Shaking barriers

The main focus of Shaking Barriers is to make visible and politicise barriers that people face in the art world by hearing the voices of those directly affected. Namely, barriers to their access to education, the recognition of their cultural practices and the development of their work practices.

Shaking barriers recognises that people’s barriers to participatory access to the arts are intersected by economics, territory, language, gender, ethnicity, disability, class, etc. Shaking Barriers therefore raises the fundamental question of how coordination can be achieved in a structure composed of a large number of actors that aspires to be radically democratic.

We would like to apply our findings in an international, pluricultural, multilingual and digital context. The people that contribute to this project also come from diverse territories, contexts and economies.

We are in a process of developing and researching methodologies that can be used to create open, accessible and safer environments – aiming towards decentralization of knowledge and de-elitisation of cultural capital production. Ensuring this, prevents us from reproducing the very spaces which we are trying to challenge.

Shaking Barriers is a project with two axis: firstly, peer-to-peer education and secondly, art as social action.

The axis of education has a field of research and implementation through pluricultural methodologies that is rooted in the critical, popular and liberating pedagogy of Paulo Freire and touches on the critical work of Bell Hooks. This axis aims to recognise the environments, differences and barriers in accessing art spaces among participants and to co-investigate practices of working towards structural change.

The second axis corresponds to art as a fundamental guidance that permeates all levels of our project, taking into account that the people who access the project may or may not come from specialised art circles.

The symbolic end of our project will be the collective creation of a zine, which will compile the sentiments and activistic art projects explored. In an equitable way, the project will present the graphic and visual discourses that evidence the reflections on the discussions of the barriers to people’s cultural access. It is important for us to take into account the pluricultural identity of Shaking Barriers, which aspires to be a diverse and international community that is grouped and organised in an online environment.