Tiago Assis

Biography

I graduated in Graphic Design at the Escola Superior de Arte e Design (ESAD) in 1998 and entered the job market at that time, where I held various professional roles in graphics and digital media. Between 1999 and 2022 I was part of the Identidades group, taking part in training and cultural exchange activities in communities in countries such as Mozambique, Cape Verde, and Brazil. It was these activities that made me want to go into arts education as a teacher. I taught at the Escola Artística Soares dos Reis between 2001 and 2007 and at the Faculty of Fine Arts from 2008. In 2005, I completed a Master's degree in Multimedia Production and Design from the University of Barcelona (UB), where I was already thinking about the relationship between technology and Identidades' activities. These activities were systematized in terms of scientific research through the ID-CAI collective. It was in this vein that I developed my doctoral thesis at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV). The fact that I had a highly privileged technological background became a focus of my research and led me to research the exclusionary processes involved and to critically analyze my own actions. This reflection brought me closer to critical theory of communication with post-structuralist and post-colonial frameworks. In this way, my path as a teacher and researcher has established itself in areas that are both theoretical and practical and has come closer to Arts Education. In the last two years, critical-theoretical tensions have raised problems with my action-research in the past, forcing a deep self-criticism and a break with what I had developed. The fact is that, through decolonial lenses, I have begun to better understand my place of speech, my position of privilege and the colonialities of which I am a part. This problematization led to the search for the suppression of theoretical-practical barriers as a hierarchical and colonial scientific system, to the study of male whiteness and to the inscription of postcolonial critique in the educational and scientific spheres with a horizon on environmental and identity issues. My experiences, communications and publications on intercultural issues and art education between 2011 and 2018 were biased by an uncritical whiteness. The dimension of the critique of technology and communication, which almost always appears as a focus in all of these works, advanced with this gap. The same should be said of the publications that preceded the BWG and CREAT_ED projects. However, it was also these experiences that brought me closer to the critical postcolonial field. Despite my claim that technology is not neutral, communications and publications up to that point were also haunted by the lack of truly intersectional critical lenses of diversity. My critique of creativity denounces universalizing discourses, but it hasn't exactly sought out a history of resistance either. Only since 2020, with the need to stop and disappear as a decolonial action and framework for teaching and research, have I tried to think about the places of power of the teacher-researcher in art and technology education. Projects such as Bioimages and BWG have become experiments in thinking about sustainable images and reflecting on the environment and the social. The CREAT_ED project definitively put my cis-masculine whiteness into play through an intersectional framework in a form of research that starts from the place of speech and the positions we occupy and that contaminates research without separating theory from practice. This framework has expanded into historical, technological and arts education dimensions in the search for a reparatory and restitutive critique.