Escuela de envejecer (School of aging) is presented at Museo Jumex as a series of events in the public space led by Argentinean artist Ana Gallardo in collaboration with Marian Baumann, Samantha Flores, and María Cristina Urzaiz Mediz. It is part of Agora: a Blueprint for Utopia, a program of commissions for the Museum’s public plaza.
In her practice as an artist, Ana Gallardo seeks to unravel personal histories that reveal wider social issues. For many years she has devoted herself to establishing bonds of friendship, solidarity and a sense of community among senior citizens, developing several bodies of work such as Un lugar para vivir cuando seamos viejos (A place to live when we are old) (2010), Acciones Primarias (Primary Actions) (2014), and more recently School of Aging (2016-ongoing). In this series of works, Gallardo approaches the proximity of death, aging, and solitude by collaborating with senior citizens in different parts of the world. While in many non-Western societies elders occupy a relevant position, the alienation of modern life has relegated them to a plane of invisibility. For Gallardo, this situation of oblivion is a form of violence that can be counteracted through identification and the creation of affective structures.
With School of Aging, Gallardo invites the public to reflect on and pose questions about the people’s lives after, what industrial societies have defined as, “productive life” ends. In this way, the artist enters into a dialogical relationship with retired people where she learns from their skills by gardening, singing, dancing, among other activities. More than distractions or ways to spend free time after retirement, these are forms of productivity that respond to vocations that were left aside at other times in life. For the artist, it is precisely in this age when unrealized, silenced, invisible dreams have a last chance to be fulfilled. School of Aging seeks, through long-term work processes that generate emotional ties, to offer a space for intergenerational exchange where the possibility of learning opens up to new horizons.
Gallardo brings to the public space of the museum a work that she develops in more intimate settings of collaboration. By socializing these processes, and publicly sharing the results, the artist gives form to these relations and proposes the artwork as a vital activity with a transformative potential.
Ana Gallardo (Rosario, 1958) is a self-taught artist working with sculpture, installation, drawing and performance. Her vocation as a cultural agent has led her to organize collaborations with independent projects, artists initiatives and to foster a long series of events through which she reflects on diverse subjects such as abortion, solitude, the old age, intimacy and the proximity of death. Her practice seeks to generate alternatives of production, exhibition and dialog within the field of art, as well as to connect different generations and give visibility to groups that are isolated from society, like in the case of senior citizens.
ACTIVITIES
Listening sessions with Marian Baumann
26.NOV. / 1:30PM
01.DIC. / 1:30PM
06.DIC. / 12PM
Talks with Samantha Flores
21.NOV. / 5PM
03.DIC. / 5PM
09.DIC. / 5PM
Oral narrative workshops with María Cristina Urzaiz Mediz
25.NOV. / 1:30PM
29.NOV. / 12PM
10.DIC. / 1:30PM
Concurrently with School of Aging, we present CV Laboral (2009), a sound piece in which Gallardo also addresses her preoccupation with the productive labor that supports her work as an artist. In it, the artist lists all the jobs she has had since 1973 and that build a precarious scenario.
