Performative critical pedagogy as a space for in-between translation (towards the production of insurgent cultural politics) Part One:

Critical pedagogy as translation 1. Resistances through postcolonial in-between translation Postcolonialist theory or postcolonialism is a theoretical framework that grapples with the relationships between colonisers and the colonised through a certain specific philosophical and literary production. This framework is considered to be beyond local or temporal references1, since postcolonialist theory can serve as a method for identifying the potential resistance in dominant structures, when a supposed text (a colonising language, dominant discourse, religious tome, or museum) attempts to prevail and exploit the Other (an oppressed language, silenced discourse, unrecognised Other). Thus, postcolonialism can also be a method for analysing forms of resistance through culture. In this sense, I will focus on Hommi Bhabhas work (2002). The author attempts to construct a different way of conceiving the colonising western culture and its position with respect to the Other. His position focuses on the forms of reaction, intermingling and subversion that takes place between colonised/colonising cultures. Cultures can be understood as complex forms beyond the traditional binarisms sustained by the modern Western world (centre/margin, civilised/savage). Hence, as a work method, postcolonialist theories are useful in conceiving a series of oppositional strategies from within each system. Bhabha reminds us that these strategies are revealed as hybrid forms or forms of resistance and transformation precisely within systems, regardless of whether they are inherent in colonialist empires or other frameworks2. These forms cannot be understood or grasped by the system itself and it is precisely their non-form, this hybridism, that always makes them in-between practices: they
1

In this sense, we can speak of postcolonialist theories or postcolonialism on the basis of three acceptations: temporal, discursive and epistemic: Poscolonialismo, http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=Poscolonialismo&oldid=6755852 (consulted for the last time in January, 2007). 2 In this respect, museums or cultural institutions can be thought of as systems of discursive or territorial domination, as I argue at the introductory chapter of this publication.

cannot be recognised beforehand by dominant systems, since they are inherent therein; they arise against and within them. What Bhabhas approach has to teach us is the precise place where the critical perspective of culture lies: its multiple forms of resistance. Thus, we can identify a cultural place as a space in continual transit or a passage. According to Bhabha, cultural knowledge cannot be reduced to a unitary sum or blocked in certain disciplines, but is rather a constant, fluid process (Bhabha 2002). Therefore, cultural signs are never pure or heterogeneous; they always arise as constant reinterpretations or contaminants between boundaries. Thus, a cultures political space needs to be located in a hybrid or third space, since this, precisely, is always a space of resistance. The third space is understood as a hybrid space that is neither the colonist Self nor the colonised Other (i.e., neither the dominant, colonial discourse, nor just the oppressed, colonised other), but something more, which irrupts into this relationship of domination (2002:45). This third space is a hybrid; it emerges as a continual disruption and contamination of cultural signs. Culture flows; it is not created, it is contaminated. The hybrid is a cultural mixture within an unstable boundary in a space that is both inside and outside; hybridism assumes the impossibility of closing the cultural gap. This third space is the element that articulates the difference: ... the importance of hybridism is not to be able to trace two original moments from which a third emerges, but rather hybridism to me is the Third Space, which enables other positions to emerge. (Bhabha, in Rutherford 1990:211) Therefore, Bhabhas proposal is dynamic. It forces us towards continual translation so as to able to interpret the in-between, the fruit of a context or situation that is impossible to translate. Indeed this interpretative ambivalence is achieved through cultural translations that incorporate cultural ambivalence, which is impossible to translate and dependent on each context. These translations lead us to rethink, not the capacity to represent the Other, but rather the instability of interpretation this is the contamination and momentum of resistance in the cultures or systems themselves, from which we position ourselves. This interstitial space is continually being negotiated, since incomplete meaning is a transformation of the boundaries and limits in spaces through which the meaning of cultural and political authority is negotiated (Bhabha

