The University in the Community: a Dialogue through Art

CRESPO BUITURÓN, MARCELA

Augsburg

Conferencia; Urban Cultures Meeting; 2022

Universidad de Augsburgo

We are a group of professors, plastic artists and social workers that are working on the Art and Social Integration Project in Itatí Neighbourhood.Itatí is one of the biggest slums in Argentina and also in Latin America. But, before starting to talk about that, I invite you to rethink some concepts that I consider relevant to this question. If we come up with the city as an implementation of social processes, we must stop perceiving the informal neighbourhoods as unplanned excrescences or unformatted yuxtapositions, with difficulty in the access to basic services, and we also have to rethink the concept of urban transformation, always present in the life of the city, with a dynamism that can’t be restricted to house development or services conceived by local or national planning offices.Quite the opposite, the actions to that transformation should emerge from the organic needs of its neighbours.One of the main important questions that is necessary to attend is, of course, social integration. Nowadays, there are a lot of studies about the relevance of the artistic activities to set up ways of communication or social integration spaces in informal neighbourhoods that grow without planning urbanization processes.Community art, especially, has been a great development for the last five decades because it strengthens social links and transforms public spaces.This is the reason why the idea of founding an Art & Trade School in the informal neibourghood emerged to intervene public spaces. But it does not consist in discovering new individual artists or in providing them with art elements or tools, or in teaching them a trade, but in promoting actions that produce durable sense effects in the community field. These kinds of actions are relevant to the integration of the inhabitants in the informal neighbourhoods, whose identity is frequently questioned by the other urban sectors of high economic power or social pre-eminences. By doing so, the collective construction of means of representation or identifying symbols has, not only an aesthetic value, but also change the perception matrixes, because people who live there start to see and feel the place differently. They get identified with their neighbourhood.