I was born in Valladolid, at the centre of the north part of Spain, an industrial city in the middle of nowhere, and surrounded by fields of corn, small valleys and smaller villages. I was raised in a quite peaceful neighborhood where I spent most of my time, as other kids of my age, playing all types of games on the streets and getting dirty. I moved to Salamanca University, when I was 18 years old, long hair and “grunge” clothes and a will to be an artist were my identity signs for almost 5 years of being at the Fine Arts University there. This place teached me two things: first, I learned that to be an artist means to do almost everything yourself (we did not get a Contemporary Fine Arts education and our syllabus was based on expressionist and formalistic paintings.) Second, and fortunately, I could get in contact with the field of art education, and some critical theories and colleagues who were interested on developing other type of artistic practice and nets. During this time I began to study and to focus on the field of education and art education, something that surprisingly has not ended, and in fact, it has always given me jobs and very interesting ways of working with people as art educator.
Thanks to this strange “paradise- hell” university experience, I could manage to study for a year in Berlin and even made a practicum in an alternative cultural art centre for 3 months (NGBK). This was a period in which I decided to stop any kind of artistic production, and focused myself on education projects as I felt it was quite more interesting to apply my artistic knowledge in art education and collaborative art projects. After my Germany experience, I moved to Salamanca, as I could manage to have a special grant to make research in the field of art education and in the art centers for 4 years, with the aim of publishing a PHD (something I’m still on). During this time I had the great opportunity to travel, research and contact a lot of different people and projects (mainly in connection to Lüneburg, Berlin and Chicago Universities). At this point, due again to institutional troubles and disagreements, I left the university as a researcher (precarious life and intellectual slavery was in the tops of my reasons). I worked in a non regular basis in Mallorca, at the Pillar and Joan Miró Foundation, where I could work in some kind of hybrid community and art education project with groups of seniors for almost 3 years (the project and the group titled artUOM have managed to design under my coordination a Collaborative final publication of the work done). Parallel to this I committed myself to other projects and platforms, like bordergames, with which I managed to travel and work in different cities (Berlin, Gigón, Sao Paulo) within radical educational practices via the design and development of a participatory free videogame with youths. After living here and there for a while, I decided to move and settle down in Barcelona, where I worked in the field of applied research for cultural institutions, and began to collaborate with a youth association at the Raval neighborhood in Barcelona (Teb), where I finally ended working half time, till now. Thanks to the friends and travels I did, I was invited as a guest teacher in a Visual Culture master programme. Since 2007, I began to work and collaborate with Aulabierta (open classroom), a free university and self organized student association in the Fine Arts University at Granada, that woks as a learning community and cultural platform for autonomous radical cultural production which is a bottom up university curricula approach. Since the end of 2008 I started to work on a complex cultural and pedagogical project titled TRANSDUCTORES (Transducers) in which we worked on the basis of collaborative learning and critical pedagogy to structure a curatorial/pedagogical project, that is nowadays in its second phase.
Perhaps I can say I do not produce art or consider myself as an artist in a first place, but the way I have used and applied the contents and project, that I learnt from art education and collaborative art projects has always helped me to survive and position myself in a secondary and more flexible space, as an educator or art educator. This position has let me work on more critical ways, tactical ones. At this moment projects like TRANSDUCTORES, my work as youth educator, guest teacher and other pedagogical tasks, all of them, have showed me that you can earn money and do an ethical job, once you think in terms of critical cultural practice inside different frames and institutions (wherever this is a community centre, and art centre or a curatorial project). Because of this, I tried not too much to encapsulate myself in the shield of being a professional artist or to produce art, but in the articulation of transformative and critical condition to create and distribute knowledge via cultural practice. Of course this is my experience, and thus, I always define myself as a researcher and art educator.
Thanks to this strange “paradise- hell” university experience, I could manage to study for a year in Berlin and even made a practicum in an alternative cultural art centre for 3 months (NGBK). This was a period in which I decided to stop any kind of artistic production, and focused myself on education projects as I felt it was quite more interesting to apply my artistic knowledge in art education and collaborative art projects. After my Germany experience, I moved to Salamanca, as I could manage to have a special grant to make research in the field of art education and in the art centers for 4 years, with the aim of publishing a PHD (something I’m still on). During this time I had the great opportunity to travel, research and contact a lot of different people and projects (mainly in connection to Lüneburg, Berlin and Chicago Universities). At this point, due again to institutional troubles and disagreements, I left the university as a researcher (precarious life and intellectual slavery was in the tops of my reasons). I worked in a non regular basis in Mallorca, at the Pillar and Joan Miró Foundation, where I could work in some kind of hybrid community and art education project with groups of seniors for almost 3 years (the project and the group titled artUOM have managed to design under my coordination a Collaborative final publication of the work done). Parallel to this I committed myself to other projects and platforms, like bordergames, with which I managed to travel and work in different cities (Berlin, Gigón, Sao Paulo) within radical educational practices via the design and development of a participatory free videogame with youths. After living here and there for a while, I decided to move and settle down in Barcelona, where I worked in the field of applied research for cultural institutions, and began to collaborate with a youth association at the Raval neighborhood in Barcelona (Teb), where I finally ended working half time, till now. Thanks to the friends and travels I did, I was invited as a guest teacher in a Visual Culture master programme. Since 2007, I began to work and collaborate with Aulabierta (open classroom), a free university and self organized student association in the Fine Arts University at Granada, that woks as a learning community and cultural platform for autonomous radical cultural production which is a bottom up university curricula approach. Since the end of 2008 I started to work on a complex cultural and pedagogical project titled TRANSDUCTORES (Transducers) in which we worked on the basis of collaborative learning and critical pedagogy to structure a curatorial/pedagogical project, that is nowadays in its second phase.
Perhaps I can say I do not produce art or consider myself as an artist in a first place, but the way I have used and applied the contents and project, that I learnt from art education and collaborative art projects has always helped me to survive and position myself in a secondary and more flexible space, as an educator or art educator. This position has let me work on more critical ways, tactical ones. At this moment projects like TRANSDUCTORES, my work as youth educator, guest teacher and other pedagogical tasks, all of them, have showed me that you can earn money and do an ethical job, once you think in terms of critical cultural practice inside different frames and institutions (wherever this is a community centre, and art centre or a curatorial project). Because of this, I tried not too much to encapsulate myself in the shield of being a professional artist or to produce art, but in the articulation of transformative and critical condition to create and distribute knowledge via cultural practice. Of course this is my experience, and thus, I always define myself as a researcher and art educator.
