INTERACCIÓ’06 Community cultural policies

Cultural Studies and Resource Centre (CERC) Barcelona Provincial Council

Barcelona, 24 – 27 October 2006

DOCUMENTATION

3.

Experiences: projects, collectives and actions

Documentation Centre of Cultural Studies and Resource Centre Barcelona Provincial Council October 2006

Contents

Presentation

Spain

Andalusia

- Copilandia. Gratis 2

- hackitectura.net / wewearbuildings 3

- Sevilla Ciudad. 3x2 lugares de imágenes compartidas. Claudio Zulian 4

Aragon

- La carrera del Gancho 6

Basque Country

- Ritos. Fabrica de Teatro Imaginario (FTI) 8

Castille and León

- Espacio Tangente 9

Catalonia

- Almazen. Associació Cultural La Ciutat de les Paraules 11

- Ateneu Popular 9 Barris 11

- Bulevart. ODA de Diputació de Barcelona 12

- Burn Station. Platoniq 13

- El Camp de la Bota. Francesc Abad 14

- Canals temàtics. Antoni Abad 15

- Can Xalant Centre de Creació i Pensament Contemporani 16

- Culturas de archivo. Jorge Blasco Gallardo. Fundació Antoni Tàpies 17

- Desenvolupament Cultural Comunitari (DCC) 18

- Escola de Música-Centre de les Arts de l’Hospitalet de Llobregat 20

- Espai Eart. Experimentem amb l'art 21

- Graffnollers 22

- Grup de Patrimoni Industrial del Fòrum de la Ribera del Besòs (FRB) 22

- Hangar. Centre de producció d’arts visuals 23

- Idensitat 25

- Joystick 26

- Majories Urbanes 1900-2025. Fundació Antoni Tàpies 28

- Memòria Viva de Callús 28

- Obrim Finestres. Xarxa de Centres Cívics i Culturals de Mollet del Vallès 29

- La Plataforma d’Entitats i Veïns de la Mina 29

- Processos Oberts (P_O_) 30

- Sessió contínua. ODA de Diputació de Barcelona 31

- Sitesize. Joan Vila-Puig 33

- Suburbe. Xarxa Oberta de Cultura Suburbana 34

- Terrassa Acció Creativa. GOTAC 35

- Trans-Art_06. Laboratori de Pràctiques artístiques 36

- Turisme Tàctic 38

- 24 hores, una línia en la ciutat. POCSassociation 39

- Xarxa de Museus locals. OPC de Diputació de Barcelona 40

Madrid

- Basurama 42

- Bordergames. La Fiambrera Obrera 43

- Capital Confort. Colectivo El Perro 44

- Precarias a la Deriva 45

Valencia

- Cabanyal Portes Obertes. Plataforma Salvem El Cabanyal 46

Virtual spaces

- Els hacklabs o laboratoris de hackers 47

Europe

- Arts Ambassadors Unit. Manchester. England 49

- Bij’ de Vieze Gasten. Gant. Belgium 50

- Chocolate Factory. London. England 50

- Cittadellarte. Biella. Italy 51

- ECObox. (La Chapelle). Paris. France 51

- Fablevision. Glasgow. Scotland 52

- London Symphony Orchestra St Luke’s. London. England 53

- Maisons Folies. Region Nord-Pas de Calais . France, Belgium 53

- MIME. Migrating Memories. Malmö. Sweden 55

- Theater Zuidplein. Rotterdam. Netherlands 55

- Zinneke Parade. Brussels. Belgium 57

Presentation

With the selection of experiences presented in this compilation the aim is to show a wide range of practical cases and actions that represent the keys to the articulation of cultural work of proximity today. A work primarily characterised by the diversity of approaches and methods of action which drives it, and by the extraordinary capacity for innovation and contribution of new projects, but which points towards some new comparable missions and objectives.

Traditionally, cultural action of proximity had been located, at least in the southern and Latin European ambit, in the most social dimension of culture – socioculture – but, without at any time overlooking this social dimension, the new approaches insist on not dissociating this social component from a demand for rigor and strengthening of contents in cultural and artistic terms, a level of demand in terms of artistic goals made clear in many of the experiences included.

