By Francisca Jiménez
In mid-January, a diverse group of teachers and professionals from different disciplines gathered at the Adolfo Ibanez University, in the pre-mountain range of Santiago de Chile, with one interest: participating in the Pre-Texts workshop with Professor Sergio Araya, Dean of Design at the AIU, and Professor Doris Sommer, Director of Cultural Agents.
Briefly, Doris facilitated the first activity: a warming up that was a corporal work, a human knot, that had to be unraveled. This served to "break the ice", because many of us did not know each other yet. Then, we made cardboard books, listened to read aloud, asked questions to the text to publish in the "cordel”, etc. The group dynamics around the texts surprised us, day after day.
The text that we chosen was "All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury. It is a science fiction story, and we approached it in different ways: from plastic arts, acting, biology, food, design with laser cutting, electronics, pedagogy, journalism and different tangents of the texts. This tangents are especially important on Pre-Texts and refer to how the text is approached by the reader when unraveling it from different angles. Doris recommended us to bring some documents related directly or indirectly to the story to crumble it and “Go off on a tangent”. Therefore, we printed different documents from internet with different contents. For example, a new discovery about the geography of the planet Venus and an article about female power.
These papers were hung on the “cordel” and served us to read the texts and understand the story through the perspective of our colleges. This activity will be very useful to work with our students and the most varied disciplines.
After five days together in the foothills of the pre-mountain range of Santiago, we approached, we moved and we united around a text in an experience that we will never forget. All thanks to the pretexts.
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