The main argument proposed by this text is to bring up a debate between what I define as ‘education and art,’ as opposed to the much-trumpeted ‘art and education.’ I have attempted to write and rewrite, from a dialectical sidewalk, the concept of education and art. I use this expression to portray what education as a form of knowledge states and, within that context, the countless dialogues it opens through the questions posed by the makers involved in the current art practices. I also use education and art because it is the art practice that questions its own models of interpretation and where institutions have often used the tools of education to build bridges for communication and social interaction with the artworks and actions that, in most cases, haven’t been in any way designed to communicate but to shock and alter the environment where they are shown. In this sense, education and art has earned a well-deserved distinction from the maelstrom of ineptitude created by institutions throughout Latin America to outline educational formats in order to promote the works of contemporary visual artists.

Although, in most contexts, education is a rigid process of knowledge formation, it is also true that it substantially loses rigidity when paired with processes involving actions produced by artists. Moreover, in these increasingly convulsed times, it is clear to us that art becomes a necessary activity for the existence of such knowledge and its environments.

To analyze diverse visual arts projects in terms of the close relationship they foster between education and art, I must critically install the interactions that arise within the diagram of some relevant projects in Chile and Bolivia, which have been circulating education and art actions, in addition to articulating various contemporary epistemes emerging in these territories.

Most of these collective and collaborative research hubs have surfaced mainly because of the scarce resources for managing new ventures and the lack of specialized training in critical studies in the visual arts field. In this sense, the education and art perspective has enabled an in-depth re-exploration of the criteria of reality and the fictions that allow us to understand the very unevenness of these lands.

In the case of Chile, it has been impossible to continue sustaining a series of art promotion, production, circulation, and research models based purely on the ideology of contemporary art. Therefore, when analyzing the aforementioned pairing, we imbue into unique contexts where platforms for both pedagogical and theoretical practices have been established. These are also spaces where artists, managers, and curators hold dialogues concerning how their processes—rather than their proposals—are circulating. All this is aimed at appropriating, interpreting, problematizing, and building spaces that can resolve the expectations that arise from education and art.

It is important to sketch a few poetic bridges that enable specialized ponderations and the search for renewed educational and training backgrounds in art that have gained momentum in recent years.

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