2002: 215). This third space is presented as an element that re-articulates potentialities and new possibilities; therein lies its political capacity for continual translation-subversion. Bhabhas notion of agency is constructed in the capacity for resistance through constant negotiation. The interstitial space that emerges assumes a twofold dimension in this inbetween practice: first, it is an intermediate work not located at any pole, impossible to identify, always in tension, in-between; it is contextual translation. Second, this inbetween space is also always active. It always means irruption, interrogation, an appearance in the midst of something and a harnessing of continual action (Bhabha 1995); it is also constant negotiation. This in-between space is where the politics of difference and social conflicts are constantly negotiated and never absorbed or integrated. Cultural translation implies both articulating meanings when becoming inbetween, as well as leaving them to be articulated by other people at a later point in time. Translations may always be appropriated, interrupted, re-articulated and with that, disseminated anew in their re-articulation. This is the challenge of in-between practice: it lies between articulation and re-articulation. 2. Performative critical pedagogy: differential production From the postcolonial perspective, we could describe pedagogys action framework as follows: all educational action, although transformative in character, remains a liberating impulse that seeks an Other (a student) to stage a text (an educational project, curriculum or exhibition) and impose results for the Others representation (a real voice, an emancipation, an empowerment or production of knowledge). The aspect of interest is that these acts are not only imposed, but also negotiated, re-appropriated and resisted by the cultures that cut across the educational space. Indeed, within the framework of performative theory, Judith Butler (1997) reminds us of how all law is discursive; a natural essentialist or prior state to discourses does not exist. Thus, it is impossible to fix behaviours or mark categories beforehand on the result of the discourses on subjects; what can be pre-fixed are forms of reception, reiteration and resistance. In this sense, we might describe the performativity of critical pedagogy as follows: pedagogy assumes the existence of concrete scenarios, agents and scripts launched to stage a natural law this is the case of the educational law wherein the instructors task of intellectual

transformation empowers students and endows them with critical capacity. Yet, this law changes as it is reiterated and is transformed from within. In other words, its iteration differentiates it; it is subverted in each context and can resist multiple forms beyond the binarism of the liberating professor and oppressed student. What interests me within this vision is how performativity always involves the capacity of subverting discourse from within, be it educational, museum or colonising discourse. The discursive law, understood as a work method, is not universal in performativity; it always produces differences, although they may seem minimum. Being aware of its contradictions and limitations, playing directly with them and putting into play their diverse relationships as work elements is of interest. This reflection forces us to clarify the limits to critical practice so as to understand frames for work and producing knowledge and subjectivities whenever we produce educational situations. The work material turns into power relationships and implicit resistances whenever critical discourses are constructed in the face of the risk of relying on the repressive myth of liberating emancipation (Ellsworth, 1989). Critical pedagogy works precisely to articulate differences through differences. It acts differentially; its work can always be reiterated and appropriated. Pedagogy here is articulated on the basis of the multiplicity of fronts that open up and are negotiated in each context. Thus, it is important to produce situations that open up fronts and reinterpret experiences differently hence, the need to understand pedagogy as a space of cultural translation. 3. Critical performative pedagogy as a constant space of translation: towards insurgent politics Therefore, within this new scenario, we can speak of a cultural translation in which the educational text is staged: critical pedagogys subversive capacity consists in the constant negotiation between the educational texts dominating impulse for action and students constant resistance and re-appropriation. The translations are always different in each context and place with the power relationships and resistances put into play. Critical pedagogy acts politically, not because of content, but rather because of the mechanisms it launches to achieve constant translation, the space of multiple possibilities. Its political practice resides in the capacity for re-articulating action, for networking through the possibilities that open up collectively. We assert that a critical

performative pedagogy always seeks out spaces for negotiation and conflict. Thus, its contextual sphere of action must be considered in terms of conflicts in voice, agency and empowerment. This raises the question of the boundary of a representation of voices3, since this presence is always mediated and instrumentalised by others and with others and consequently demands new spheres of translation. This is where cultural politics and critical pedagogy should be articulated in actual practice in relation to their limits and contradictions. The construction of insurgent cultural politics based on this pedagogy is not conceived here only as the critical content transmitted nor worked on in a certain context be it a school, civic centre or museum; neither it is politicised with work on social issues such as immigration, war, domestic violence, etc.. Not only that, even insurgent practice would not be formed on the basis of the assumed liberating and progressive character of the agent of change in question be it a professor, educator or artist. To the contrary, insurgent politics is articulated on the basis of the discursive dimension and the social complex in which a cultural practice takes place and is always related to the mechanisms and discourses staged and their possible subversion. One performative critical pedagogy constructs spaces of constant translation in which the production/distribution of culture is negotiated on the basis of exchanges between agents and positions within the mechanisms being investigated. Hence, this implies understanding that the pedagogical relationship is a constant act of cultural translation based on investigation and collective production of knowledge. Knowledge emerges from the negotiations and conflicts between the discourses of all the agents involved in education work and, of course, their contexts. This translation process involves forcing constant in-between spaces to be created in which culture acquires its subversive capacity in the re-articulation on multiple fronts. Here, pedagogy acts relationally, since it connects agents different dimensions and positions. This educational work is interstitial inasmuch as it emerges between the professors educational discourse and the groups resistant discourse as the Other whom the educational text addresses. It means research into the complex network of relationships and articulations entailed in the collective production of knowledge. This is therefore a transliminal philosophy that cuts
3

