Art and Heritage Education in a Digital Art Center

The article analyzes how a digital arts center can become a critical, participatory, and inclusive space for artistic and heritage education, articulating theory and practice around an immersive exhibition on La Ruta at the Bombas Gens Centre d'Arts Digitals (Valencia). An interpretive qualitative approach, based on hermeneutical phenomenology and Visual Arts-Based Educational Research, is adopted through six discussion groups with 30 professionals from visual arts, education and visual culture after a visit to a recent cultural heritage installation supported by immersive technologies. The results show that technological immersion only acquires educational value when it is coherently integrated into the story and accompanied by pedagogical mediation, reveal the role of vicarious nostalgia and heritage literacy in the construction of collective memory, and evidence narrative silences around subaltern voices and social controversies. It is concluded that digital arts centers can function as hybrid learning laboratories for teacher training and heritage education, as long as technological spectacularization is subordinated to processes of participation, epistemic justice and critical reading of heritage.