Nicolás Paris (Bogotá, 1977) quit his architectural training to work as a teacher in a Colombian rural school. It was there that he developed his interest and research into matters relating to collective learning processes. He brings this experience and expertise to his artistic work, equipping himself with the tools that architecture has given him and labelling himself a “pseudo-architect”. From January to February 2024, he ran a series of workshops at Escola da Vila in Porto Santo as part of his residency there with Porta 33, a project he called Árvore Relâmpago (Lightning Tree). The conversation we had with him centred on his work and the experience he had on his return to the school.

Education and pedagogy through art, or rather art through pedagogy, as you put it to me a few days ago, are key to your work. You began your training in architecture and were a professor. It feels fitting to have you in residence in a school, especially one like the “Escola da Vila”, a remarkable building by architect Raúl Chorão Ramalho. What was it like living and working in this place and finding out about the territory of Porto Santo, in its insular condition, from here?

I began my training as an architect, but I think I’m a pseudo-architect. Halfway through my training I applied for a volunteer teaching programme at a rural school. The organisation took me up on my application and I started working with them when I was about 22 years old. The experience was powerful, but also intense. I made a rather extreme decision to undertake my own learning process, a self-assessment process. Constantly from an architectural standpoint. I started working with architectural elements, not for drawing, but for developing settings or places. I started outlining all my learning proposals using drawing as a tool. I love the idea that architecture, in its relationship with drawing, more than just a representation technique, is a tool for projecting ideas, for creating dialogues between different fields, knowledge or between different viewpoints and work processes. Drawing, more than a common language, has become a thinking system, a tool for projecting ideas.

This story is probably the starting point for my work. It made me think that one person’s learning process is like a fractal of the learning process of all humanity. I still look into what I found when working with a group of people who were learning, while learning to be a professor from an intention to build learning environments. At Escola da Vila I could go back to that initial intent, to those trust-based, slow building processes. I found it very stimulating to realise its history and the architect’s attitude to developing the design of his building from the void. 

Does this imply that the building and the architect themselves can also be professors or students?

Yes, that is quite beautiful. The whole Escola da Vila project is like a system or an organism. The school is becoming a kind of cultural centre, its building is now learning to run a different kind of school. I love the idea that we are all learning something. This is perhaps a place where, through micro-encounters, erratic, slow processes, we can find new ways of being together, without repeating history, without replicating formal, academic or linear processes, underpinning a spatial thinking that grows in many directions, in which we are all part of the same growing system. A process based on nurturing, on caring for the building and the architect’s legacy.

This brings me to a quote of yours: “Planning architecture may be an exercise in resistance, just as learning at school is an act of resistance”. Can you expand on this a little more?

Sure. The school learning process is not alone in its ability to be a resistance exercise. In general, learning is an exercise in resistance because I believe that we have a responsibility to change, to sustain the world’s impermanence, the universe’s impermanence. Learning is a time in your life when you carry out a specific activity, but I like to see it as an attitude. At this time in one’s life, learning is an attitude that you must develop because it offers the possibility of change. More than anything, I think that learning is a powerful and beautiful means of forging new connections. I really appreciate this idea, which maybe comes from biology or neurobiology, where the primary reason for any anatomy or any phenomenon in nature is to build connections, to create systems or ecosystems. The point I’m trying to make is that we should make it possible for learning to allow us to grow in relationship with others. That the best way to stand up to conformity is to try, with great responsibility, to transform individual experiences into collective learning. The word “school” comes from the Greek “skholê”, meaning that school is the time where you find out what’s important to you. I’d say it’s the time where we find what’s important to us.

If we go back to the beginning, you launched workshops that took place at Escola da Vila as an invitation to “form a study group with no clear objective or destination”. What was it like working with the group you met in Porto Santo?

