Vicente Blanco Mosquera: «Art and education are critical thinking»
The land in which we live forges our identity. We are what we are thanks to our environment, traditions, trades, language, and legends. A heritage as rich as today is threatened. And Vicente Blanco Mosquera is clear: a critical and reflective look is essential to know how to value and care for this diversity. He, for his part, brings his grain of sand through his two passions: art and teaching.
Vicente Blanco graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Pontevedra in 1997. Specializing in Sculpture, he continued training in several workshops in the Basque Country until 2012, when he became a doctor in Fine Arts from the University of Granada. His rural environment and identity construction are two of the most recurrent themes in his artistic production, expressed through drawings, murals or videos.
When he is not immersed in the studio, he is most likely to be found inside a classroom. He recently completed twenty years at Campus Terra, teaching a Master's Degree in Management of Educational Activities in Nature and a Bachelor's Degree in Early Childhood Education and Primary Education. He is in charge of training these critical views, which will be increasingly necessary to protect biodiversity.
Talking to him is a privilege. It helps to understand the value of the humanities on a campus with an eminently scientific footprint. It gives an idea of the great importance of aesthetic education in caring for the environment.
-You graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Pontevedra and continued training in cities like San Sebastian, Bilbao, Los Angeles or Granada. What did coming to Lugo mean to you?
-Lugo was my professional entry into the academic world. I landed in 2002 and started working at the Faculty of Teacher Training in Didactics of Plastic Expression.
What fascinates me about Lugo is that it is a city located in a biosphere reserve. Many people need to be made aware of that. What got me here was the nature. I am now living in the countryside, ten minutes from Lugo. It is my studio, where I also work on artistic issues. Lugo is a privileged location.
Campus Terra became more and more relevant as I started living here. Master's degrees connect you more with the territory, essential for people's education. Paulo Freire said that one becomes a citizen of the world from the local to the universal. It is true that since I have been here, we have lost a lot of biodiversity due to, among other factors, the eucalyptus eucalyptus plantations. As educators, we have to be aware of these issues to value the environment in which we live.
-He is part of the Edunartex research group, which focuses on education, nature, art and hiking. At first glance, there is no natural match between some of these areas. How do these four worlds fit together?
-It's straightforward. Art is critical thinking, I always say. Art teaches us to think and see the world critically, which moves away from single narratives and offers us other views. Educating is the same: encouraging that reflective look at our world. Art and education are critical thinking.
We also take this look at nature. We work a lot with what we call civic education in biodiversity, which concerns an attitude of care and activism towards the environment.
It's a question of aesthetic education. Aesthetics has to do with valuing diversity and difference. An aesthetically educated person can appreciate the richness of the world around him and, therefore, incorporates a caring attitude towards that environment. That is why it is closely linked to activism. For me, art, education and nature are a position of care for the world, which is urgent right now.
-Besides encouraging critical thinking, art and education are also crucial to looking at the environment with the need to take care of it and, at the same time, to rebel against aggression.
-Of course, in the rural world, we are experiencing a loss of natural diversity, trades, legends, traditions or languages, which have an enormous richness. We work from that perspective: valuing and giving value to knowledge and know-how to create a sense of belonging and to establish relationships of affection for the place.
We also have a project with the schools: the Rural Training Laboratory, where we put these issues into practice with the children of rural schools.
-And also to move away from standardization, which can be one of the evils of this era. There is a tendency in the world to standardize everything, but what is different is valuable and part of our history.
-We call them stereotypes. Stereotyping is the main problem we face in our area. We fight against this uniformity with aesthetic education. We live in a hyperconnected world, but paradoxically, taste and aesthetics are becoming uniform in an obvious way.
-It makes sense: the mainstream is more manageable to propagate than ever because we are more hyperconnected. We are not using hyperconnection to generate critical thinking but to standardize.
-That's why arts education is more important than ever. Hate speeches are born precisely because other voices are not being heard, only the majority and privileged ones. These discourses are fought with culture. We must vindicate the importance of arts education in the early stages, even at university.
-You help to build the world. The studies taught in this master's program teach people to create the world and to have the sensitivity to see beyond stereotypes, uniformity and the mainstream.
-Yes, but there must also be a commitment from administrations and institutions to value the importance of art education.
In Campus Terra, two points of view should complement each other: the scientific and the humanistic. Scientific-technical thinking serves to explain the world, and humanistic thinking serves to describe us in that world. If we have the two thoughts in balance, there is a match. That is why it is essential that on a scientific campus, other voices vindicate this humanistic view.
-The Master's Degree in Management of Educational Activities in Nature promotes educational activities in rural and natural environments. What specific actions help to achieve these objectives?
-We make excursions to the environment to appreciate the landscape, the traditional architecture, the language, the words used in the different places, and the trades... We come from the world of doing: I learned to learn by doing through experience. This is something that needs to be taken into account in education.
For us, this activist approach is critical. We spread the language, work with clay, and value crafts and architecture... Every year, we make different proposals. This year, we also worked with food. As there were international students, we tasted food from around the world to share.
In short, proposals to value nature's diversity and the environment we live in.
-The pandemic marked a turning point and served, in a way, to appreciate once again the importance of open spaces and nature. Will this type of thinking experience a boom in the coming years?
-With the pandemic, nature was highlighted, which is essential and very valuable. But it is also true that we must respectfully approach nature. You can't suddenly turn everything into a theme park. We must find a balance, enjoying nature while respecting it.