Another of the pillars of this approach to cultural and artistic action is to emphasise the participatory dimension of the experiences. This poses in the ambit of the arts a new approach to artistic creation and its presentation or exhibition, which often involves a desire for interaction and shared work between the artists and the hypothetical audiences, who can participate in the projects from their genesis and experience their evolution step by step, in a work-in-progress dynamic where the value of the creative process stands out as much as or more than the final result in the form of an exhibition or performance.

The cultural and creative proposals forged in this context usually challenge the thematic or sectorial limits and experiment with presentation formulas and formats – with a growing presence of the technological and digital component – which take place in spaces of confluence where the different artistic languages can hybridize.

This interaction between the creation or production of cultural projects and their target audiences is strengthened this year by the irruption of the new technologies that are often a key factor in the configuration and development of some proposals that find in cyberspace an environment appropriate for their propagation and dissemination. Some of the experiences presented here are mainly found in cyberspace and others move through the Net in some of their phases, in an on-line/on-site dialogue in which the presence in the virtual space of the projects complements and increases the potential of their physical dimension. The virtual space has also been consolidated as an environment for the propagation of new formats of activism. Here we are speaking of the different formulas of artivism that nest in the Net, or in a more generic sense of the now famous use of mobile phones as bearers of new forms of social mobilization.

This protest and mobilization dimension is another of the pillars which should be emphasised of cultural action of proximity. It is in this dimension where cultural action takes on a more political aspect, where the pertinence of cultural action is posed as a strategy of social transformation, whether through the fomenting of intercultural dialogue, artistic proposals for social inclusion, defence of cultural heritage and historical memory or the demand for determined uses of the urban space.

cdoc@diba.cat 2

Spain

Andalusia

Copilandia. Gratis. Sevilla http://www.copilandia.org

Copilandia is a Project of the Gratis collective, Federico Guzmán, Victoria Gil, Kirby Gookin and Robin Kahn which was celebrated in Sevilla between 28 December 2005 and 8 January 2006, in an anchored ship in the Guadalquivir River ( in La Torre del Oro wharf) within the Sevilla_Entre_Culturas Festival, organized by the Culture and Arts Institute of Sevilla.

The ship was equipped with photocopiers, computers connected to Internet, CD and DVD recorders and all kinds of artistic materials. «Our objective», points out Federico Guzmán, «was to create a kind of pirate utopia, an island free of copyright that multiplies, spreads and celebrates the free exchange of art and ideas». The election of a ship as free creative space refers to Robert Louis Stevenson’s literature, in which pirate ships sailed with no flag.

Starting from the possibility of thinking about copyright dissolution as an artistic means, Copilandia was conceived as a «collaborative project of cultural recombination» to which many creators were invited to present their works so that anyone could copy them, distribute them and manipulate. «In turn, we encouraged everybody to produce their own works (either from the works in the ship or gaining inspiration from other things), so that the exhibition was growing and changing every day, as if it were a kind of palimpsest».

More than three hundred artists answered to the invitation. Works were presented, among other creators, by Vandana Jain, Indian artist who lives in New York and manipulates logos of big corporations; Larry Miller (Fluxus member), who sent a property certificate – able to be copied – about the genetic code; Yoko Ono, who sent a box with rubber stamps which had the sentence «Imagine Peace»; Jordi Mitjà o Maura Sheehan, who presented some cutouts about the freedom subject.

There were also a series of artists that instead of sending a work already built, they sent some document where the instructions to assemble it were given. For example, the Peruvian collective Espacio la culpable sent a leaflet in which they explained how to build a «pico» (sound system mostly used in the Caribbean countries and South America); the sculptress Kiki Smith sent a text where she commented, step by step, how to build a piece of hers with the shape of a paperweight; and José Vicente Losada presented a kind of instructions sheet to manufacture three dimension sculptures from photographs taken by him. All these projects were compiled in a book that took the shape of a recipe book.

