Educational Service Exhibitions

A partnership between the Serralves Foundation and Porto Municipal Council, intergenerational project ‘I am 25’ brings together the users of Day Care Centre Bom Pastor (Portuguese Red Cross) and the children and adolescents living at Centre António Cândido. The project’s basic premises are that the relationship between different generations plays a crucial structuring role at all ages and that contemporary art is a unique stimulus to creativity and personal expression. 

This year sees the project’s seventh edition: a time to reflect, reinforce ties and foster the will to carry on. A time to explore the limitless potential of every instant and see it as unique and unrepeatable, beyond the challenges it may present. Inspired by Sérgio Godinho’s song Dias úteis [Working Days], the group experienced the routines that mark everyday life to reassert the merit of simple things and the transforming value of affects and true joy. 

In 1956, when Paris resident Hungarian architect Yona Friedman presented his ‘Mobile Architecture’ manifesto, low cost trips were not yet on the horizon, the reality of ‘the home office’ sounded like sci-fi and globalization was not yet called by that name. However, his visionary genius had foreseen a world based on flexibility, a mobile world adaptable to the various needs of city dwellers.

Although the complexity of the new challenges that face today’s society is more daunting than the reality of the Cold War — starkly present on the horizon of the late 1950s —, many of Friedman’s principles were incorporated into architectural vocabulary in various ways. Seen as utopian for a while, his ideas now influence a new generation of urban planners and architects dedicated to studying renewed forms of inhabiting and coexisting in a society.

Recognizing the significance of these concepts the Educational Service of the Serralves Museum chose them as the theme for the Annual Project with Schools 2017/2018. Based on project methodology practice, we have invited schools to reflect on our way of conceiving and experiencing our physical spaces and how we interact with the world through them.

Following encounters with teachers, a seminar and workshops for students and teachers, Serralves challenged each group to reflect on these issues with the purpose of creating a flexible, participative and participated building proposal.

The different constructions that now make up the exhibition ‘Annual Project with Schools’ form a stable, adaptable and mouldable city capable of better addressing the needs of its inhabitants.

We are grateful to the 50 schools from the districts of Aveiro, Braga, Bragança, Porto, Lisbon, Viana do Castelo, Vila Real and Viseu who have participated in this edition of our Annual Project with Schools.

A special word of gratitude is due to the architect Yona Friedman, who kindly offered us the possibility of reproducing his drawings on the walls of the exhibition and thus share with our visitors the fluidity, humanity and lucidity of his work.

What is learning? What is the role of curiosity in the pedagogical process? And how can artistic expression be brought into the adventure of curiosity and discovery? These are some of the questions that nurtured the 2016/2017 Annual Project With Schools and guided the thirteen workshops we developed for pre-school to secondary school students, teachers and groups with special educational needs. 

Believing that the learning process could and should include components such as involvement and fruition offered by the act of playing, we asked participating schools to begin by asking ‘What is learning?’ and create a video and a game. The videos, which tell of the unreserved commitment of teachers and students to the project, took the form of testimonials that address this question and expand our notion of learning. The games were created by the various classes based on a standard game-board and led to the very serious play involved in the process of discovery, of getting to know oneself and the world.

We invite everyone to enjoy the learning game featured in this exhibition and would like to thank the 32 schools from the districts of Aveiro, Braga and Porto which participated in this edition of the Annual Project With Schools. 

Concept and organization: Educational Service of the Serralves Foundation 

What idea do we have of our body today? How do we represent it and feel it? What place does it occupy in the social, natural and virtual space? What place do we give it in the street, in schools, at home, in relationships we establish with others? These were the questions that we asked the school community and were the basis of the Annual Project with Schools for the 2015-2016 school year, whose theme is BODY IMAGES.

The Annual Project with Schools brings together dozens of schools at different levels of education every year, from pre-school to secondary school, in a continuous relationship with the Serralves Park and the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. Its goal is to promote cooperation between school and museum, to foster the creation of an educational trans-disciplinary space in which the artistic and environmental experience has an effective place within the context of formal education. 

42 schools joined the project, from the districts of Porto, Aveiro, Vila Real and Braga. The works now shown were developed throughout the 2015-2016 school year. They are the testimony of a prolonged conversation that took place at the Schools, and between them and the Serralves Foundation, through a programme of activities at the Museum, at the Villa and at the Park directed at teachers and students, which included visits, workshops, itineraries, discussions on the work process and a seminar for teachers. 

Concept and organization: Educational Service of the Serralves Foundation

How does one build to build a house? How does one build a school to build a school? How to build a city? How to build a community? What resources are there at our disposal to do so build them? What stories and images can we create to build the foundations of these buildings without stones or walls? These questions were at the source of the Annual Project with Schools 2014/2015, under the theme of Constructions in Transit. The Annual Project with Schools brings together dozens of schools from different levels - from pre-school to secondary - in a prolonged relationship with the Serralves Foundation. The aim of the programme is to promote the cooperation between schools and the museum while fostering the creation of a trans-disciplinary educational space in which the arts and the environment might have a crucial presence in the context of formal education. 

Concept and organization: Education Department of the Serralves Foundation