/the_field
(20_may_2022)
This course taught by Daniel Charny, curator, was an introduction to event and exhibition
organisation where we did different tasks to learn how to set up an event like ours, MDEFest,
in a successful and meaningful way.
During these sessions, we started to create divisions and groups within our class, first in a
random way and then in a more meaningful way, and we tried to create discourse and a narrative
behind it that could make sense of the hypothetical exhibition. During the first group exercise,
I got together with José, Paula, Busi, Fiorella and Andrea and we created a discourse focused on
the Symbiotic Perceptions concepts. This was the result of our union:
After the second session where we presented the different exhibitions, we created groups again, this time bigger and more related to our projects instead of doing them randomly. In this case, I joined the Hidden Agencies group which contained topics related to Bodies and Sensing, Meta Relations and Bio-Narratives.
The third and fourth sessions, both face-to-face, were devoted to preparing the groups for MDEFest and were no longer hypothetical groups. During these sessions, we had to use objects that were related to our projects to represent what our activities during MDEFest were about, and then interrelate these themes with those of other people. The purpose of all this was to create groups so that we could divide the festival into areas and see which projects were assimilated into others so that it all made more sense.
Also, in these sessions, we were deciding the name of the festival, and the umbrella that would envelop all the works and projects we have developed throughout this year.
As a reflection of this course, I think that at this time of the year more effort should be dedicated to the projects and activities of MDEFest than to creating groups for an exhibition and giving a title to an event. We did 4 sessions of 3h each during one of the busiest times of the year and, although it was interesting to learn about that topic, having to create hypothetical exhibitions with randomly made groups didn't help much. Finally, we used neither the groups nor the titles created in class, nor the title of the MDEFest, and I think this is also significant. And as I said, I found it interesting, but perhaps not very convenient.