SENIORS

The Museo Moderno has undergone a transformation, becoming a space for seniors where they can have a presence, their own experiences, and develop a true sense of belonging at the Museum.

We offer interactive visits that open the eyes of our visitors and encourage discussions on art, memory and personal history.

School of Painting: Meditation on Colour

The School of Painting is a space within the “Life Centre”, a programme within the Communities Department of the Museo Moderno carried out in collaboration with residences, retirement centres and other meeting spaces for seniors of Buenos Aires’ Commune 1.

The initiative has grown out of the interactions and reciprocal listening process between the museum and its neighbours.

Coordinated by Alejandra Knoll, an artist and mediator with the Museo Moderno’s Education team, and with the participation of Florencia Böhtlingk and Nicolás Domínguez Nacif, the workshop seeks to create a participatory environment with a horizontal approach where everyone learns from each other.

For this second School of Painting tutorial, “Mediación del color” [“Colour Mediation”], you will need a blank piece of paper, a paintbrush, watercolours in the three primary colours, a rag and water. You will experiment with the logic of colours and experience the watercolour technique.

To learn more about the School of Painting, please write us at:
[email protected]

School of Painting: The power of the line

The School of Painting is a space within the museum’s Centro de Vida [Life Centre], which is part of the Museo Moderno’s Community Department, which is run in collaboration with the different residences, retirement centres and other meeting spaces for seniors in Buenos Aires’ Commune 1.

The initiative has grown out of the interactions and a reciprocal listening process between the museum and its neighbours. Coordinated by Alejandra Knoll, an artist and mediator with the Museo Moderno’s Education team, and with the participation of painters Florencia Böhtlingk and Nicolás Domínguez Nacif, the workshop seeks to create a participatory environment that takes a horizontal approach, where everyone learns from each other. 

To begin, we suggest choosing a sketchbook that you can use for the entire series of tutorials. What follows is an exercise that you can do at home, but you can also try it out at a public plaza or on the bus, or wherever else it may strike your fancy! If you decide to use a brush, be sure to have paint in different colours and some water at hand. You can also use a pen or pencil.

Today we are going to explore the power and possibilities of the line. Listen to the story that follows. You can interpret it either as a landscape or as a series of instructions. With your eyes closed, let your gestures flow over the surface without the interruption of thoughts or judgements. Listen to the words and transform them into lines that follow the rhythm of the narration.

PODCAST: Where is the community?

Where is the community? This is a podcast series produced by the Communities Area of the Museo Moderno’s Education Department. The four episodes of the series bring together voices from the worlds of critical thought and artistic practices, who have been invited to reflect on the common and the community during the process of emerging from the pandemic, when there is growing anxiety about the future as well as increased phobias regarding contact with other people.

Chapter 1

In this first episode, we speak with activist and researcher Emiliano Exposto. He speaks from the perspective of community mental health, providing a diagnosis of the psychosocial crisis we are going through and bringing together alternative care experiences in spaces of collective containment, which are not incompatible with enjoying our autonomy.  

Chapter 2

m7red is a research and activist collective that focuses on complex urban contexts. The adjective “complex” is very appropriate to the current sensation of not having the tools to engage in a new environmental and social reality that requires urgent and concrete responses. 

In terms of the Museo Moderno and its Community Department, this complexity lies in the difficulty to connect with specific groups and audiences in a precarious psychosocial context that is no longer exclusive older adults and users of the mental health service.

The invitation to look at, see, and feel the vitality of the materials and forces around us is a proposal that m7red shares with the new program at the Museo Moderno, Un día en la tierra [One Day on Earth]. As a component of its community, the museum can find itself within a maelstrom of stakeholders and agencies that co-exist, sometimes collaborating and sometimes creating problems. The diversity is such that, even within a single audience, the capabilities, skills and desires can often diverge. 

m7red’s experience offers us ideas to consider the place of human culture in this context of overlapping realities and crises. How can we make art a part of environmental health, coordinating a threefold ecological interplay of signs, territories and bodies that allow for healthier and more sustainable modes of production and exchange?