In this respect, it would be interesting to delve further into Alcoffs work (1984) on the representation of Others in texts. Sturm also works on this aspect in relation to the Others mediated voice under the concept of rhizovocality in her article published here.

across given boundaries and identities and emerges among the different agents involved and discourses produced. This is when negotiation cuts across the given discursive limits to action, since it acts by subverting these limits in each context, resisting the positionings of the agents involved within the gaps and blind spots of each discourse. To examine this aspect in further depth, I will provide an example based on an educational project. 4. Critical performative pedagogy at the Centre for Urban Pedagogy 4.1. The Centre for Urban Pedagogy: Garbage City The Centre for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is an education and design centre in a nonprofit spirit4 (CUP, 2007:1), an educational and artistic platform whose work is based on the principles of sustainable architecture, radical democracy, activism and work with different social networks. The CUP develops projects that investigate different concepts and alternative designs for life in the public space. Most of its projects forge relationships among politicians, public officials, architects, urban planners, the urban landscape and its interactions with different communities, and of course, critical pedagogy. The project I will be describing is called Garbage City and was developed in 2002 5 in response to New York City Mayor Rudi Giulianis plan to close the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island, which had been created in 1985.6 The key question posed by the project as a whole was: What would New York City do with all of its garbage after having officially closed its only muncipal dump? Using this question as a springboard, the projects general goal was to investigate the consequences of New York Citys new, informal waste disposal plan, which transported garbage by polluting diesel trucks through transfer stations in poor, communities of color, en route to landfills in other states. The project pivoted around (in respond to) the
4

The CUPs goal is to work with the relationships between environments for social decision making and construction. (CUP, 2007:1) 5 The video was included as complementary material on the DVD. I wish to thank the CUP for donating the video, since it enhances and completes the meaning of this article. 6 This landfill, the worlds largest and the highest on the East Coast in the US, is currently in disuse (information from the video).

competition sponsored by the city and the Municipal Arts Society to revamp the landfills infrastructure and use. The project was developed for four months in collaboration with a group of students from City as School, an alternative high school, where the Centres programme was articulated in relation to the city as the works cross-sectional axis. The entire project was based on work by this group of students with help from the CUP. The workspaces were the high school classrooms and public spaces on the streets. The groups action framework was the successive encounters with a range of social agents. 4. 2. The work elements in the Garbage City project. The final result of the project was a educational installation (CUP: 2007) that shows the entire work process through a documentary video that was the core driver of the project and five educational posters that furnished complementary information on the field work and status of the issue, as well as a scale model of an alternative proposal: a landfill-ecological park7. The work material was presented through three elements: a documentary video, posters and a scale model. Breaking it down The video displays a range of peoples opinions on the subject and identifies the actors and scenarios that affect the issue of wastes political dimension8. A series of interviews present the groups work in a number of locations. The interviews overlap each other and reflect a variety of opinions, contexts and perspectives on the subject. The stances of ecologists and public administration can be seen, as can the views of the waste sector voiced by workers at a waste recycling factory and the position of the mayor of the City of Linden, New Jersey. At the same time, complementary information with visual examples from two different sources was inserted to illustrate the narrative thread: video animations and visual information from the educational posters. The video animations recap the citys history from the viewpoints of waste, current recycling
7

The image of the project exhibition, work process and map of the final proposal can be found at http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/projects/detail/23/description#resources. (Section: download.) 8 The list of institutions and associations represented by agents in the video are: the New York City Department of Sanitation, Sustainable South Bronx, the Environmental Justice Alliance, the Municipal Art Society, Fortune Groups Materials Recovery Facilities, Browning Ferris- Industries, the mayor of Linden, New Jersey, John Gregorio, the Citywide Recycling Advisory Board and the City Green Inc.

