LAB’O: university guidance through art experience

For some years now, the Pirelli HangarBicocca Education Department has been working with the Department of Human Sciences for Education at the University of Milano-Bicocca, creating and promoting mutual enrichment through in-depth research and actions, mainly by means of education through art and art-based research.

A key moment came in the autumn of 2014, when a project in collaboration with the LAB’O educational guidance service was launched. This includes a number of areas of research in which art is used as a vehicle of knowledge, education and transformation. Pirelli HangarBicocca and LAB’O have designed and created educational courses involving contemporary art displays in the exhibition space, which assist the guidance service for school students of all levels.

The participation of the Pirelli HangarBicocca Education Department focuses mainly on the approach and methods adopted by education through art, in which art is used as a vehicle for learning.

Contemporary art has the advantage that it speaks to participants of their position in the contemporary world in languages ​​that are open to many levels of interpretation and that involve multiple disciplines at the same time.

Works of contemporary of art are the essential starting point for learning about the world view of the artists who created them, but they are also a means for illustrating issues that are different and seemingly distant from art, bringing in new forms of inspiration and new perceptions. The encounter/impact with the work, in terms of its content and form, thus becomes the ‘difference that makes a difference’, which, in certain conditions – which will be the subject of experimentation and reflection – lead to a truly transformative form of learning.