“Algunas escuelas tienen ciudades y otras no”.

Narrativas de infancias en una escuela rural albergue pública

Abstract

Obispo Salguero is a rural boarding school, where students, teachers, cooks and tutors live from Monday to Friday. Based on the extension project “Roots. Narratives and stories of the Obispo Salguero school”, we have been working since 2022 on the construction of narratives about daily life. Within this framework, and as a result of obtaining a scholarship from the UNC Extension Secretariat entitled: “Building stories - Narratives in the Obispo Salguero boarding school (Pampa de Olaen, Córdoba)”, we carry out different activities around narrating with photography.
This resulted in the construction, together with the students, of the exhibition entitled “Some schools have cities and others do not. Imagining the Pampa de Olaen” which was exhibited in the UNC Brujas Pavilion. This production aims to show the daily life of the rural school Obispo Salguero from the eyes of those who live there.
In the following article we seek to bring this work closer from the photographs taken by the children themselves and the curatorial text that follows.
“Some schools have cities and others do not.” This one, on the other hand, has a river, cows, cooks; it is also visited by doctors. The children stay overnight, fish, do puppet shows, study, learn math, science, language, brush their teeth and hands and go to bed early.
The photographs are analog and were taken by the students with two different instructions; “with what image would you show the school to someone who does not know it?” and “what is a day like at school?” You, then, will find these stories in the photographs. But first, we ask you to close your eyes and think: with what image would you tell what the place where you live or work is like, to someone who does not know it?
Every school has different stories, this one has many that help us to root ourselves and we want to share them with you.