processes and their effects on public health, other alternative processes to dumping and the process of public competitions for new proposals for the landfill. The video shows how this process concludes with a tacit agreement between two large companies to monopolise the public proposals to the detriment of public health9. The educational installation also exhibited posters that displayed how the final educational installation was constructed. A preliminary poster situated the different actors in their relationships and scenarios through a diagram showing the circulation of power in the different discourses. The second poster showed garbage flows and their economic relationships both at the municipal and national levels, as well pick-up points, incineration plants, data on loads and types of waste transport. A third poster showed a comparative analysis between an incinerator plant and an ecological landfill. A fourth poster reflected plans and different possibilities for an ecological landfill and proposed a sustainable waste city as a place with a range of different activities for public life. . Another poster reflected a dystopian fantasy scenario developed collaboratively in which the poor, minority residents of New York City became forcibly relocated to the now-closed landfill left there to create their own society. Later made another process diagram was specially designed for another exhibit that showed the groups entire educational work and its stages (interviews, group work, sketches, scripts, and video editing). Lastly, the project displays the scale model of a waste city as a insustainable model of a social space of encounter, a park-ecological landfill. This vision would transform the zone used as a municipal landfill by turning it into a ghost- park with the design of a scale model and its exhibition as an architectural project. This image is more of a science fiction proposal as our fantasy about what might happen.The entire project has been shown on several occasions, as has the documentary on its own.10 4.3. The performative critical pedagogy dimensions of the CUP project
9

The video shows how diverse alternative solutions were directly rejected by the communities and neighbourhoods on the island of Manhattan and adjacent areas in the face of possible emanations of toxic gas and contaminants. The videos conclusion includes a denunciation of the business hiding behind recycling in the end: some municipalities are suspected of having misappropriating funds. 10 A large part of the information on the project is related to the projects website. The documentary has been broadcast on local television stations and publicly screened in forums on sustainability and the environment. See (CUP, 2007:1), which explains the process on the projects webpage.

At this point in the text, I will try to translate our theoretical field on the basis of the CUPs work. I am aware that this practice did not take place within a museum framework; furthermore, it is an example of collaborative practice through education and collaborative work in design and urbanism. Moreover, its sphere of action was articulated thanks to the collaboration with the City as School High School. Even so, the CUPs project contains several remarkable aspects that may help us better understand the behavior of performative criticial pedagogy in museums and cultural institutions. For now, I will attempt to describe the CUPs practice. - Participatory research work It is important to highlight the investigation process11 in this work scenario whereby the group confronted a problem waste and constructed a representation of the complex process in the face of this given situation: the videos and the installation. The group investigated the terrain on the basis of the emerging conflicts in the fieldwork. Waste issues were examined collectively and presented by several voices in context and continual relationship, which were articulated through a series of interviews and animations reflecting each agents and discourses dynamic position. The investigation groups voice was also presented and identified at the beginning of the video and in the posters, which showed the collaborative process at the high school (CUP, 2007: 5). The work process, its exploration of the terrain and its dynamics as positioned agents are all articulated in the video; they are not made invisible, but rather present a reflective dimension of the process.

- Relational work on the basis of pedagogical practice The CUPs pedagogical model is articulated by a series of relational models between the groups work and the participants positions. The education process here was the result of negotiating contents connected to a reality mediated by a series of relationships: first, with the material about which knowledge was generated (the series of people and discourses entailed in waste in New York) and, secondly, and even more
11

The explanatory book shows the structure by the projects investigation phases. (CUP, 2007:6).

importantly, the discourses among the members that make up the group at the institutional level. Here the education process took on importance as a complex negotiation, i.e., a collaborative process of exchange, listening and reflection among the different members of the group, social institutions and agents interviewed. The contents were not imposed, but rather discussed and analysed from the same reality. The project worked on the relationships opened up by the issues: health, public spaces, recycling and xenophobia in the neighbourhood. These themes were not preconceived nor taken for granted; they existed in the field as praxis that leapt about and intermingled in the different scenarios thanks to performative pedagogy. There was no predetermined law on waste, but rather multiple relationships that arose from watching, reading and rereading this law. The project through multiplicity

All these emerging relationships were the work material; thus, the work did not entail eliminating complexity, but rather confronting it. The project did not analyse waste as the work material, but rather the complex relationships involved and the positions that emerged in the fieldwork, in this case, New York City. In this sense, pedagogy was an emergent and instituting process; it did not originate in another reality, nor did it aim to be a prior theoretical framework12. The research in this collaborative project was developed precisely on the basis of the gaps, waste and contradictions as a multiple and queer research method (Lather 2001). The project did not search for a single truth, but rather complexities about the subject. It investigated the different readings and intertextualities generated, which were interconnected in the fieldwork. Rather than a final product of concluded art, the project was a way to recompose a visual methodology with videos, interviews, genealogies and diagrams that reorganised the multiple layers of knowledge, gaps and frictions constructed in the voices of the agents involved. This approach showed a multiple and complex reality based on the different materials generated: the process re-read the problem of waste as a complex cultural text
12

The CUP states:

