The community of the Bartolomé Ayrolo school for the deaf, in the Villa Devoto neighborhood, held an art, music and dance festival to reject the transfer of one of its school buildings to the project carried out by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires to install the so-called “Wine District”.
The activity began after 5:00 p.m. at the doors of the establishment, at 4300 Lincoln, where different artists performed under the slogan “El Palacio Ceci no se toca”, alluding to the building that belongs to the institution and has a high heritage value given which was built in 1913.
Strictly speaking, the Palace began work and was closed to the passage of the educational community of Ayrolo, which used the place until December last year for administrative activities, while the teaching of classes to students takes place in a school building located in the same property.
As reported, the Ceci will become one of the headquarters of the Wine District, a project of the City Government to promote wine activity that includes a polygon in the neighborhoods of Villa Devoto, Villa Del Parque and La Paternal.
Lilia Sánchez, mother of a student who graduated from that school, stated in a dialogue with Télam that “today the great support that this school has from the community was demonstrated, a large number of neighbors joined the festival and it was exciting to see people listeners and non-listeners share diverse artistic expressions”.
Sánchez maintained that “for the moment the only proposal for a dialogue table that the Buenos Aires authorities made us did not materialize, the situation of the Palace remains the same and the works continue without anyone communicating with us; the classes continue but the boys are very emotionally affected because the building they want to remove from the school is part of the history of the deaf community”.
“On the same grounds as the Palace a new building was built, and then the Buenos Aires authorities set up the thing as a barter in which they give the school a new building and take the palace away from it, but they do not take into account that the only courtyard available is that of the palace and that this place has an enormous sentimental and historical value for the school community”, he added.
“The Ceci Palace is the historical, cultural and linguistic heritage of deaf people. We ask that the identity and history of the building be respected and that it continue to belong to the deaf community to put into practice the educational projects that were cut short,” said Virginia, school teacher, during a meeting in the Legislature this week.
The Union of Education Workers (UTE) demanded last Tuesday that the public education system be considered “as public, cultural and educational heritage” and that the “intangibility of assets” be declared, following the complaints of the educational community in the face of various attempts to sell land where schools operate by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires where schools operate.
“We want public education to be declared by law as public, cultural and educational heritage, and the intangibility of assets,” said the general secretary of UTE-Ctera, Angélica Graciano, in statements to the Télam agency.
At the end of 2021, the school authorities were notified of the start of a renovation work on the Palace, for which they demanded the removal of all the school’s furniture.
In February, the educational community received the news that ownership of the building passed from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Economic Development, a measure that was understood as the previous step to the transfer of the property to the Wine District.
This is how the resistance to losing the link with the Ceci Palace arose, which led to several mobilizations at the school gates and in the Villa Devoto square and the call for the festival this Saturday.
