The visit to Caixaforum dealt with contemporary art. We were explained the main features of this type of art, which consists on pondering about unfair situations of our current world and the pursue of social justice. The tour guide presented us three different activities belonging to the exhibition "Caiguda lliure".
The first one dealt with a yellow plastic maze in which evryone had to go through in order to experience any sensation that we could feel in there. Once we had finished walking through it, we started wondering about the colour of the plastic structure, material, design ..., all of us came to the conclusion that the maze was made of plastic with a yellow colour due to the need to recycle so as to preserve our planet in good condition. We also came up with the idea of being inside wandering and not knowing where to go, finding ourselves entirely lost. Curiously, the deeper we were going, the slower we felt we were walking, having no vision of possible ways ahead of us, just a slight curtain of soft yellow plastic allowed us to see some of the possible ways by our sides.
My impression about this exhibition awe-inspires me. I was mind-blown to have been the main character of the piece of art and the way there was a connection between it and me, in the sense that it made me wonder about many problems we have in our society and the need to sorte them out.
As for the second activity, we were put in groups and shown different objects in a glass cabinet. Besides, we were given a sheet of paper having some questions to answer about them. In groups, we had to hazard a guess about the origin of the object, age, the person whose object might have belonged to ..., having said all we thought about it, we expressed that all those objects belonged to a wealthy eastern man from late 50s. Then, the tour guide asked us: Do objects have gender? After that question, we all realised that our society has assigned certain objects to genders, being an imposition of our cisheteropatriarcal society. Therefore, as future teachers I consider this activity a must to be worked on children for the promotion of critical thinking about that the society that surround us and possible bits they can do to change in the future.
My impression about the activity is that this dynamic and first person experience on the piece of art absolutely enriches the learning of everyone, getting yourslef into the real exhibition. What I most appreciate is the way it fosters critical-thinking and the claim of injustices in our current world.
Finally, in the last activity, we were given a cardboard in which per groups we had to paint, trim and stick different handicrafts into it, relating them to some well-known person. At the end of the activity, all our peers knew who we had depicted: "Lluís Quintana", a teacher of primary education whose teaching imparted had been flawless. Overall, the activity was of great use to work the different notions of recognition and artistic abilities.
Apart from those three guided exhibitions, we had time to walk around and see some other exhibitions of contemporary art, for instance, drawings, projections, listenings, etc. We visited the opera exhibition and the exhibitions about the fascism. They were really exciting as it explained through art and history the past events that happened in our time, which is a reminder of the mistakes that were made by mankind and never must be repeated.
To sum up, the experience was amazing due to all the things learned and that will likely be remembered forever more by all of us. Undoubtedly, it is an exhibition that will help us as future teacher to have some references about how deal with social injustices through art.
