«third teacher» poses a fundamental question: how do we learn, and it does so by transforming the classroom into an open, relational space where everything can be a teacher.
Over the coming months, both venues will offer workshops, activations and meeting spaces that invite active participation in a collective learning experience based on the sensitive and the common.
The exhibition can be visited from 29 June to 12 October at FCAYC (León) and at the Centro de Arte Fundación María José Jove (A Coruña), with free admission for all.
An informal visit in June 2022 to the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia [FCAYC] initiated a living, constantly changing process in which to address how learning takes place. That process is now open to the public as third master, an exhibition project developed by the Colombian artist Nicolás Paris (Bogotá, 1977) in dialogue with the teams of FCAYC and the Centro de Arte Fundación María José Jove (FMJJ).
third master raises a fundamental question: how do we learn? And it does so by taking as its central figure the «classroom», a conceptual environment that Nicolás Paris reimagines as an open, dynamic and porous space, capable of connecting the symbolic with the physical, the institutional with the natural, the individual with the collective.
Since the beginning of his career as an artist, Paris has employed pedagogical tactics within the exhibition context to foster collaboration and open-ended research with viewer-participants in laboratory-like spaces. In this process, Paris transforms the exhibition space into a place of egalitarian, communal and investigative exchange and dialogue, focused on the collective development of concrete artistic projects. His career includes exhibitions in international institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, the São Paulo Biennial and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, always with a strong focus on collaborative processes and the pedagogical potential of contemporary artistic practices.
The exhibition focuses on environments as active agents of learning. It unfolds through “21 classrooms” that take the form of interventions in space, workshops, encounters and atmospheres that recognise those “third masters” that surround us: water, seed, mud, worm, yeast, word, bacteria or tree, among others. The aim is to generate a process of continuous transformation based on the possibility of creating new links and based on four strategies of nature: balance, symmetry, bifurcation and impermanence.
A two-site project, with spaces and programmes open to the public
third teacher at FCAYC headquarters
third master is deployed at FCAYC as a pedagogical strategy to rethink ourselves. It happens through different works and visitable physical environments located in the stables, the exhibition hall, a wheat field or the apple orchard that have been intervened by Nicolás Paris to make the encounter possible. An intervention of pressed earth transforms scattered experiences and brings them together in a large connector. Among the images that can be found are codes, enumerations, everyday objects and videos made by Nicolás Paris.
These spaces and objects aim to promote moments, attitudes and atmospheres in alliance with some of the active programmes that will be activated during the months of July and August and in which everyone will be able to participate. The programmes, conceived as an integral part of the research and exhibition proposal, are built on the basis of their active cycles and elements of the environment to establish a complex network of relationships in which to explore, connect and learn from water, earth, seeds, sky, play, words, stars, bacteria and yeast.
The intention of these programmes is none other than to connect the micro with the macro, the past with the present and to remember that the extraordinary manifests itself in the everyday. All the activities will be available on the FCAYC website in the coming days. Participation is intergenerational, free of charge and requires registration for the months of July (2 July) and August (28 July).
third teacher at the FMJJ Art Centre
third master begins at the FMJJ Art Centre through a research laboratory and meeting space with a seed as its teacher: corn. Through it we begin a process whose life - germination, growth and transformation - will allow us to listen, observe and accompany its rhythms. An intervention built by Nicolás París will function as a transversal space, in dialogue with other projects such as Escuela Mediada, Raíz, Mover a seed. The cereal will be an educational agent in itself, which will allow us to rethink education through patient observation.
The Education and Mediation Area of the María José Jove Foundation Art Centre aims to contribute to the development of a critical citizenship, capable of empowerment through art and culture. Through our programme, we seek to give people a voice and promote art as a tool for both personal and social development.
About Nicolas Paris
Nicolas Paris (b. 1977, Bogotá, Colombia) works mainly on collaborative and interdisciplinary projects closely linked to issues related to pedagogical strategies. His artistic practice encompasses drawing, video, workshops, installations, object art, text and performative actions. The focus of her work is on the structure of the classroom and pedagogical concepts.
Having worked as a teacher in rural areas of Colombia for several years, Paris sees art as a form of dialogue in which it is possible to share experiences. In 2017 he founded the Institute for Radical Learning (InPAR)The project is a space aimed at mobilising collaborative processes and facilitating the activation of study groups.
He has been invited to develop projects based on educational research at institutions such as the MACBA of Barcelona (2022-2023), the National Museum Thyssen-Bornemisza of Madrid (2022), the Banco de la República Cultural Network and the Miguel Urrutia Art Museum (MAMU) of Bogota (2020-2024), the Bogotá Education Residency Programme (2020-2024), the INHOTIM in Brumadinho (2012) and the residence Museum as Hub at the Triennial of the New Museum His works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including: Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne (2021); Times Museum, Canton (2019); El Museo del Barrio, New York (2019); Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2019); La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2016); CaixaForum, Barcelona (2017); MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2015-2016); XII Havana Biennial (2015); Grazer Kunstverein (2014); CEAAC, Strasbourg (2014); Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2013); CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson (2013); MUAC, Mexico City (2012); II New Museum Triennial, New York (2012); 30th São Paulo Biennial (2012); 54th Venice Biennale (2011); 11th Lyon Biennial (2011); and the Museum of Modern Art of Medellín (2009/2016/2023), among others.