ART AND VISUAL COMMUNICATION CENTER

ABOUT THE INSTITUTION

The artistic exploration is the pedagogical axis in the teaching of photography at Ar.Co – Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual since 1973, date of the first initiation courses. This exploration has always been based on a comprehensive conception of photography, on dynamic and personalized teaching and learning processes, which privilege the practical experience of photography and its constant reformulation processes.

The pedagogical programs have, however, this double operative axis that moves between the experience of learning by doing and a constant aesthetic reflexivity, and it is never too much to say that it is these two operations together that set in motion the process of invention – let’s say, the art of the student inventing himself.

Nowadays, to talk about the pedagogical directions of art education or even its pedagogical tasks is commonplace. The school’s thinking, always postponed and deterred, waited for by the disaster of endless curricular experiments, is not grounded in artistic thinking, the very thing that seemed to inspire it. The battle has been lost within the school itself, much by virtue of art education (and photography in particular) being increasingly prescriptive and programmatic. Art and school have a common destiny that should not be settled (or pacified) but should preserve their condition of sensitive instability.

Pedro Tropa