Redesigning Education

SPONTANEOUS THEATRE
Using simple props, a blackboard and a cardboard stand, we staged impromptu theatrical performances in parks and street corners along the route map. Activities included performing conversations with the body, creating a continuous story, emotion-control games and the preparation work for a puppet theatre.

SPONTANEOUS SYMPHONY
Combining musical instruments with ordinary found objects like plastic tubes, taped drums and wearable found-instruments, we explored body movement, rhythm and texture of sounds throughout the streets. The recorded audio tracks showed a mix of familiar melodies, chaotic traffic, children's laughter, and sounds of venders soliciting attention. The audio tracks were later repositioned as 'pockets of symphony' throughout the exhibition space.

SPONTANEOUS PHOTOGRAPHY
The work from the photography construct reflected the participants' collective view of La Paz through multiple lenses. Provoked by curiously shaped periscopes and pinhole cameras, the activities were lessons on the physics of light, visual perception, and the possibilities into a poetic way of looking.

SPONTANEOUS POETRY
This construct on applied arts played with the possibilities of simple paper folds, writings, and challenged the museum audiences to join the street-graffiti of stories on the San Francisco plaza over the course of the exhibition.

SPONTANEOUS LA PAZ San Francisco Museum \| Exhibition 15-18th June 2011
An exhibition titled Spontaneous La Paz was put together at the final week of our stay in Bolivia, using the museum as a site of distribution and exchange of ideas. The exhibition featured the work-in-progress of this education initiative to date, and was presented as a framework of possibility and propositions, rather than as answers and solutions. Objects, photographs, audio and video curated in the space attempted to draw relationship to the various strains of inquiry. They also articulated our present success and failures, and projected our trajectory. Outlined below are the contents that were installed in the exhibition. In addition to these were sound tracks played throughout the exhibition, and a video screening of the performances held at the closing reception. Our next goal is to have all the materials organized as an online exhibition so as to continue the dialogue. _ vendingMAP The vendingMAP is an adaptive blueprint and a seminal part of this research that we would follow every day while working in La Paz. The map traces the positions and operating hours of existing vending businesses within the busiest areas of the city. Different layers of the vendingMAP reveal the activities of mobile Lustrabotas (shoe-shine boys), circulating handcarts, and stationary vending booths. Based on the highest density of the streetscape activities, three routes were designed to use vending+school_SMALL activities to perform research, instigate response and to measure success. _ EXTRA SMALL: Stocked within each vending+school_SMALL contructs were _EXTRA SMALL postcards that were handed out to participants at the end of each activity. Additional postcards were distributed through the Ludateca, hosted by ECC, as well as throughout the exhibition. The postcards provided participants with guidelines to replicate and elaborate on activities on their own time. They also allow for participants to trade with others, thereby further expanding the lesson in informal ways. _SMALL: Extending from vending+school_EXTRA SMALL instructional postcards, vending+school_SMALL constructs contain simple activities that facilitate creative expression in a structured manner. As each the four vending+school_SMALL contructs occupied the streets, tracings and evidences of creative expression and problem solving were recorded and documented.

		SPONTANEOUS THEATRE Using simple props, a blackboard and a cardboard stand, we staged impromptu theatrical performances in parks and street corners along the route map. Activities included performing conversations with the body, creating a continuous story, emotion-control games and the preparation work for a puppet theatre. SPONTANEOUS SYMPHONY Combining musical instruments with ordinary found objects like plastic tubes, taped drums and wearable found-instruments, we explored body movement, rhythm and texture of sounds throughout the streets. The recorded audio tracks showed a mix of familiar melodies, chaotic traffic, children's laughter, and sounds of venders soliciting attention. The audio tracks were later repositioned as 'pockets of symphony' throughout the exhibition space. SPONTANEOUS PHOTOGRAPHY The work from the photography construct reflected the participants' collective view of La Paz through multiple lenses. Provoked by curiously shaped periscopes and pinhole cameras, the activities were lessons on the physics of light, visual perception, and the possibilities into a poetic way of looking. SPONTANEOUS POETRY This construct on applied arts played with the possibilities of simple paper folds, writings, and challenged the museum audiences to join the street-graffiti of stories on the San Francisco plaza over the course of the exhibition.
_ MEDIUM: A piece installed in the museum courtyard is the first act of another shift from vending+school_SMALL to vending+school_MEDIUM. The vending+school_MEDIUM is designed to foster both performance and music, and will deployed over the coming years, eventually paving the way for larger and more complex forms of street-based arts education.
Documentation of Spontaneous La Paz in Museo San Francisco: photo & video
Other photos: The International Design Clinic is a registered not-for-profit that provides students, artists and designers the opportunity to use their unique creative talents to design and construct projects for communities in need throughout the world. Since its inception in 2006, the IDC has completed over a dozen projects on three continents, including an urban tent for the homeless made of trash; a communal playspace for Romanian orphans from construction debris; a vision for education based upon borrowed resources for the migrant communities of India; and a three-dollar projection system designed to rearticulate the manner in which art and architecture is conceived, displayed and regenerated. Espacio Cultural Creativo (ECC) is a non-governmental nonprofit organization in La Paz that works nationally in education and culture. The ECC seeks to transform education by enhancing and strengthening the capacities and expression of creative individuals, and to reverse social disadvantage, exclusion and inequality. Through the methodology of Ludo creative expression in human resource training, the ECC promotes opportunities for meeting and interaction between generations and cultures.