Apart from its expositive proposal, Copilandia organized other kind of activities: performances ( of artists such as Anneke Gräpper, Carmen Carmona or Francisco Javier Petidier); concerts (Moakara, Asuntos Propios, Chigate, Pico y Pala…); DJ and

cdoc@diba.cat 3

VJ sessions; book presentations ( like Creación e Inteligencia Colectiva, work published under Creative Commons licence by Zemos 98) and videogames (the famous Matanza cofrade, whose author was charged with an offence against copyright for using «images» of El Gran Poder and La Esperanza Macarena – two of the most emblematic figures of the Sevillian Easter Week – which are registered as trademarks); and even magic shows and spoken word ( like the one offered by the New Yorker Lydia Lunch).

Also there were conferences, workshops, talks and round tables about different subjects related to copyright and the information and knowledge distribution: from the payment that the SGAE demands to bars for the music they play to the story of the vietnamita (machine precursor of the present copiers which was widely used in the 60s and 70s by the anti- Francoist groups), going through the reproduction of images of religious members, the access of students and researchers to academic texts or the rights and duties that artists have in the information society. To finish, we should mention one of the most unclassifiable proposals of Copilandia: the «liberation» that the artist Macarena Ruiz Acal made of her notes of the public entrance examination she had been studying for three years. Notes she threw publicly to the Guadalquivir River. Hackitectura.net / wewearbuildings. Sevilla http://www.hackitectura.net/ http://www.wewearbuildings.cc/

This is a team of architects of the flows who work together, made up by Sergio Moreno, José Pérez de Lama, Aka Osfa and Pablo de Soto. They focus on the theoretical and practical research of the territories where architecture, town planning, information and communication technologies and new policies come together. Hackitectura.net often collaborates with José Luis Tirado, a new media artist. Hackitectura.net provides some pioneering experiences in the construction of autonomous cyborg events/territories Based on urban activism, by 1999 hackitectura.net, at that time wewearbuildings, began to incorporate communication and in particular video streaming into urban spaces, as a form of participatory appropriation and transformation of the city (Media-tank, an autonomous screen device, in the actions against the car park of La Alameda in Seville) and participates in diverse events of global interconnectivity (Borderhack 2002, Tijuana). In 2003, successive incarnations of urban spaces/rooms for the connected crowd were set up: Okupa Futura Ciudad Disidente, produced in collaboration with the Department of Culture of Corvera Town Council, Asturias, and in the abandoned high speed train railway station in La Cartuja in Seville, where they started experimenting with free wi-fi networks and the use of free software. In September 2003, hackitectura.net organized La Multitud Conectada, in La Rábida (Huelva), as part of Reunión 03, a meeting of Andalusian artists and activists produced with the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía which also had the presence of numerous contributors, with whom a fruitful collaboration was initiated. From here emerged the core of the current network: Seville, Malaga, Barcelona, Madrid... The following year, Fadaiat (Tarifa) was held: Transaccions, the motto and subtitle of which was Freedom of Knowledge/Freedom of Movement. And in 2005, Fadaiat: Borderline Academy (Tangiers). During these years,

cdoc@diba.cat 4

hackitectura.net participated actively in numerous global events: Evian 03, WSIS We Seize? (Ginebra03), Neuro, London European Social Forum... and contacts were strengthened with European groups that work in the same fields, coming together in increasingly more ambitious projects and with a wider social scope. It actively participated in Euro May-Day-Sur 05 and is one of the founding groups of Indymedia Estrecho. Sevilla Ciudad. 3x2 lugares de imágenes compartidas. Claudio Zulian. Sevilla http://www.acteon.es/

Sevilla Ciudad. 3x2 lugares de imágenes compartidas is a project in which different groups of citizens have participated, in several meetings and debates they have been defining the characteristics of their own representation. To Claudio Zulian, the participation processes are not the object of a generic aestheticization, but they suppose a differentiated instance where discourses have a specific value and determine, when the shared word is unfolded, the iconographic programme of the piece of work. According to these premises work and author are redefined, the work’s symbolism appears as an agreement between the public and the artist, the final outcome brings knowledge to the general wisdom.

In the proposals of this multidisciplinary author, the work group decides the definitive location of the work. This decision usually affects places, such as squares or building façades, where the citizen does not usually have the possibility of a representation. The Museum can also be a suitable location, if the policy of the representation asks for it, as in fact happens with this project. The fundamental question is to conquer a public space of representation, releasing it from the submission to the interests and to the controls of the economic or institutional marketing.

