This digital object has been developed from the University of Barcelona in Fine Arts Degree context, most specifically, in Contemporary Visual Arts Subject.
Summary
The first days of class I realized that it was not a conventional one. This course was not about learning by heart specific concepts, this course was about questioning this concepts and creating a dialogue between the people in the class. The truth is that at the first time I felt very violent about this “way of doing” because I was not used to it where it was essential to the students to have an active attitude, to intervene, to join in the talk and I feel completely unable to arrange my ideas, and to share them. It causes me a kind of personal crisis because I saw that for some of my partners was easier to join the class and I didn’t understand why it was so hard for me. My self-distrust paralyzed my participation in the group but, on my own without being aware I started to get more and more implicated.
I think that the role of the teacher has been vital for this experience. He keep the full two hours shooting us with questions, with kay quotes or bibliographies of different authors like Siri Hustvedt, Gurpegui, Terese Kaufmann, G. Deleuze, Maite Larrauri, J. Lacant, or Byung-Chul Han. When we started to do the research about Desire, we created different groups and we could choose the specific aspect of desire which fit better with our own interest. I was so lucky with my group, we were able to share our wonderings, feelings, desires and moral dilemmas, it was easier than to share them with the hole group. Actually we were like a team, and quickly I found my place in it.
When we started the research about the Desire, one thing that helped me a lot was to feel that the teacher was not above us, controlling what we were doing or checking our work, I felt that he trusted his students. Sometimes this freedom scared me, and made me feel a little lost, but he was there with us in the moments when we were stucked. It was a pity that we didn’t had time to share the discoveries and the new questions between groups and to continue the research as one.
From my point of view, the main difference between this course and the other subjects, was that I actually did an autobiographical research. I was included on the subject-matter. In fact the whole course was about how the artistic capitalism and the visual culture impact in me, what things in me are colonized and in which things am I a colonizer, and the most important thing, what can I do about it? Instead of finding answers to it, a lot of questions were born in my mind: Do I really have any thought or desire that is not colonized? Is it possible to emancipate my thoughts and my desires of all this mechanisms? Where am I placed in the colonial matrix of power?…and of course all this questions made me feel so confused, until today.
Today, most of those questions are still without a clear answer, but thanks to all of this process, now I’m not so scared of sharing my thoughts and experiences to the group, and I’m more self-confident with my own thoughts. I have learned to ask the “reality” from a conscious positioning and to be aware of where my desires and thoughts come from.
The DIYproject, made me think that while I was studding all this years in high school and the first years of university I’ve missed this kind of strategies, and the experience to be really implicated in my projects. The idea of making a retrospective and thinking about my learning process has been a challenge but also has made me be conscious about my lacks and has made me meet and consider other ways to do, to think and to desire.
By: Loida de Vargas Medina