Un/doing Gender through Experimental Photography: An A/R/Tographic Practice with Everyday Objects in Higher Arts Education

Abstract

This article explores a pedagogical experience developed within the Erasmus+ Edulands Project at the University of Murcia, in which students used everyday personal objects to create experimental photographs inspired by the work of Ouka Leele. Through A/R/Tographic methodology, which integrates the identities of artist, researcher, and teacher, we analyse how the use of chance in the resignification of everyday objects allows for the destabilisation of normative gender constructions. The experience demonstrates that experimental photography, when mediated by objects laden with personal narratives but reinterpreted by others, functions as a critical pedagogical device that reveals the performative and constructed nature of gender identities. The results suggest that arts education, when it incorporates experimental practices and the legacy of transgressive artists such as Ouka Leele, can constitute itself as a space for questioning and subverting gender normativities.