Sevilla Ciudad. 3x2 lugares de imágenes compartidas is the fruit of several months of meetings with people of the city, and specific and systematically with three work groups coming from three districts of the Andalusian capital: Cerro del Águila, Pumarejo and Pino Montano. The dynamics of each place have fostered a certain homogeneity in the different groups, something which, for example, has been useful to show the points of view of three different generations. In each group it is peculiar one or more forms of activism: from the union fight of the sixties and seventies, to the actions through the web or the practices linked to the new urban cultures. Each collective has chosen the place, the actions and the title of their photograph. The expositive proposal is constituted by three pairs of large format photographs. Each pair has two photographs exactly alike: one is left for the group which has participated in the experience (and it is exhibited in their headquarters permanently); whereas the other one is presented in the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo [Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Art] (CAAC), accompanied by sound recordings of the talks between the artist and collectives,and leaflets, manifestos, gazettes, articles, flyers, newspaper cuttings, stories, archives, diaries, projects and other documents that invite to explore the actions and personality of the participating collectives in their districts. The different exhibitions were opened jointly. A bus which welcomed the participants and visitors travelled through the

cdoc@diba.cat 5

city to visit the three centres and finally the CAAC. It is a celebration of the experience: being together is a regenerating event whose festive dimension, also present in the preparation of the images, creates a bond with the memory and ends up being part of the city’s imagery.

The project En casa de Quintana is done by the Neighbour Association Delta and has integrated elder people involved in different ways in the collective life of the Cerro del Águila district. As scenery of the photograph the Manuel Quintana house was chosen, a neighbour who incarnates the most open and hospitable facet of this Sevillian district. The group analyzed the history of the Cerro district, deepened in some aspects such as the identitary elements of the district: urbanism, craftsmanship, neighbour and union vindications as well as the strong anti-Francoist resistance.

The work group of the project La vida rescatada [The Rescued Life] was created in the neighbour Centre situated in the Pumarejo Palace, place where all kinds of people pass by daily.

In the photograph it was decided to bring out the Pumarejo Palace itself and the square with its name and where, through the day,all kinds of people pass each other: lifelong neighbours, activists from the Neighbour Centre and different collectives and local associations, homeless people and the new neighbours in the restored houses. Each participant group appears doing their own activities or with objects that describe them.

The third work group, Culturas Urbanas [Urban Cultures], was created with members of three collectives (graffiti, break-dance and scout) integrated in the Red de Apoyo a Jóvenes (Red AJO) and the different meetings were developed in the Civic Centre Entreparques. The place where the photograph was taken was chosen following the requirements of the graffiti group, as they needed a wide space to paint. Moreover, this location lets us value the Pino Montano physiognomy: long avenues flanked by rows of apartment blocks, the everyday landscape where youngsters and adults make possible a friendly coexistence. In the photograph the activities of the three participant collectives are dramatized, underlining their ethical sense, and at the same time it tries to show the vitality, creativity and self-management ability in the young people, questioning the negative stereotypes (criminality, couldn’t-care-less attitude, drugs…) with which the youngsters from the outskirts are identified.

cdoc@diba.cat 6

Aragon

La carrera del Gancho. San Pablo (Saragossa) http://www.carreradelgancho.es/

El Gancho is the popular name of the San Pablo district of Saragoza. It is a historical district with a great proportion of immigrant population and in full urbanistic renovation. La Carrera del Gancho is a street parade, like a summer carnival, where artists work with the citizens in the creation, manufacture and execution of the party. This project has been driven by the Social Action and Education Area in Zaragoza City Council and has been coordinated by the Cadeneta organization, of the F. Ozanam Foundation.

The project’s process is well defined so that artists and neighbours work altogether in each stage of the project. At first, artists and neighbours look for ideas to design the Carrera. We work to create a collective imaginary shared by everyone. The neighbours suggest elements in their neighbourhood: characters, images, sounds and music, traditions, conflicts… everything which is characteristic, what everyone recognizes as their own, whether they are old neighbours or newcomers.