Chapter 3

“Dónde está la comunidad?” [“Where is the community?”] is a podcast cycle produced by the Communities Area of the Museo Moderno’s Education Department. This series bring together voices from the worlds of critical thought and artistic practices, who are invited to reflect on the relationship of artistic practice to the things we hold in common and to our community in the aftermath of the pandemic. 

In this third episode, we hear from Julia Ramírez-Blanco about the community aspect of artistic practices.

Ramírez-Blanco studies the aesthetic and political dimensions of artistic utopias and activism. She teaches at the University of Barcelona and is also a collaborator with the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). She has recently authored the forthcoming book, Amigos, disfraces y comunas. Las hermandades de artistas del siglo XIX

Beyond exploring art as an occupation and aesthetics as a personal experience, Julia’s case studies and reflections provide a key to understanding the renewed interest among art collectives, activists and other actors in creating settings and environments for outreach, and the production of subjectivities that are more committed to real contexts and less focused on the individual.

Chapter 4

The Communities division within the Education Department of the Museo Moderno has developed a programme cycle known as Dónde está la comunidad [Where is the Community?]. In this series of conversations, critical thinkers and artists are invited to reflect on the relationship between art, the common and the communal.

This past December, in collaboration with the Museo de la Cárcova and the Barrio Rodrigo Bueno Senior Citizens Centre, we held the “Estampas comunitarias” [“Community Prints”] printmaking workshop, which was free and open to the community.

The Rodrigo Bueno Neighbourhood Senior Citizens Centre invited a group of neighbours to participate in this artistic learning experience, coordinated by Noelia Mercanzini. The workshop provided a space to learn and exchange techniques related to image design, block cutting and other stamping techniques. However, it was also designed with the intention of discussing the participants’ own interests, since, in addition to learning a technique, the workshop was planned as an opportunity to gain knowledge to be able to develop their own businesses.

In this podcast, the participants and host of the workshop tell us about the working process as well as the results and expectations that grew out of the activity.

To learn more about the programmes offered by the Communities division of the museum, visit the website or write us at: [email protected]

PODCAST: Cómo no vivir solas [How Not to Live Alone]

“Cómo no vivir solas” [“How Not to Live Alone”] is a podcast cycle that brings together a group of artists, advocates, health professionals and theorists to reflect on art in the creation of images, stories and affections. Rather than conceiving of old age as being debilitating, their voices propose a different point of view. In this series of four podcasts, we invite you to listen to different perspectives and practices that see life after sixty as an opportunity to continue to learn and enjoy, to fulfil those desires that were postponed due to work and family obligations.

In the first episode, we listen to Mónica Navarro, director of the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero’s Ancestras (Women Ancestors) Program and the Gerontological Intervention and Management Programs. The Ancestras program provides a group space for participatory learning that asserts the wisdom of older women. Mónica discusses the formation and objectives of the group as well as its working methodology and sources of inspiration.

In this second episode, artists Ana Gallardo and Ana Eloisa Guichón, who first met within the framework of the retrospective exhibition Ana Gallardo: Un lugar para vivir cuando seamos viejos [Ana Gallardo: A Place to Live When We Get Old], which took place at the Museo Moderno in 2015, talk about what that meeting meant to each of them.

Sharing a passion for painting, Gallardo and Guichón forged a friendship that bridges art and life. They talk about topics such as being a woman, growing old, and not yet giving up on continuing to learn. Enjoy this conversation full of affection about the importance of cultivating bonds and chasing our dreams.

In this third episode, we asked philosopher Diego Sztulwark to reflect on solitude and the effects of the pandemic and social distancing on our individual realities. In his words, Sztulwark takes up some of the ideas of the writer and theorist Gilles Deleuze about solitude, self-knowledge and the link with others and with the community.

In the fourth episode, we invited members of the women’s roundtable of the Soberanía Sanitaria Foundation to think about the challenges of adopting a concept of health that is oriented to promoting autonomy and dignity in people’s lives, rather than just the treatment of disease.