Investigation is the nucleus of CUPs curriculum and it invites students to re-imagine civic studies by detaching them from the safe haven of the classroom and setting them free on the stormy seas of bureaucratic chaos. In contrast to the civic education that focuses on the good citizen, the observation of real political processes furnishes students with access to several types of roles, while promoting critical thought. (CUP, 2007:5)

with a series of power configurations that framed hidden interests and realities13. In the videos case, we can hear overlapping voices: the government official or expert contrasted with another series of citizen or activist groups. Its multiplicity makes us reconsider the possibility of spaces of resistance. - The CUPs practice from its political dimension Garbage City was a praxis that addressed a complex series of relationships based on re-politicising daily life. The group investigated how waste politics affect the different levels of interviewees in their relationships with the social complex and political mechanisms in which waste discourses are generated. The project connected the groups structures and personal experiences with administrative political structures that cover and cover up this problem. Thus, the politics implicit in the production, distribution and marketing of waste were made visible. The project presented a space shot through with conflicts: the materials showed the complex variety of cultural negotiations the subject of landfills makes emerge. Politics here were exposed in the heat of action; its very mechanisms were analysed and questioned, while being translated: these mechanisms were reinterpreted with a positioning provided by the scale model. Thus, the political work here was not limited to only one methodology in use. It was a positioning that nourished the groups work mechanism in producing and distributing the project. This project involved a complex, on-going participative process. More than constituting a dialogue reduced to a communicative act between supposed equals, in this projects case, the complex cultural negotiation reverted in the way it represented and presented itself as a discussion and investigation group for transformation. Here, then, participation was not reduced to certain aspects of the process in the field, but rather to the entire projects production, distribution and channelling within an entire complex institutional network, where the project would be listened to, re-appropriated and possibly re-articulated. This process was constructed, be it in the form of the discussions and dialogues in the beginning, the interviews and videos filming the process, exhibitions in diverse spaces or communication channels in its final format and the
13

As conceived by CUPs curricular unit:

What happens when the discipline of design is forced to function in the environment of a complicated political process? What roles and interests is it really serving? (CUP, 2007:3)

interrelations between the diverse institutions involved. With it, the agency promoted by this project was multiple: it will be articulated and re-articulated constantly beyond the high school in its use as a repertoire of actions in other contexts. The collective project is waiting to be re-launched, differentiated and contextualised, therein resides its performative dimension as a re-articulation in the face of a third: it is always open to translation. 4. 4. The CUPs practice as a space for in-between translation Now we can grasp how the Garbage City project was generated when a performative critical pedagogy was activated collectively. The CUPs pedagogical project was approached as an in-between space, thanks to the emergence of spaces of resistance and transgression. It was a hybrid practice that lay between critical pedagogy, urbanism, participative investigation and collaborative artwork. Its process of cultural translation was blurry; it monitored and represented a range of different voices and experiences, instead of filtering them, by colliding with them and considering them at the representative level itself: an experience in the public space on waste issues. The city was deconstructed here by creating spaces of resistance through an in-between act of translation: its articulation and re-articulation based on the workgroup. Finally, it is important to point out that this project did not aim to give a voice to a community, but rather that it constructed spaces for translation. A group starts to work on tensions and negotiations in a discursive scenario. Its practice is made up of cultural participation, articulation and production in a collaborative practice. At the same time, it is opened up as a communicative element in relation to a third and is presented as a space of cultural translation in a re-articulation. It is in this sense that the CUP project was intermediately located or rather, emerged in-between from the different discourses, actors, institutions and social networks whence they emerge, reproduce, are disseminated and negotiated.

2. Part Two In-between translation museum work

Having analysed the considerations involved in performative critical pedagogy and the place of in-between translation, I turn now to the dimensions of this pedagogy and focus on museum work. My aim here to translate these concepts and in doing so, offer a fresh look at the framework of pedagogy as cultural politics in the museum field. 1. Museums and pedagogies in the postcolonial framework When studying museums as cultural institutions, we normally start out from a common definition that approaches them as centres that govern culture14. Museums are constructed by politics of access and controlled and regulated participation based on a communicative paradigm: there is a sender (the museum and exhibitions) and a passive receptor of the cultural act (society and the public). In this postcolonial approach15, museum behaviour constructs a represented culture that establishes lines of work with others through access and communication16. The cultural politics constructed in this case are centripetal: from the outside in, including terms such as social inclusion and cultural diversity in its work decalogues, which legitimises them from a clearly western, Eurocentric perspective. It should be pointed out that in the majority of these types of politics, the museums pedagogical model originates in a model of compensatory didactics, as defined by Sturm (2002a). This education endeavours to justify the existence of a unique, dominant culture within the museum by communicating its positive values. It eliminates any conflict and difference from the visitors point of view and any sign of hegemonic discourse that may lead to contradictions or unexpected reactions. Here the aestethetic facet of the educational act compensates the individual, yet it is not articulated, much less contradicted by other discourses. This is comparable to the banking concept of the educational act (Freire 1978) and thus emphasises the educators neutral communication task, which is to unload museum data on visitors. It expects neither response nor reaction, only its domestication as that undefined Other.