The artists participate in the sessions, they start putting forward design proposals. The ideas and designs are taken to the workshops where the groups make the graphic materials for the parade, they rehearse the musical, dance or street theatre performances… all this with the direction of the corresponding artist.

The workshops are also a meeting point of neighbours from different communities. Diverse people working in a team with an idea which belongs to everybody and is for everybody.

And so, when neighbours and artists march past the street they are showing an authentic artistic creation from the collective neighbourhood imaginary, where everybody has worked on it for months.

The neighbours participate in the party: the participants with the artistic groups are the protagonists of a party that seeks to involve all the neighbours with symbolic elements and rituals which make everyone’s participation easy. And this spreads all over the neighbourhood and overflows to all the city.

For the project creators, the Carrera del Gancho recognizes people’s values, gives them a space to set them in motion. «When the artist creates in the street and assumes deeply the urban landscape and its people, we offer to the people an opportunity to «practise culture» in an active way. Children and adults contribute with the best of them, their own culture, their creativity. If we know how to recognize and value this, then we are creating a social benefit».

«We can say, then, that the social benefits of the Carrera del Gancho are shown in several ways:

cdoc@diba.cat 7

Children show the way to adults. They know how to discover and practise the method that we as adults have to explain to ourselves with so many words. They act as citizens and they feel comfortable. From the ethnic group one becomes citizen. We give value to the origins and traditions, we do not impose new shapes or unwished integrations. We offer opportunities to maintain traditions and differences while at the same time we are open to the artistic innovation and to the citizen category».

cdoc@diba.cat 8

Basque Country Ritos. Fabrica de Teatro Imaginario (FTI). Bilbao http://www.antzerkiola.com/

The Fábrica de Teatro Imaginario (FTI) (Imaginary Theatre Factory) has been immersed in the Ritos action since 2003. It is about the need and the value of the theatrical fact inserting this in the everyday life of villages or districts chosen every year (Ondarroa, Orduña, the Bilbao district of San Francisco). For this, after observing, understanding and interpreting the sociocultural reality of the chosen district or village, and always encouraging the exchange with their cultural agents, the FTI creates numerous actions during several weeks: open theatre workshops, exhibitions, kalejiras or unannounced theatre performances, among others. The last day of this period, and as fruit of the relationships created with the village, the exchange and training process, there is a last popular performance in a public space, a collective ritual: Ritos gure azken lur zatia. These exchange activities are specifically the keys and main objectives of the Ritos action.

After the acquired experience, in 2005 they incorporated to the project the nomadic concept. This approach lets them investigate on the adaptation of the proposals to the specific spaces of each village, as well as finding in the journey the travelling theatre spirit. They have looked for, without leaving the historic territory of Bizkaia (Armintza, Ea, Elantxobe, Dima,. Urigoite and Otxandio), the geographic contrast of seaside and inland towns, which, having in common a small number of inhabitants, would bring them a direct contact, with their idiosyncratic particularities from the linguistic, historical, folkloric, social and cultural aspects.

cdoc@diba.cat 9

Castille and León

Espacio Tangente. Burgos http://www.espaciotangente.net/

The contemporary creation centre Espacio Tangente is open in Burgos since July 2001. Although this iniciative, which springs from the idea of defining a free space of creation of self-managed projects, has been working for seven years. The managing group of this proposal was for the first two years of the project negociating with the Municipal Culture Institute of the Town Council the permission for a municipal building out of use. It was achieved, but it has to be renewed yearly, something that has become an annual fight to claim the social use of this public space.

This space builts tools that allow to create a network and meeting point of social and artistic creation in Burgos. From the commitment, independence and self-management it is attempted to contribute to the city through art. «The promoting collective has sought a progressive increase of the participation from other collectives, not only in the management and organization but also in the programme planning in order to keep the project open and dynamic, able to collect, link and encourage efficiently the cultural manifestations around us».

To the public activities, exhibitions and collections, courses and workshops, talks, editions, etc, we must add others whose aim is to consolidate a permanent platform for the creation and diffusion of contemporary culture: information services, library, video library and record library, plastic workshops, computing, photography and audio, lending spaces for collective use and social and cultural associations, documentation and promotion of local production, etc. which have turned Espacio Tangente into an essential point in the city.

