The education department

Video Sound Art’s education department runs training programmes, workshops, seminars and public talks, and labs in upper secondary schools and universities, working alongside artists, researchers, curators and architects. The aims: to encourage a new approach to contemporary art, to open a dialogue with the people cultural programmes are made for, and to make the artistic message not something to be received passively but a tool for reinterpreting the present.

Some institutions have been decisive in treating the educational role — the work of bringing an audience closer — as intrinsic to the identity of an exhibition, whether a museum, a festival or a biennial, on a par with curating. Where these two worlds meet, programmes can grow out of interdepartmental co-design, building a bridge between those who produce culture and those who receive it. It is in this spirit that Video Sound Art promotes participatory work, in which the audience finds itself taking part.

With upper secondary schools the programmes take the form of PCTO placements, Italy’s school-to-work scheme: students join the festival team through the production and installation of the exhibitions, and develop material of their own — podcasts, texts, editorial and communication projects, photographs and video, models. The flexibility of the curatorial and education departments is the key to a method of co-design in which the traditional divide between educational and curatorial roles gives way to contamination.