. After a visit looking at the way that these elements are dealt with in selected works, the pupils will have the chance to develop their own creative processes based around biography and autobiography.

During the academic year of 2013-14 we are starting up a new activity aimed at upper Primary Education. This new project incorporates a number of elements taken from drama such as gesture, body language, staging and the expressive potential of lighting, in order to use them to achieve educational objectives. This means that the theatrical becomes a method through which the pupils can get involved in the works and create new experiences based on them.

The Museum has been running its If it was a Movement activity for the past four academic years. This is an activity that offers an intuitive and essentially sensorial approach to the Collection’s works. A dancer and an instrumentalist lead a journey around various rooms and works in the Museum, during which music and dance are the languages used to experience the form and the content inherent in each work. This is an approach to art through art itself, searching for ways of communicating other than the verbal.

Echoes is an experience based around active listening and sound production as ways of approaching the Museum’s contents. It is an activity that enables the exploration of the sounds implicit in certain works, as well as establishing connections between the world of sound and that of specific avant-garde movements such as Abstraction. Echoes is an attempt to find new methods and routes of art appreciation.

Leap into the Void is an activity for adults and children following the path forged by various artists from the late 1950s onwards which enabled them to shake off the limitations set down by the picture plane. Beginning with Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases as a metaphor for this breaking away, and using dynamics and resources lifted from circus arts, participants are invited to pass through the picture surface and discover new horizons of creative possibilities.