Like the Palm of My Hand

Mediation Between In-Person and Online Education

Tuesday, 24 November 2020 - 7pm
Place
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Capacity
75 people
Organised by:

Museo Reina Sofía

Force line:

Rethinking the Museum

Education programme developed with the sponsorship of Banco Santander Foundation

Como la palma de mi mano

In late 2019, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Area began working jointly with mediator, artist and curator Christian Fernández Mirón on an independent mediation project that evolved into Like the Palm of My Hand, a set of virtual journeys, aimed at different audiences, that enables the experience of the Museo to expand beyond physical presence in its rooms, offering a new path for the Museo and its visitors. As a result, two initial journeys take the form of Map for Expanded Families and The Invisible Museum.

Like the Palm of My Hand seeks to illuminate new forms of doing from the digital sphere to reflect on virtual possibilities in cultural institutions. 

Throughout the encounter, conversations will centre on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected museum institutions, how projects in the Museo’s Education Area have been transformed, and the nuts and bolts of the working process for Like the Palm of My Hand framed in this context. The journeys currently being developed will also be presented. 

The presentation will feature the participation of the project’s director, Christian Fernández Mirón, art and education specialist Patricia Raijenstein, and the Museo’s Education Area team.

Like the Palm of My Hand currently offers the following journeys:

Map for Expanded Families

This route touches on themes such as care, affection and diversity. Aided by some of the works housed in the Museo, the audience are invited to work together to create a joint map that reflects upon the links connecting some people with others.   

The Invisible Museum

This route turns its gaze towards the hidden side of the Museo Reina Sofía, to what happens backstage, focusing on the voices we don’t usually hear and works we don’t often see displayed in its rooms.

The following routes will be available shortly:

Non-Evaluable

This teacher-centred journey — configured from the transversal contents of the Organic Law for the Improvement of Educational Quality (LOMCE) — will put forward actions that invite joint imagining and thinking via questions connected to school learning and deemed urgent by the education community.

Crippled Paths. Journeys to Debate Aspects of Regulation

The term that gives these journeys their name comes from Crip Theory, and thus reappropriates the insult historically attributed to people with functional diversity, as a critique of the normative body that is built, socially and culturally, in categories such as that which distinguishes between the abled and the disabled.

Crippled Paths are brief, independent journeys that can be downloaded and open up walks around the outside of the Museo — its courtyards, corridors, rooms — in audio and a readable text format. The journeys have been conceived for experimentation rooted in functional diversity and with a view to fostering sensations and strangeness that help to establish communication with the audience through access to cultural institutions. The audience can reflect upon their impressions via questionnaires that will be available on the same download page.      

These journeys are framed inside the programme AMuseumForOneAndAll, the primary aim of which is to calibrate, through collaboration, accessibility in the specific context of the Museo. 


Participants

María Acaso is head of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Area.

Christian Fernández Mirón works and draws from projects that move between art and education, and is concerned with working with people and communities, shared doubts and learning, and the search for collective intimacies. He has also developed mediation initiatives, questioning and exploring pedagogies, sensibilities and established formats in the independent and self-managed sphere and in related institutional frameworks in Spain, Colombia and England. 

Cristina Gutiérrez Andérez is a Schools coordinator in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Area.

Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca is a Community coordinator in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Area.

Alba Pérez Cadenas is a Mediation coordinator in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Area.

Patricia Raijenstein develops mediation projects and focuses her interests on forms of relationships between museums and their audiences and visitors via artistic strategies, viewing education and art as meaningful social tools for communities. Following these premises, she develops projects in cultural and education organisations, and teaches visual culture classes in the European Design Institute and collaborates with different agents and institutions such as the School of Electro-Sound Crafts and the Community of Madrid’s Young Art Room. In 2019-2020 she has been working as a Mediation advisor in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Area. 

Javier Sanjurjo is an Accessibility coordinator in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Education Area.


Educación: Patrocina: Fundación Banco Santander