At the children's level, schools are now stressing the importance of playgrounds, which have natural elements and are a space for leisure. We are beginning to think of the outdoors as a space to live the day-to-day life of the classroom, not just for playtime.
In Spain, we had an essential tradition in this respect: the forest schools or the Instituto Libre de Enseñanza, which a hundred years ago was already hiking with children. It is precious to recover that, but always with critical thinking.
-One of the challenges of this era is to take care of the planet: more and more people are aligned with this objective. In this context... Will there be a need for professionals specialized in these areas who know how to take care of natural spaces? What skills should they acquire?
-It is necessary to teach how to observe, not only to see. To teach to observe is to take care, as I said before. It's needed to work and develop an aesthetic sensitivity towards the environment and life. This is essential for life to continue.
Everything depends on how citizenship is built. That is why our work is essential: to educate civically in biodiversity. The citizens have to demand quality spaces at the service of people and nature, not only at the service of speculation. There has to be a balance.
It's vital and challenging work because there must be an accompaniment of the administrations and because it is necessary to generate that citizenship. Without that accompaniment, a lack of aesthetic education has repercussions in our environment.
-Educating the new generations on these concepts from a very early age is also essential.
-There is an artist, Bruno Munari, who worked with children and said that we know the future of society by looking at children because children are the future. It is necessary to work on these issues if we want to have a different view of nature.
We live in an economic system, neoliberalism, which also shapes our thinking, often unconsciously. The way we look at nature is one of depredation. Faced with this, we must create other ways of relating to nature. There is no other way. It is urgent, but I wonder if it is convenient for the system, which wants to perpetuate itself. There will always be this struggle. It is more complex than it seems.
-Your world is entirely physical, but another capital derivative in this era is technology. Are physical systems going to be integrated with technological ones?
-The physical is fundamental and will become more and more so. The traditional school separated the mind from the body. The conventional school is mainly memoristic, but we also learn with the body. Living beings are designed to think through the senses: sight, skin, and touch... The hand is a technology with millions of years of evolution.
We carry out workshops with children from 3 to 12 years old. I believe that recovering the body that thinks will be increasingly necessary. Let me give you an example. For new technologies, such as AI, it is straightforward to generate texts. Still, motor skills such as balancing or tying a shoelace require more computational effort because they took millions of years of evolution.
The school has to return the body to childhood, to think through the body. Until the age of 7, new technologies should be out of the classroom and coexist in a balanced way.
More and more schools are calling us because teachers are demanding this. Do you know how enjoyable it is for a boy or a girl to work by rubbing a paper surface or cutting with their hands? When we do it, we think, we experiment, we discover.
-There are very authoritative voices in the AI world saying that the only thing that will distinguish us in the coming years will be our ability to be creative.
-Creativity is part of our human condition and should be a right for everyone, especially in childhood. It allows us to generate ideas and solve situations based on our life problems. Creativity begins with the most essential things. A pencil is also a technology. You can be creative with the minimum, with two sheets of paper that you find around. That's what you have to work on in childhood.
-Your academic research focuses precisely on creativity.
-Yes, our educational research focuses on creative processes and their methodological incorporation with children in school. It's a privilege that on this campus, in the area of plastic arts, the three of us professors are actively involved in the world of creation: Salvador Cidrás is an artist, and Estella Freire is an architect. It is not very common for teacher training faculties to have this profile. This means that our focus is precisely on creativity, from a firm commitment that the three of us have to early childhood and primary education.
So far, we have been researching action scenarios that allow children to create through experience and doing. This led us to develop different principles for their design, as well as parameters for observing creativity. At present, we coined the term Creative Pedagogy of Place to create workshops with children working from the imagination of proximity, emphasizing the rural world. This also led us to design specific materials for children and furniture that allow movement and other spatial arrangements according to the needs of each workshop.
In short, we are developing a pedagogy of creativity that starts from our environment and its problems.
-On an artistic level, your works have been exhibited in Spain and Portugal, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and New York? What are the most recurrent themes in your work?
-The technique and the medium I work with is mainly drawing. It has always been the basis of my artistic research. I work with large format drawings made with coloured pencils and watercolours on canvas.
The themes have a lot to do with issues around the construction of male identity and the rural world in which I live. I built my identity from the margins, from the questioning of stereotypes, which we talked about before. That means the approach to my environment is from the look of the invisibilized, colonized or exploited collectives, such as nature and animals, so there is a symbiosis or a recurrent presence in all my work. My current work is marked by the rural environment in which I live, but other experiences have accumulated.
They are open narratives based on elements of my environment, flora, fauna or experiences that I incorporate, both real and imaginary. The purpose is to create narratives open to the viewer so that he can build his own story and his own view of the drawings, incorporating his background.
-Is it necessary to have specific references to understand them, or can a drawing inspired by your environment be understood in New York or Beijing?
-You have to have an aesthetic education. For people to value my work or that of other contemporary artists, they have to have a reference base, and it requires a specific learning that we generally don't have -in Spain, there are no art education specialists in kindergarten and primary school-. A somewhat generalized rejection of today's art comes from a certain lack of knowledge perpetuating stereotyped ideas about art or artists.
-Finally, do you consider yourself a cradle artist or did your artistic sensibility appear over time?
-I have always had an interest in creation. The drawing has been very important to me since I was a child. But, indeed, training is also critical afterwards. I studied Fine Arts and was educated in different places, enriching and broadening my view. That changed my perspective on art: it was not the same as today when I was 18.
Education opens doors that give access to other sensibilities and other knowledge. Passion is critical, but so is the curiosity to keep learning.