“Visitar museos fue como ir a Disney”: un proyecto en la cárcel

Abstract

"Breaking free the muses! Museums in Prison” is a community engagement project that connects museums of the province of Córdoba with prisoners kept in the Penitentiary Establishment No. 4 Colonia Abierta Monte Cristo. The project took place between 2018-2019, and it is on hold at present due the coronavirus pandemic. This proposal of museum-based pedagogy was carried out by various public museums in tandem with the university and the jail. We were mainly interested in the possibility of bringing museums closer to a context full of social prejudices, in which there are individuals who usually do not have the chance of accessing these cultural spaces. We constitute an interdisciplinary team made up of plastic artists, actresses, pedagogues, museum guides and anthropologists. As part of the project, we organized artistic workshops in Colonia Abierta Monte Cristo to address issues such as identity, memory, and life inside and outside the prison. During this time of intramural work, we arranged the visits to the museums for the months of October and November. In turn, the team created two museum exhibitions and a clip that documents what the inmates experienced. The ultimate purpose of this article is to socially spread the project, to reflect on the participants, the impact and the territory where we worked on, as well as to recover and value what we learnt as professors.