Ohe main museums in the world are concerned with ensuring access to pictorial art for blind people or people with reduced visual acuity. It is an increasingly accentuated trend also in Brazil, particularly in museums in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. This accessibility, however, can be ensured from primary school onwards, on the initiative of art teachers, even if in a simplified way. This is the proposal of visual artist Laura Chagas, in scientific initiation work that she carried out at the Center for Studies and Research in Rehabilitation Prof. Dr. Gabriel Porto (Cepre) from the Faculty of Medical Sciences. The artist was guided by Lucia Reily, researcher and art educator at Cepre and professor of speech therapy and the postgraduate program at the Institute of Arts.

“The initial idea I had was to produce a book with tactile illustrations for the visually impaired. In conversations with professor Lucia, the proposal came to select some important paintings from Brazilian art and bringplace them in relief or on some tactile support, so that they could have contact with pictorial works. This is not a translation – which would be impossible – nor an adaptation, but a mediation”, explains Laura Chagas. As the objective is to enable this contact from childhood, the author chose to use cheap materials and simple techniques, reproducible and accessible to elementary school teachers.

Recalling the growing strength of movements in favor of social inclusion, art educator Lucia Reily observes that art teachers can play an important role in ensuring for students with visual impairments the same privilege as others, that of perceiving painting. “These are children who need tactile references. This reference material serves to show teachers a tool capable of motivating and enthusing special students to learn about our artistic heritage. It’s not always possible to take them to a museum.”

In the theoretical part of the research, Laura Chagas carried out a survey of an extensive bibliography of what has already been published on the subject in the country – material available at www.arteemcomum.org – and interviewed experts in the field such as Amanda Tojal, from Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and Valquíria Prates, from Masp, in order to verify how national museums are facing this challenge. The artist also browsed the Internet to find out what important museums in other countries have been doing to serve the visually impaired. On the practical side, during a course offered by Pinacoteca, Laura tested materials and glues for the prototypes she developed (see images of some of them on this page).

Aworks – When selecting the works that would be worked in relief and with other materials, Laura considered the importance of the artist, the feasibility of adapting his painting to tactile representation and the possibility of building a linearity with examples from each period of Brazilian painting. The artist highlights three works among the countless works executed, due to different formal characteristics that make them emblematic of her proposal.

From the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Debret, who painted Brazil in the 19th century, Laura chose the watercolor Calceteiros, which depicts slave labor in a square in Rio de Janeiro. The painting is full of details, but the artist only represented the two slaves in the foreground. To do this, she used the so-called “eva” rubber (ethyl vinyl acetate), which due to its colors, ease of handling, cleaning and durability made it a good material for crafts and school work. She states that she could also represent the background scenes, separating them into layers and working each one into boards. Another possibility would be to simply describe all the scenes in the painting, as some museums do, which the artist considers unsatisfactory when the aim is to allow children to come into contact with the work.

For the mediation of Mastros by Alfredo Volpi, who works with colors and shapes, Laura Chagas used materials with different textures. The purpose was to highlight in a tactile way the differences in the color passages, without the concern of associating the colors properly, but of highlighting their variation. As Volpi's canvases do not suggest volumes or depths, the solutions were relatively simple. A Negra by Tarsila do Amaral deserved an intermediate solution between the previous two: on a single board, the representation of the black woman in the foreground was obtained with collage in rubber, and the background was colored with materials of different textures.

Laura's works come in sizes that facilitate manual contact and the reproduction of details, without sticking to the original dimensions. She notes that Debret's canvas, for example, measures no more than a foot wide, while Volpi's is reasonably large. Stressing that she has always looked for simple solutions using cheap and accessible materials, Laura informs that similar works in museums are much more sophisticated, such as resin boards, suitable for cleaning after being handled by a large number of visitors.

The tactile resources presented by the Unicamp researchers can be easily adopted by elementary school teachers, but they remember that students with visual impairments will continue to need the mediation of the educator to relate the board with other aspects of the original work. “This also applies to observers with normal vision, as simply looking is not enough. The teacher's participation is important to explain the visual language and provide information about the artist, the historical moment and the meaning of the work today”, says Lucia Reily. “But the tactile resource already constitutes a first contact for the visually impaired with a cultural universe from which they would otherwise be excluded. This way, he won’t feel cut off from the sighted world,” she adds.

New steps – In the opinion of the Unicamp professor, despite the short time for the research, Laura Chagas managed to achieve a good mapping of what has been done in Brazil with a view to including the visually impaired in the field of art. To both of their surprises, there are many more initiatives than they imagined. They also noted the need for a didactic approach, similar to what is adopted for students with normal vision. The work is expected to have three new stages, one of which is to verify how blind or low-vision students interpret the tactical mediations of pictorial works. “We don’t know the feelings and sensations that the activity awakens, they are the ones who must tell us. It is information that would reveal the degree of adequacy of the path we are following”, predicts Lucia Reily.

Another stage concerns museum management, with suggestions to make the collection accessible to the visually impaired, such as the creation of a methodology combining tactile with verbal description of the work recorded in audio. Such a methodology, according to the researchers, would allow the disabled person to mediate a greater number of paintings on their own. A third stage would address the management of special education, ensuring these students have the right to culture and access to the visual world, just as those with hearing disabilities have the right to music, and those with physical disabilities have the right to dance. “The issue is to guarantee everyone’s right to everything. At Cepre, research should not only be used for the specialist to learn more; it must present results that are useful to society”, says Lucia.