On March 14, 2020, a state of alarm was declared across the country. The COVID 19 pandemic was reaching our cities and was going to affect our lives with changes we were not yet able to imagine. We were (and are) scared and perplexed; willing to follow confinement orders and build the future with new habits to preserve health, the economy, and everything we understood was part of a social system that changed instantly. And we believe that it was the noun “instantaneous” that somehow gave rise to what would be a didactic activity that had as much uncertainty as charm.
We came up with Laboratorio Escóitasme? for 15 days, we did a network broadcast and sent messages to the families who came to our workshops.
Laboratorio Escóitasme? it was put into operation seven days after they had confined the whole of Spanish territory. We thought about offering an activity for 12 days … we reached 52 uninterrupted sessions over 10 weeks. Except on Sunday, every day was Laboratorio Escóitasme?
the exhibition
With all the material made by artists and participants and with the pedagogical learning generated, we now propose an exhibition of the project in two rooms of the Foundation.
On the ground floor, a perimeter of tables will collect each of the proposals launched by the artists and the results obtained. They are works that have materialized in different formats. Each artist will have its space in which it appears made explicit what the proposal was; the works of the participants are the material of the sample. And Seoane’s works the script from which they departed.
Upstairs, a newspaper that collects day by day a selected news story from those that appeared in the media during that time in which we were confined to our homes. And a skyline from which the strips of that skyline descend to the ground floor, showing the “words” and interventions of the 52 days of confinement. In this upper floor the didactic activities will be carried out (maximum of 25 assistants) that are conformed by the 25 proposed challenges.
There will be, in this way, a didactic approach “à la carte”, both for groups of schools and for those visitors who wish to participate; this time analogically.
So on March 21, International Poetry Day, we read Seoane’s poems and launched the first challenge for the next day: a visual poetry, a set of rhymes, or a free poetics would be the first works for the next day. And as Seoane’s chosen verses were an ode to Galician emigrants, we asked for a family genealogy to be made that reflected the intrahistory of each of us who, in an unforeseen way, could not move from where we were confined.
Thus began Laboratorio Escóitasme?, a project that was conceived as a children’s and youth activity and ended up being “a meeting of families”.
In parallel to the creative challenges, also we came up with the idea of building new meanings that the quarantine itself forced to rethink.
Thus arose the idea of constructing “words” that children and adults proposed almost unintentionally. Then, we would have a new goal: we should give an image to the “word” invented. The first one was INXILIO.