“Artistic Clashes in the Classroom Space

What is it about?

This article explores the aesthetic collisions present in the Faculty of Education Sciences building at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) as an a/r/tographic inquiry involving students and the instructor of the course Processes and Strategies in Photography and Contemporary Art, part of the Master’s Degree in Research and Innovation in Specific Didactics for Early Childhood and Primary Education. The research methodology is grounded in the practice of static drifting, following Guy Debord’s model, through photographic documentation. The project phases include theoretical research on artistic drifting, the educational space as a “third teacher,” and visual perception inspired by Georges Perec’s literary experiment An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Photography is employed as a tool to meticulously document what has been the students’ academic habitat over the course of five years. Subsequently, a collective photomontage is created, where visual narratives emerge from the interplay of textures, colors, geometric forms, and subjective, emotional, and critical elements. The resulting work, derived from the static drift, reveals textural journeys, spatial echoes, ephemeral geometries, and chromatic explorations, uncovering the hidden language of the shared environment

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Why is it important?

This article offers a pioneering and richly layered exploration of educational space through an artistic lens. By engaging students directly in an a/r/tographic (art‑research‑teaching) inquiry, it transforms the building of the Faculty of Education Sciences at USC into an active participant in the learning process. Using static dérive—a psychogeographic method adapted from Guy Debord—the study invites participants to observe, document, and reinterpret their academic environment with intention and sensitivity. Photography serves not just as documentation but as a tool of discovery, while a collective photomontage visualizes the emotional, aesthetic, and spatial narratives of the shared educational habitat. All of this reveals the “secret language” embedded in everyday architecture, underscoring how physical spaces shape pedagogical experience and creative insight

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