Vocational Program 2024/2025
The Vocational Program offers artistic guidance to individuals over 14 years of age in facilities run by the Municipal Secretariat of Culture and Creative Economy and in the CEUs (Unified Educational Centers) of the Municipal Secretariat of Education of São Paulo. In addition to weekly meetings, the Vocational Program also conducts complementary cultural activities, engagement programs, and community outreach, supplementing the artistic and pedagogical processes with the classes and/or groups served by the project.
The pedagogical practice was developed at the Vila Itororó Cultural Center and the Amadeu Amaral Public Library, primarily based on actively listening to the individuals with a vocation. By placing the participants' desires and concerns at the center of the creative process, artistic mediation allowed techniques to emerge as responses to the interests of each group. At Vila Itororó, this openness to dialogue resulted in an investigation focused on watercolor and the reinterpretation of images through embroidery on photographs. In the context of the Amadeu Amaral Library, the production concentrated on the languages of painting and drawing, reaffirming the commitment to an aesthetic education that values authorship and subjectivity in artistic creation.
At the end of the orientation sessions, the individuals who showed a calling were able to participate in a final showcase at the Olido Cultural Center.
Class from the Vila Itororó Cultural Center:
The pedagogical practice developed at the Vila Itororó Cultural Center was guided by a mediation that integrated active listening with the repertoire of contemporary art, using as a reference the textile production of artists such as Sonia Gomes and Rosana Paulino. The main methodological challenge lay in constructing a notion of composition that harmonized the overlapping of languages, articulating the fluidity of watercolor and the gestural quality of dry pastel chalk on fabric with the rigor of embroidery on photographs. In this process, the group—composed spontaneously only of women—transformed the studio into a space for subjective exchanges, where manual work served as a tool for dialogue. The experience was broadened by a visit to the exhibition Women Affected by Dams: Embroidering Rights, at MASP, which served as a poetic trigger for the development of original works. One of the significant outcomes of this immersion was the work of one of the trainees, who used embroidery to give new meaning to photographs she had taken herself during the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, thus consolidating the union between political memory, technique, and artistic sensibility.
Amadeu Amaral Public Library Class
At the Amadeu Amaral Public Library, the engagement of teenagers and young adults transcended the classroom, solidifying into visits to exhibitions and educational workshops. Starting from the individual habit of drawing in notebooks, the group was encouraged to explore collective painting in large formats, demanding body awareness and respect for teamwork. Although they also experimented with embroidery individually, the main focus was on the transition from an intimate scale to shared composition, transforming technical learning into an exercise in coexistence and collective authorship.
Final exhibition
The final exhibition solidified itself as a fundamental pedagogical stage, in which the individuals with the vocation took the lead in the assembly process and developed basic curatorial concepts. The activity promoted a critical analysis of the composition of the space and the mutual aesthetic influence between the exhibited works. The cycle concluded with a collective discussion about individual trajectories, allowing participants to reflect on the subjective and technical developments experienced throughout their artistic journey.
