drawing as a vacation

on Vânia Medeiros

Dates: July 18, 25, August 01 and 08, 2026
Saturday
Hour: 10h to 12h
Duration: 4 meetings
Audience: general interested parties
Investment: R$ 320,00 + fees

Classroom course
Includes certificate at the end
For Libras interpreter, request by email cursos@mam.org.br with 7 business days' notice.

The word "vacation" has its origin in Latin. feriae, which meant "days of rest," "festivals," or "days when no work was done." In this course, we will discuss drawing as a form of resistance to regimes of mental exhaustion and fatigue through practical movements of observation in Ibirapuera Park. 

The act of drawing places us in a dynamic of time, value, and purpose different from that demanded by the functional and productivist logic of contemporary work. We will treat drawing as an open, slow, corporeal process, a field of experimentation where ideas are still being formed, and not as a product.

We will use as a reference different states of attention cited by Professor Virgínia Kastrup in the text "The functioning of attention in the work of the cartographer" to guide our attentional attitude in each encounter.

Each participant will create their own notebook at the first meeting and will carry it with them for the next four days, experimenting with different materials.

Agenda

Lesson 1 – Tracking

• Introduction to the course and its main concepts.
• Manual production of notebooks.
• Observation practice: The park and its relationships between species.
• What collaborations between humans and non-humans are emerging in this space?
• We will track, through slow and intuitive walks, the inhabitants of the park with drawings that reveal the simultaneity and interdependence of their ways of living together.
• Materials: free

Lesson 2 – Touch

• Sharing references: Artists' notebooks as an experiment in thought.
• Aguadas: playing with imprecision and graphic accidents in the act of drawing.
• Observation practice: Situations in the park.
• Starting from a more focused visual field than tracking, we will concentrate on specific situations that occur in the park, deepening our gaze, observing for longer periods, and investigating the characteristics of these interactions.
• Materials: watercolor

Lesson 3 – Landing

• Sharing references: Botanical and ethnographic drawings
• Graphite: tracing and shading
• Observation practice: Zoom in.
• We will zoom in even further and experiment with landing, an attentional mode whose framing allows us to observe the details of objects and beings more deeply, in their specificities.
• Materials: Graphite

Lesson 4 – Imagination

• Sharing references: speculative fictions
• Colored pencils, felt-tip pens, painting through the line
• Observation practice: Fictionalizing
• Reflecting on what we observed throughout the encounters and, based on the characteristics we learned about the coexistence among the beings in the park, we will imagine and fabricate invented situations through drawings and texts.
• Materials: free

MAM friend There's a 20% discount. Be part!
Students, teachers and retirees have a 10% discount
Doubts:
cursos@mam.org.br
WhatsApp: 11 99774 3987

By participating in this activity/event, you authorize, free of charge and permanently, the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art to use your image, voice, biographical data, and distinctive features, captured in video, audio, photography, and prints, for the purposes of recording, disseminating, and promoting the institution's activities, in any means, vehicles, supports, media, methods, and technologies, whether tangible or intangible. If you do not wish your image to be disclosed, please inform the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo by email. cursos@mam.org.br.

credits

Image: Vânia Medeiros