The MUN organizes the Week of Attention, from May 23 to 25, a conference to develop this capacity through workshops, conferences and meetings.

From May 23 to 25, the Museo Universidad de Navarra organizes the Week of AttentionThe aim of the proposed activities is to deepen and rehearse practices to preserve and develop this capacity, which is particularly threatened nowadays. The proposed activities seek to deepen and test practices to preserve and develop it. All the proposals in the program - aimed at the general public, educators, researchers, artists, museum professionals, etc. - are free of charge with prior registration until full capacity is reached. Places for the morning workshops have been sold out and a waiting list has been set up for registration. There are still places for the afternoon meetings.

The initiative, which is part of the MUN's SociArte project and is supported by Fundación la Caixa, has the collaboration of the Institute of Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra, Princeton University and the Friends of Attention collective. This is the first project of the Pausa Laboratory, a research space that invites us to develop, through experience, physical and mental skills linked to the contemplative life.

In the words of Nieves Acedo, director of Programs at MUN, the objective of the Pausa Laboratory "is to create a space of activity to host pilot projects informed by a research style to better understand the attitudes related to the experience of the art spectator. We are convinced that art contributes to the regeneration of subjectivity through the conscious cultivation of skills such as attention, listening, reflection and independent judgment. The Pausa Laboratory seeks to test this hypothesis and find new ways to put it into practice".

In this sense, Fernando Echarri, head of the educational area of the MUN, points out that these conferences aim to "make people aware of their capacity for attention in order to advance in the knowledge of reality, using this capacity in an appropriate way".

CONVERSATION AND LEARNING

To achieve this, during the three days workshops, conferences and meetings have been organized with professionals from different disciplines such as visual artist and filmmaker Claudia Claremi, Princeton professor and researcher Graham Burnett, writer, facilitator and multidisciplinary artist Peter Schmidt and polarity therapist and osteopath, painter, dancer and facilitator Fernando Yoldi.

However, emphasizes Acedo, "beyond the specific activities, the program seeks to provide opportunities for exchange, conversation and mutual learning, bringing together a community of art professionals, researchers, educators and interested people in general".

All activities will be guided by professionals from the educational area of MUN and Friends of Attention. This initiative is especially important nowadays due to the relevance of the subject at present, "as a response to the fragmentation of attention in an over-stimulated and accelerated world", says Echarri. And faced with this situation, the MUN proposes to train this capacity. "It is necessary a discovery that attracts the will and sustains the decision to pay attention. The different activities aim to facilitate discoveries in this direction. The commodification of care makes this task urgent and serious. We have a lot at stake, as almost everyone knows by now, and what we are trying to do is to contribute something, to act and show what art and a museum (especially on a university campus) can mean in this common task," Acedo stresses.

The program will apply "active methodologies in the morning workshops, with participatory experiential sessions, including learning by doing and the search for meaningful experiences. And art is the vehicle for transmitting all the contents," says the head of Education. In this regard, the director of Programs stresses that "contemplating art is an absolutely free and, at the same time, complex action. A work of art is not a landscape or a tree. It contains a spectrum of meanings that are not always correct, it responds to an intentionality and admits value judgments, of success or failure. In this sense, art is the center of the conference. There is no art without attention and I can think of no better place to think about the latter than art".