Everything can be connected

In March I met Inês Pina, the Education Coordinator (Arts) at Serralves. We spoke about festivals, drawing on the school desks, and how to connect multiple and diverse opinions on art.

The conversation started in the education studio and then continued during a quick tour of the galleries. Inês showed me the new wing and the two artworks that she’d picked in answer to my final two questions. 

Lawrence Bradby: In the UK I worked in gallery education. I’m interested in learning about the culture of gallery education here in Portugal. How does it operate? What are its priorities? What are its rewards? So my first question is about your experience of the job: what’s the most enjoyable project you’ve worked on at Serralves?

Inês Pina: I started working at Serralves in February 2023. Within all the projects over the last year there were two that I particularly enjoyed. One was Serralves em Festa. It’s a huge celebration, a free 50-hour non-stop festival. There are many many people inside the museum. It’s one of the best ways to celebrate what we do here for the whole year, but for a broader audience. And I was programming things that I don’t usually program – music, circus and theatre. 

There was another project I really liked. It was starting the moment I arrived in the new job so it was one of the first projects that I did. It was called 'Frequencies', by artist Oscar Murillo. The idea is that there are canvases stapled onto the students’ desks at school. The canvases stay there for six months because the artist wants the students to forget that they are doing it. 

L: So he doesn’t want the students to respond to the excitement of the new, he wants it to be part of their normal school day.

I: It needs to be raw information that goes on there. Oscar Murillo is Colombian but he moved to London when he was ten and he wants to address questions of identity. What does globalism bring to notions of identity? Do kids this age have the same patterns or different patterns according to where they live?

Serralves was the mediator between the artist’s studio and the schools. I had a chance to go to every school and give a presentation about the project. 

There are a lot of boundaries that enter in this project. First of all I needed to tell the students that they could write or draw whatever they want.

L: You didn’t prohibit anything, like hate speech?

I: What I told teachers is that the artist wanted these canvases to be absolutely representative. They can become a battleground but they can also become a place of dialogue. If you have hate speech then you also have someone writing over it, and starting a dialogue. Instead of saying ‘Don’t write that, this is forbidden’ the teacher could say ‘I found this on one of the desks’ and use this as an opportunity to have dialogue. 

L: You said that part of the enjoyment for you was visiting these schools. Were some of these new relationships with schools that Serralves hadn’t worked with before. 

I: No, they were all schools that had already worked with Serralves. The call was open to schools in the north of Portugal: there were schools from Aveiro, Bragança, Armamar, Matosinhos, and other places. When I presented the project I realised that even though the teachers had worked with us, most of the children involved hadn’t heard of Serralves. I wasn’t expecting this. 

It was important for this project to happen because now all the school groups are coming here to see the final exhibition. They want to see what other students their age have written on the canvases. In terms of school projects and interacting directly with schools this was one of my favourites. 

L: Tell me a bit about how school visits to Serralves are structured.

I: When I arrived one year ago I wanted to reframe the education programme. I wanted to include the park, the museum: all the spaces. And I wanted to see what the connections were between the school programmes. We want the programme to be easy to read, so we planned a maximum of four activities per school key stage. We offer architecture and cinema activities to some key stages, but not to all of them.

School groups come here for two hours maximum. We cannot expect them to have an art class in this time. The visit is an opportunity for them to see different mediums, different artists, different artworks. This is going to influence them in some way; even if they don’t go into art, they learn about context, about the skills you can learn to achieve what you want to do.  

The other day during a school visit we had a conversation about one of the first abstract painters in Portugal. He was very interested in science. He even designed an astronomy room for a secondary school here in Porto. 

L: What’s his name?

I: Fernando Lanhas. He was really interested in getting the measurements right and the numbers accurate. We have an artwork of his which is a map of all the meteorites that have crossed Portugal or fallen in Portugal since the eighteenth century. 

L: Was that on show downstairs, in the exhibition curated by the writer, err, I wrote her name down …. Augustina Bessa-Luis?

I: Yes. 

L: That map is so poetic. It has this dry humour. Meteorites clearly don’t respect national borders, but the map uses Portugal’s borders to determine which meteorites are and are not shown. 

I: The thing about Lanhas’s work is it gives school groups the notion that everything is valid. Any of your interests can become an art project. In the same way, if you're working in science you can bring in other disciplines to help you with that.

L: This brings us back to what you were saying about the benefits of school groups coming here: children can learn different skills. They can experience a wide range of things, some of which they may return to later.

I: I don’t mediate school groups very often right now but I need this contact. You get a lot from it. I used to work in a communication museum dealing with science and technology. And that experience was much more hands-on. For instance, Morse, who invented the morse code, was a painter. And one of the first pieces of telegraphic equipment was invented by a pianist. This cross-disciplinary aspect is very relevant for schools.

I’m an educator. This is very specific for me. I can work with all types of collections — telephones, stamps, cinema. What’s important is making sense of objects, making a narrative. 

L: So your role in different museums has been to remind the artists that the scientists are important and vice versa. 

I: Working across disciplines is very important. When we look at the learning skills listed in the documents from the Ministry of Education we see that working across disciplines is already encouraged. In a school environment it’s not that easy to engage different disciplines within one theme but in museums we can establish these connections. In the two hours that they’re here we talk about math, geometry, poetry. Eventually they get interested in an artist or they want to come back.

I still remember the first time I came to Serralves. It’s very vivid. I got a feeling that I didn’t get in other museums. I got the feeling that this was a free space: I could go wherever I wanted, in and out of the buildings, and choose what I wanted to look at.

I had a group recently and I asked them a question and no one said anything. So I told them ‘You are going to reply; this isn’t going to work if we don’t talk.’ They’re afraid of saying the wrong thing but there are no wrong answers. Even if a student says something further from what is expected, even if you have to say that this is not what you were looking for, you can always validate their answer. You can always connect it. 

L: Do you mean that you can support the person who said the unexpected thing and make them feel their contribution was valid?

I: Yes! That’s why we’re mediators because we’re going to connect what a student says with something relevant. This is the best and most difficult part of our job, to have a group of 20 or 25 people in front of you and to connect all of this so it’s valuable to all of the people there. In the group you probably have 25 different ideas about an artwork. It’s what artists do – they offer us artworks which can bear many connected meanings.

L: I’ve got two final questions. The first is: what artwork is most popular with children on primary school visits?

I: There’s an artwork in the new wing with a piano which plays itself and coloured balloons and flashing lights (Philippe Parreno, Quasi Objects: Marquee (cluster), Disklavier Piano, My Room is a Fish Bowl, 2014). One father told me that once his young daughter had reached the room where this is, she wouldn’t move on. He asked why we put the best artwork halfway along, adding Now I can’t see anything else. 

L: Which artwork would you like to have at home for a month?

I: Obviously I can't take anything home from the museum, but if I could it would be a small painting by Tala Madani called 'Flashlight in the mouth' (oil on canvas, 2013). 

I liked it even more after I heard the artist’s explanation — it’s about people who think they are enlightened. The artist also says that she sizes her paintings depending on the size of the emotion – the bigger the emotion or difficulty, the smaller the painting in order to contain that dangerous energy. And I was surprised by the really small size of the painting when I first saw it.

I’d like to have this right by the front door to look at before I go out in the world amongst people who think they’re enlightened. A humility mirror before leaving the house.

L: I’m definitely enlightened after this discussion. Thanks Inês.