14

I shall not examine this point in any further depth, as I address it in the introduction to this book when I describe museums as discursive systems. 15 Although a line of literature on museums marked by museology exists that criticises museums postcolonial framework, these studies usually place greater emphasis on the construction of the Other in exhibitions or certain content considered to originate in the post-colonial theorys framework. Since I am using post-colonial theories as a method in this article, my approach is not exclusively connected to exhibition content, but rather to museums cultural production as colonial production. 16 The paradigm of new museology normally sustains this referent.

Furthermore, the museums civilising imprint must be analysed. The discursive terrain of museums and art centres presents them as critical projects under the banner of culture. The institution is conceived of as a colonial standart of cultural assets, a space for healing social conflicts. It is aesthetic evangelism as Kester called it in 1995: the artist illuminates from above, with clarity, to the excluded17. It reshapes and guides them, thanks to an artistic or cultural medium that moulds and saves subjects in view of the universal and redemptive character of this supposed centre of cultural production. The group it works with is standardised by being able to contact and secure access to high culture, which will guide its steps sporadically of course towards individual emancipation. A veritable moral paradigm of pedagogy (Kester: idem). This liberation, Kester reminds us, normally revolves around the subject as an individual element and restricts his or her success and failure to the person, while it confines the capacity for political action to the individual and not the context. This approach precisely obviates the social complex and socio-economic structures that surround us all as social agents, in which the saviour museum or cultural institution is directly related to the social fabric and machinery in which it is located. This complex process, revised by the postcolonial viewpoint, entails a questioning of this evangelical model as cultural imperialism. Museums are strategically positioned with respect to their societies and urban contexts and maintain the binomials of the centre-periphery or the terms of social inclusion and politics of access again through colonial conditions. Thus, difference is domesticated, conflict diluted and resistance disappears. Luckily, these models have changed/are changing18 and more and more interlacing paradigms and tendencies are emerging. Nevertheless, I believe we need to place special emphasis on constructing the ways pedagogies are structured in museums. With the plural pedagogies, we are referring to the many different discourses the educational act constructs according to power relationships (Gore 1996). Within the wide range of pedagogies museums develop, we need to be able to analyse our practices based on power relationships, so that they reflect an articulated relationship in cultural politics

17

Kester refers directly to artists in community in his article, a certain kind of collaborative art practice in which artists work in a community or collective. In my case, I am extrapolating this aesthetic evangelism to other agents who work with collectives and apply media or strategies related to art or cultural work and museums: educators or mediators. 18 The use of the present perfect or present continuous depends on whether we are addressing the national or international panorama. I shall leave it to the reader to decide which tense to use.

beyond actions staged in galleries and workshops19. This step involves constantly regarding and translating museums on the basis of the discourses they engender beyond mere content or the spaces of experience the education process constructs. Applying critical performative pedagogy in museums involves an approach through the multiple differences and especially the gaps that complement the flow of power relationships. It would aim to understand the ways in which museums configure subjectivities, while it analyses the spaces of resistance and blind spots museums produce and cannot cover (up): who organises exhibitions, who determines the system of art, which cultures inhabit the museum, which cultures are not represented or are invisible in the museum. Furthermore, these gaps emerge in all acts of cultural production; here, they enter from the gamut of exhibitions to the cultural and educational events or projects a museum finances and/or displays. I believe this goal can be accomplished on the basis of cultural translations. 2. Museum pedagogy as insurgent cultural production The performative critical pedagogy set out here would function precisely on the basis of the postcolonial theory in museums. It would focus on working with the discursive structure and emerging conflicts of the institution in which it is applied: which views and power relationships are established in terms of the Other and how in-between translations can be practiced. I would not attempt to camouflage or process the museums structure solely at the level of content while obviating the structure of the museology project, exhibitions and political positions that education departments create within the museums discursive structure. This approach would analyse the imperialistic character of exploiting the Other that museologies still maintain, although this exploitation is sustained in symbolic terms: the museum exploits the social capital of certain margins or peripheries to justify its hegemonic influence on the meaning of culture. Based on a model of working towards different audiences, we can see how pedagogy often views museums and exhibitions as content to be communicated, not as mechanisms of identity and symbolic control over citizens subjectivities. The educational act in the museum field becomes political only
19