I think of a workshop as an artistic medium. It forges a powerful relationship with the notion of the word as a plastic material. Developing a workshop or being with a group of people of different ages, with varying academic backgrounds, or perceptions, and carrying out exercises, nearly all of them experimental drawing, inviting them to think spatially, as an excuse to reflect, is a support or a medium as far as I’m concerned. A workshop is my studio, a place where I learn to be an artist from others. This is the moment when I can be, as I said, a pseudo-architect. In this instance, I decided that a workshop could be the starting point for inhabiting the school. Workshops are not just for others, they are also for me. More important than moving forward in these wayward processes is to make detours. The workshops were laboratories, where the most important thing was to be together at Escola da Vila, a place that allowed us to find new ways of togetherness. Since we had no idea what our goal would be, anything that happened would always be remarkable, because we learnt. We worked with different age groups, trying to bring them together in the same learning moment. I found it interesting to understand how different generations have different ways of being and understanding the island. I believe that having been with different groups gave me a better understanding of Porto Santo. For me, the most important thing is that everything stems from a collective learning process. I hope that the project I end up developing, be it an architectural intervention, a piece, an installation or something else, will be a platform. I hope to transform my experience on this island into collective learning.

I have read that you are interested in “questions such as: who is teaching and who is learning – how to learn from mistakes – how mistakes affect and transform the act of listening”. Samuel Beckett refers to “failing, failing again and failing better”. Is this trial and error process, this failing better Beckett referred to, driving the learning processes embodied in your work?

Yes, absolutely. I prefer to think that my job is to make good mistakes.

In repeating an action, an intention, a situation or a mistake over and over again, we establish a path so that, through repetition, that action, intention, situation, that mistake, is turned into something poetic. There is a plastic makeover, of materials and, above all, of ideas into something common.

I really like Jacques Rancière’s book “Ignorant Master”. I learnt from him that the key element for a learning process to happen is trust, and trusting the other person. If there is trust, if we are in an environment where we feel safe, learning will take place whenever a mistake is made, as everyone will feel responsible for their own process. If this happens, I will start to lose control. Given this inevitability, I trust that each party will selflessly endeavour to transform this experience into knowledge. Each moment of my working method is an attempt to make better mistakes.

Why Árvore Relâmpago?

Bruno Munari once said that a tree is the gradual explosion of a seed. I prefer to think of a tree as a slow lightning bolt. Lightning connects heaven to earth and a tree connects earth to heaven. If you reverse this lightning bolt, it can become a light tree or an instant tree. This image echoes the idea that we all share the same growing pattern. Árvore Relâmpago offers the possibility of building connections. Connecting different scales but also joining the permanent and the fleeting, the individual and the collective, the everyday and the unusual, connecting us.

You spoke a few days ago about the workshops as an exhibition endeavour. In fact, they will lead to an exhibition, held on the island of Porto Santo and at Porta 33 in Funchal. Will it continue the workshops?

I would like to extend this experience to other locations without it remaining confined, as an excuse to be in dialogue with other entities, other institutions. As I mentioned before, I like to think that an exhibition or a piece is part of a research process or the development of a working method. I do not make pieces or installations, I carry out exhibition projects. This exhibition that is going to take place sometime in the future has already started, it’s already happening. We are constantly making, destroying, undoing, learning and unlearning.

What do you think you will bring back with you and your work from your stay in Porto Santo?

Increased confidence in developing my work based on everyday life, based on a slow pace, based on the word. I have a profound belief that the transformation and sustainable learning processes are inhabited, that they happen or that they begin in situations like this, which are not just.

To sum up, what do you feel you have left behind in Porto Santo, for Porto Santo and for its inhabitants?

I would not like to give a generic answer. As far as the children are concerned, I think we have shared some fun moments and the idea that learning should be fun. With the young people, I think we are leaving plenty of open questions and above all incongruent questions, which we may never find answers to or will only find with time. With adults, including the Porta 33 crew, I think we leave them with a feeling of tranquillity and calm. They mentioned this a few times towards the end of the workshops, as if time had been suspended.

I believe that, in some way, more than merely sharing exercises, I have shared a thinking framework to make connections and understand each other as something broader than ourselves. I would like to believe that this whole system is going to lead to a good mistake or a trail on the island, something that will eventually become obsolete and, if it does, that is wonderful from my perspective, as it means that it will no longer be and will give way to something fresh, unexpected, something that we cannot control.