RHIZOME PROJECT 1
A notebook for seniors for sketching and writing

In botany, a rhizome is a stalk that grows horizontally underground, sprouting roots and shoots along the length of its nodes. In terms of social philosophy, a rhizome is a scheme that has no fixed centre, lacks a hierarchical structure to subordinate its branches, and may open up unlimited paths. Based on this idea, we invite you to set your mind, body and imagination in motion and to connect with others through the activities we have designed for you and yours.

In the current context of physical isolation, we want to offer you a meeting space and emotional proximity.

Click on the image to access the booklet.

RHIZOME PROJECT 2
A notebook for seniors for sketching and writing

In botany, a rhizome is a stalk that grows horizontally underground, sprouting roots and shoots along the length of its nodes. In terms of social philosophy, a rhizome is a scheme that has no fixed centre, lacks a hierarchical structure to subordinate its branches, and may open up unlimited paths. Based on this idea, we invite you to set your mind, body and imagination in motion and to connect with others through the activities we have designed for you and yours.

In the current context of physical isolation, we want to offer you a meeting space and emotional proximity.

Click on the image to access the booklet.

RHIZOME PROJECT 3
A notebook for seniors for sketching and writing
In line with the tenets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals aimed at gender equality, we invite you to get to know some of the women artists in the Museo Moderno collection by setting your body, mind and imagination in motion with Rizoma [Rhizome], our notebook for seniors for sketching and writing.
 

Click on the image to access the booklet.

Emotional map making to recreate a personal journey

A workshop from Abre Artes Expresivas and the Museo Moderno Education team.

In this workshop, we invite you to create a map that will allow you to retrace your life journey, showing where you have been and where you are going. What experiences do we have tucked away in our personal rucksacks, and what tools have we acquired along the way? In this workshop, we will contemplate the possible paths we want to take going forward, and consider how memories and images are intertwined with our desires.

See to create

Meditation for seniors
A timeless experience to connect with our imaginations

Visualization can link us to our inner creative force and open up our imagination and our personal perspectives, all through closing our eyes and looking inwards, reconnecting with our body and our emotions.
With Germán Paley, Art Educator

Who is to say that time travel is not possible? Who is to say that know-how is necessary? Where can you find inspiration? It is as easy as that simple act of closing your eyes. By doing so, you can open up a portal to invention and poetry. We invite you to live this experience in which you are the protagonist of your own art.

PHOTO JOURNALS: A WINDOW ON THE WORLD

The screens of our mobile phones and computers can also be a window on the world, a means of recording our everyday lives, creating many worlds and sharing them with others.

We invite you to compile a photo journal of your day, using 5 photos of yourself, your pets, a neighbour, etc. You can also include the new landscapes you can capture outside your window at different times of the day, and the objects you encounter as you go through your daily life. For each shot, come up with a title or a caption that captures the most important aspects of your day.

When you have put it together, share it with your family and friends via WhatsApp or email. If you would like to share it with us, send it to [email protected], or upload it to Facebook and tag the museum: @modernoba

SOUNDSCAPE

Florencia Bohtlingk is a contemporary artist who participated in Una historia de la imaginación en la Argentina [A History of the Imagination in Argentina], part of the museum’s 2019 programming. Her work La boca del Infierno [Hell’s Mouth] invites us to reflect on closed borders, the body as territory, caring for the environment, the planet, and sustainability.

We invite you to visit the website Fragments of Extinction by clicking on the image or the following link: https://www.fragmentsofextinction.org/listen-to-ecosystems/

There you will be able to listen to different sounds of nature and give yourself over to meditation and sketch imaginary landscapes. Choose a colour of your liking and close your eyes. Do not think too much about what you are drawing. Then, surprise yourself when you open your eyes. Try to identify figures in the abstract forms.

EXPOSICIONES PRESENTES
Elian Chali: Unexpected Plane
Art, That Endless River
Green Manifesto
A Hundred Roads in a Day