TRAINING as philosophical guides — The Conversation Agency

Participants: Youth Navigators - Young people aged between 13-16

Purpose: To train as conversation guides for visitors

Looking at artworks from different points of view - physical and philosophical. Communicating, questioning, becoming inspired.

‘Everything that I’m doing now has come from this. It gave me the tools I needed to push my life forward’ Harley (pilot phase Youth Navigator)

Youth Navigators exploring the exhibition ‘Nothing in the World but Youth’

In 2011 we launched an exciting 5-year rolling Youth Navigator programme, training teenagers to engage the public in philosophical conversation around the artworks. Through the 5 year period we ran a training each term developing a flexible structure within which myself, together with a different artist each year, combined the elements of making and philosophical reflection & conversation. Each cohort culminated in the young people holding conversations with strangers in the gallery.

The aim was to encourage the young people to be playful with ideas. One of the trainee youth navigators once suggested that she could see Godzilla in a Mondrian painting. This observation then became the starting point for an inquiry on Can artists bring things to life? onto Is a painting is ever still? And onto Can art ever be dangerous or subversive?

In a visual arts setting we also explored the visual assumptions that we are exposed to through advertising. During the Grayson Perry exhibition in 2015 the young people were particularly fast at identifying the brands and reading the visual cultural narrative within the artist’s new work - a series of 6 tapestries that filled the gallery walls.

My inspiration for bringing practical philosophy to an art gallery came after completing my MPhil in Community of Philosophical Inquiry at University of Glasgow. Philosopher/curator Eulalia Bosch spoke during a conference we organised on Practical philosophy in 1999. Describing her work co-devising shows for young people and training young philosophy guides at Barcelona’s Museum of Modern Art in the 1990’s.