Whoever believes that education is a mere intersubjective act, with groups in galleries opposite works of art or collections and not the political position and degrees of negotiation involved in a department should reconsider the compensatory or banking model applied.

in its contents: the educator transmits or exhibits supposedly political content, be it the exhibition, work or artist in question. The information is unloaded and the exhibitions discursive device is neutralised, while the symbolic mechanisms of control continue to act and register on the audience. Museums may also decide to work with the Other, but this Other is not problematised and its articulation is not negotiated. The mere fact of access and the something that takes place in the museum already transmits the museums political dimension. This is often when that Other is defined as the community to legitimise the proportion of contextual reality the museum requires to keep on functioning20. Meanwhile, the educators task and his or her view and discourse are eliminated or neutralised; they deteriorate or lack sufficient institutional presence to establish forms of translation beyond communication or work with other people. In this sense, educational discourse consciously or unconsciously masks a capacity to read the political contexts whence exhibitions emanate. We should not forget that exhibitions are cultural representations that are structured and distributed by certain discourses. A museums capacity for interpretation would involve constructing in-between spaces of cultural translation that articulates education as resistance (Sturm 2002b) precisely within the systems blind points, inside them, flourishing like weeds. This means articulating pedagogy not through the Others access, but rather through an internal disruption within the institution itself, again from the inside out, in multiplicity. This kind of interstitial museology would construct relationships of tension between the insides and outsides of discourses on the basis of the museum itself, forcing it towards constant cultural translation. Critical pedagogy would be understood here as a via of negotiation that includes collective forms of cultural translation, not so much in terms of a museums fulfilment of its self-justifying mission, but rather to investigate the museum and its cultural representations through the continual difference. 3. The postcolonial approach to museology through participation and cultural negotiation When culture is negotiated in other contexts, it subverts the hegemonic relationships of discourses, which is when it forces us to translate it culturally: it always demands new
20

In this sense, it is clear how museums and major art events hire and exploit the social capital of the reality around it through artists in community or so-called counterculture artworks or practices while continuing to deploy imperialist discourses and mechanisms of hegemony.

translations and interpretations and, with it, new translators. Consequently, museums need to defend the construction of cultural designs on the basis of a collective translation that takes the Other into account beyond monocentrist production. With this perspective, we can now approach the question of politics and museologies. The museums communicative cultural direction consists in bringing its culture closer to the public, and with it, imposing, yet never questioning its own cultural values. Nevertheless, the postcolonial dimension would be able to consider the shift from the politics of access to the politics of participation and negotiation under a postcolonial frame. This shift means a rupture with the paradigm of cultures vertical democratisation under the communicative epigraph as the transmitter of values to be imposed on the museums peripheries. This dynamic side of culture has a direct impact on the realm of museology. Museums would be considered spaces for cultural negotiation: spaces for the constant translation of codes, contexts and subjectivities between diverse discursive spaces and, consequently, public spheres. Of course, museums could no longer monopolise this relationship, as if only one single translation and translator were possible. Instead, museums would be understood as a cultural vector, along with other relational points and vectors, that serves as a springboard for constant interpretation and translation. The museum is merely one more translator, not the only one, and still less the One that can contain the entire value of cultural meaning.21 This last consideration leads us to rethink a different frame for museology work, one articulated by transculturality in the museum (McDonald 2003) in its acceptance of the contaminations and hybrid spaces in culture. This dimension would therefore affect all the museums cultures, which are contaminated constantly: curators, conservers, educators and, especially, the public. Cultural politics would maintain a critical relationship with culture through an act of cultural translation, thus allowing a differential space to emerge in the museum. Here these politics are constructed by complex negotiation, both in view of the institution itself as well as other cultures and agents, in which to collectively continue the act of translation.22 As a result, these cultural politics could construct decentralised ways to produce and distribute culture in
21

This would block the differential behaviour of the culture we are handling and construct a hegemonic process of mono-centrist translation.

