Vídeo documental participativo como arte contextualuna intervención artístico-pedagógica para la construcción identitaria en la adolescencia

Abstract

The construction of identity is a continuous process throughout our lives, but during adolescence it is lived all the more intensively due to a series of physiological and cognitive changes, as well as social pressure to fit in.Although formal education should arguably provide support to advance in this vital task -as it is one of the main settings of youth socialization- in its framework, the training of the students' cognitive abilities is prioritized over their integral development.For some decades, a number of different practices have emerged in the interstices between art and education capable of tackling the exposed problems. These are the artist residencies in schools, projects aimed at collaborative creation. In this doctoral thesis we explore from theoretical and empirical perspectives how, within these artistic-pedagogical proposals, participatory video documentary can play a role in the adolescent subjectivation process. We start from the assumption that this model of creative exchange, which is part of the contextual art paradigm and is fed by its methods, generates a symbolic space that allows participants to make progress both in the personal and social dimension of their self-definition, since it gives the opportunity to observe oneself from an unusual perspective, create links with the surrounding reality, experience it and rethink it. In order to confirm our hypothesis, relying on interdisciplinary bibliographic review and case studies we designed an artistic intervention for formal secondary education, which we implemented during the academic year 2017/2018 in two groups of students from IES El Carmen and IES Mariano Baquero Goyanes (Murcia), respectively. Our initiative was conceived as a workshop integrated into curricular subjects and aimed at the collective creation of a documentary videographic work on a issue relevant for the students involved in the project. Its hybrid and flexible methodology brought together the elements of artistic mediation, videotherapy, videoarttherapy, participatory video, and critical and holistic pedagogies. The data on the project was collected using the participant observation method and instruments such as the questionnaire, the semi-structured interview, the observation journal, the individual monitoring sheets and the audiovisual record. The analysis of the results suggests that the formula of creative interaction that we designed does have an impact on both the personal and social areas of the adolescent's subjectivity: while it promotes progress in self-knowledge, self-confidence and self-acceptance, it also allows them to test various relational dynamics and strengthens the sense of belonging and citizen consciousness. Likewise, the intervention had repercussions in its sociocultural context.In both editions, the collaboration with the educational centers was consolidated to the point of integrating the proposed methodology into their curricular programme, with the advice and limited intervention by the mediator during the following years.As well as that, on one of the documentaries it was brought forward the idea of a meeting space for social dialogue which would be managed by the youth community. This caught the attention of local government officials and the project was included in the program of one of the most important cultural centers in the Region, located in the Old Artillery Barracks.Two other works presented the adolescents' perspective of the struggle of the neighborhood for the tunnelling of the railway tracks, thus documenting one of the most remarkable social movements at the regional level at that moment. These facts not only value the undertaken artistic-pedagogical practice, but also highlights the need to tackle the alienation of adolescents from public and political life. Contextual art in general and participatory video documentary interventions in particular, offer an ideal framework for achieving this goal.