Incorporated as part of Plazaratu, Autoconstrucción. Piezas sueltas. Juego y experiencia (Self-construction. Loose Parts. Play and Experience) was initially formulated as an exhibition project designed, first, not to be an ordinary exhibition and, second, so that it could be understood from a space other than the one it occupies: a square, a park, a school playground, or the streets we stroll through every day. Accordingly, although its setting is one of the museum’s galleries, its approach lies behind the door, in that outdoor space now occupied by the garden, which also finally opens its eyes to the interior of the underground rooms as it struggles to become a space for play for a neighbourhood or for an entire city, discarding of course the notion of play as the exclusive heritage of childhood.

In order to shape all this, a number of historical practices based on self-construction approached through play as a learning process, almost all of which emerged or were vindicated in the 1960s and 1970s, have been reviewed and form a theoretical-practical magma from which two workshops have been proposed – one in collaboration with Barrutia Ikastola (Vitoria) and the other with Dinamoa Sormen Gunea (Azpeitia) – resulting in the installation that now configures this space for meeting and learning. At the same time, a body of documentation is displayed at either end of the exhibition, by way of a prologue and epilogue, and this includes, in addition to materials resulting from these experiences and an extensive bibliographical selection available for consultation, various documents that seek to create links with historical pedagogical trials, such as those proposed by Lady Allen of Hurtwood, Emmi Pikler, Palle Nielsen or Simon Nicholson – whose Theory of Loose Parts is included here with particular determination and has ultimately, and not by chance, slipped into the title of this project – but also with models of democratic design, such as those contributed by figures like Enzo Mari or Lina Bo Bardi.

As a culmination to this process, as well as in dialogue with Antonio Ballester Moreno’s ways of doing, an invitation has been extended to the artists Abraham Cruzvillegas, Carme Nogueira and Raphael Escobar to incorporate into this space a series of works that are linked to the objectives of this exhibition through the experiences of these creators.

Autoconstrucción. Piezas sueltas. Juego y experiencia attempts to explore the notion of play tied to the process, activity and impulse to make things, to build, rebuild, repair and remodel. To convert action into play and therefore into a way of learning, training and even living. The pedagogue John Dewey defended that “education comes about from experience” and advocated that children should learn from real work and direct experience by making a chair and not by playing at carpentry.