an articulated fashion, without delving into the dichotomy of the sole producer and exhibition centre (the museum and its cultural designers) and the marginalised peripheral receptor (the different audiences as cultural receivers). I believe it is possible to launch these cultural politics, thanks to performative critical pedagogys differential modes, since they force us towards a constant translation from within. Part Three Opening up multiple fronts on the basis of in-between work (Conclusions) Throughout this article, I have attempted to present a work method based on performative critical pedagogy as an insurgent cultural policy through translation spaces, thanks to the postcolonial approach. To summarise the possibilities of working within this frame, I will underscore its most important aspects. The first point to be highlighted in a praxis of critical cultural production is its inbetween constructions, which come about through a complex process that acts as an intersection in the framework of critical pedagogy, performativity, the poststructuralist relationship in research and the production of collective knowledge. These types of projects are critical because of the way in which discourses are re-presented and performativised from multiple positions and act as a constant negotiation process. This negotiation articulates the mechanisms of power and institutional structures in which cultural production takes place, not only at the level of content, but in their way of acting and articulating with participants. The second salient aspect is that the transformation work in this performative pedagogy lies in the manner it is executed and related as a space of cultural translation. Culture is applied not as a specular, but rather as a transforming and enactive model in an act of translation through different action contexts, from the inside out. This re-articulation of critical pedagogy is what gives rise to a production of insurgent cultural politics. These kinds of politics are constructed participatively throughout the entire social network, and in turn lead to an articulating and re-articulating museology within the dynamic

22

In this sense, I am referring to the definition of dialogical cultural politics I have furnished in the introduction to this book.

complex of the different institutions. Thirdly, it is important to point out that these in-between practices act cross-sectionally in the way they combine production and distribution at several overlapping levels. They are established as hybrid spaces that lie somewhere between work, investigation, production, and cultural translation/resistance, which leads to a differentiallyconstructed and participative cultural politics, since participation is re-articulated in its constant negotiation in relation to a third. These practices take their future uses or constant translation in other workspaces into account, thanks to which, in-between spaces open up manifold fronts that we must harvest as a challenge for cultural politics in the end, be it based on educational, artistic or curatorial practices inside or outside institutions.
Bibliography Bhabha, Homi (1995) Translator translated. Interview with cultural theorist Hommi Bhabha by W.J.T. Mitchell. Artforum. v.33, n.7 (March). pp:80-84. Bhabha, Homi (2002) El lugar de la cultura. Buenos Aires: Manantial. Rutherford, Jonathan.( 1990). The Third Space. Interview with Homi Bhabha. In: Ders. (Hg): Identity: Community, Culture, Difference.London: Lawrence and Wishart. pp: 207-221. Butler, Judith (1997) Sovereign Performatives in Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative . New York: Routledge (Spanish version at http://www.accpar.org/numero4/butler.htm) Ellsworth Elisabeth (1989) Why Doesnt This Feel Empowering? Harvard Educational Review 59, no.3): 298-325. Kester , Grant (1995) Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art. Afterimage 22 .January 1995: pp 5-11. Lather, Patti ( 2002). Dangerous Coagulations? The Uses of Foucault in the Study of Education. Paper presented at American Educational Studies Association Annual Conference, Pittsburgh PA. November 2002. Macdonald, Sharon, j. (2003) Museums, national and postnational and transcultural identities. In Museum and Society . 1(1)1-16.

Sturm, Eva (2002a) Woher kommen die KunstvermittlerInnen? Versuch einer Positionsbestimmung. In Sturm, Eva, Rollig , Stella (2002)Durfen die das?Kunts als sosialer Raum.Art/Education/Cultural Work/Communities. Museum sum Quadrat 13. Turian Kant Verlag.Wien. pp. 198-211.

Sturm, Eva (2002b) Kunstvermittlung als Widerstand. In: Schppinger Forum der Kunstvermittlung Transfer. Beitrge sur Kunstvermittlung Nr.2 Schppingen 2002. Video The Center for Urban Pedagogy (2002) Garbage Problems. Website for the Center for Urban Pedagogy and project materials www.anothercupdevelopment. Descriptive brochure and curricular unit on the Garbage problems project: CUP (2007) The Making of Garbage Problems. PDF file at: http://www.anothercupdevelopment.org/projects/detail/23/description#resources.

Licencia Esta obra est bajo una licencia Reconocimiento-No comercial-Sin obras derivadas 2.5 Espaa de Creative Commons. Para ver una copia de esta licencia, visite http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/es/ o enve una carta a Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA This texts is a extraxt of an extenden chapeter , originally published in : Pedagoga crtica perfomativa, educacin artstica y trabajo colaborativo: La produccin de polticas culturales insurgentes.. En Rodrigo, Javier (2007) Prcticas dialgicas. Intersecciones entre Pedagoga crtica y Museologa Crtica .Museu d rt Contemporani a Mallorca Es Baluard .Palma de Mallorca. Libro+ DVD. Pp 47-66.