Cultural and Artistic Mediation and Curatorship in school contexts

Abstract

Artistic mediation in an educational context is a core action in the relationship between teaching and learning dynamics, school spaces, artists and cultural facilities, in a beneficial convergence with wide-ranging repercussions on citizenship and democracy processes. In this article we argue that the role of artistic-cultural mediation, resulting from the overcoming of the historical model of cultural animation, can now operate in the educational territory in dialogue with the new curatorial discourses and practices. The growing emphasis on democratisation processes, cooperative models and horizontal dynamics of creation and sharing favour this understanding. The challenges posed to schools in the 21st century, challenged simultaneously by globalisation and digitalisation, call for a strategy that is permeable to involvement, co-creation, sensoriality and critical thinking, which have a renewed opportunity in the face-to-face and extended encounter with the arts.