Escuela Serena

Artistical and pedagogical ways of moving affections and reflection between school, archive and curatorial practice

Abstract

In this work we will analyze the intellectual and pedagogical trajectory of Olga and Leticia Cossettini as well as their legacy in the present. First of all, we will reflect on the exceptional nature of the place occupied by these women, as teachers of a primary school in the province of Santa Fe, Argentina, between the 30s and 50s of the last century within the framework of an intellectual field occupied mostly by men of the metropolises. Secondly, we will study their innovative pedagogical project, the Serena School. A strongly intermedial project, avant la lettre, highlights both the use of different expressive and communication media and the perspective and didactic methodology when articulating and transmitting disciplinary contents. It is also considered particularly relevant to give an account of the archive that today preserves the legacy of the Cossettini sisters, not only because it is the collection that nourishes the present research, but because the volume and heterogeneity of its documentary materials give account of a project that from the beginning thought about the value of the archive when disseminating the work carried out as its potential meaning for the future. Finally, we are interested in commenting on the curatorial activity that we had the opportunity to carry out in relation to the Cossettini Archive in the framework of an exhibition held at the Arts Center of the University of La Plata in 2019. There we seek to resume the pedagogical postulates as well as its intermediate perspectives in order to promote a reflection on its present. We believe that the legacy of the Cossettini sisters invites us to think, at the same time, both of our (so-called) research objects, as in our own ways of thinking and doing research and creation in the context of our academic spaces in the light of a trans and intermedial paradigm that can integrate thought and imagination, theory and action, sciences and arts. The initial question that guided that exhibition and this article could be formed as follows: How could humanities open to an epistemology and an intermedial sensibility contribute to the creation of aesthetic and political reinventions and agencies of our sensitive environments and of our social, cultural, investigative and educational spaces?