Between Art and Education: The Spectator-Participant at the 9th São Paulo Biennial (1967)

• Grant number: 24/17362-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: April 30, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts
• Principal Investigator: Gabriel Ferreira Zacarias
• Grantee: Laura Manganote
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to study public participation and the interventions carried out in the exhibition space of the IX São Paulo Biennial (1967) from an expanded conception of art education, analyzing them in relation to contemporary conceptions of mediation. We seek to understand the participatory artistic proposals inserted there based on their educational and pedagogical potential, whether in the way they stimulate critical understandings of reality and the viewer's autonomy through experience, or in the way they raise questions about conceptions of mediation and problematize hierarchical educational practices. Based on this, we will trace tensions between the non-institutional educational dynamics promoted by the exhibition's multiple agents and the formal pedagogy proposed by the institution, seeking to understand the different notions of mediation imbricated in contemporary art exhibitions and their incipience at the IX Bienal. To do this, we will use as a source documentation from the Bienal Archive and the National Archive, as well as newspapers and magazines available in the Brazilian Digital Hemeroteca, mapping the events related to spectator participation. As part of the theoretical-methodological approaches to the history of exhibitions, the project seeks to expand the studies surrounding the event from a transdisciplinary perspective crossed by art, philosophy and education.