The programme planning is established on the collected proposals, and it is the managing team that channels and allows the development of the projects, and promotes all the time the collaboration, co-production and interchange among people, collectives and institutions. At present it has the support of members and a wide team of collaborators. The programmed activities from the centre try to complement the cultural offer of the city and to be an information and meeting point of the present-day art at local, national and international scale. Among its projects we must bring out Arte y territorio, a permanent discussion forum about urban development and artistic intervention in the public space. Through this forum some reflection conferences have been organized such as Actualizar la Mirada (2002) (Updating the Look), Ciudades por hacer (2003) (Cities to Do) and Creación contemporánea y políticas culturales en Castilla y León (2005) (Contemporary Creation and Cultural Policies in Castille and León). Other forum proposals are the Taller libre de paisaje (Landscape-Free Workshop) (2005) about the new perception of the territory as a creation space, in collaboration with Aguilar de Campo Town Council (Palencia), activities and projects of artistic intervention

cdoc@diba.cat 10

and citizen participation such as SubBurgos: Itinerarios por el límite urbano (SubBurgos: Itineraries along the urban boundary) or Ciudadania (Citizenship) a programme about citizen participation and urban development organized with the Federation of Neighbours Associations of Burgos and Province Francisco de Vitoria.

Nowadays, Espacio Tangente is a referent, not only as a Contemporary Creation Centre but also as a Social Centre, of dynamization and reflection about the local cultural policies in the Community of Castille and León.

cdoc@diba.cat 11

Catalonia

Almazen. Associació Cultural La Ciutat de les Paraules. Raval (Barcelona) http://www.almazen.net/

The Almazen, headquarters of the Cultural Association La Ciutat de les Paraules, is a space of cultural interaction in El Raval district in Barcelona, born in 1999, based on the project that, under the same name, turned El Raval district between 1998 and 2000 into a visual poem which could be walked through, making the preferred words of the neighbours into banners hanging on the balconies to celebrate Saint George’s Day, 23rd April, as the International Day of Words. In 2004 the experience was repeated in a marginal district of Copenhagen. The Association is in charge of the management and coordination of intercultural projects produced by itself or in collaboration with other associations and companies. Some initiatives of its own production are Vincles, La Sopa de Soupes (they turned the square where the Escola Massana is located into a banquet room where people could try at the same time the local soup of galets and the harira (a soup made by the Maghrebian residents) and the Arts Diners Club, where works made by artists could be exchanged at the Almazen bank at the price of 20 euros the piece. It also features a large programme of weekly activities: cinema season, live music, visual arts, dance, theatre, documentaries and exhibitions, which help as a platform for the new creators. Ateneu Popular 9 Barris. Nou Barris (Barcelona) http://www.noubarris.net/ateneu/

The Ateneu Popular 9 Barris is an equipment in the Nou Barris Barcelona District that appears as a fruit of the Nou Barris neighbours fight to pull down, in 1977, an asphalt factory and transform it into the today’s cultural centre. The Ateneu stands out for its social intervention project through culture and for the promotion of the circus and paratheatrical arts.

For the people in charge of the Ateneu management, «in a project like the one of the Ateneu it is difficult to talk about Culture and Proximity as two autonomous concepts that in a specific social context they seem to relate. From a space like this culture is in close proximity or it is not».

This proximity is, above all, a way of doing. Accessibility, the will to be close do not characterize an activity, a show, a programming… but they are typical of a way of doing and working. The important thing is the will and perseverance to reach out and to be accessible. That is why proximity has more to do with questions such as communication, presentation, flexibility, the capacity to integrate different kinds of publics, of paying attention to the citizens’ points of view and opinions, users, etc…

cdoc@diba.cat 12

Proximity is also participation. Everybody, always, participates because we always express opinions and judgements. What is complicated is the capacity of listening, accepting and managing them. Of differentiating between what a perception is and what a well-formulated opinion is. And, mainly, of finding those people who want to assume the leadership to manage the different points of view and to cause a certain consensus.

But proximity, above all, as a way of doing, as a process, must be characterized by the work capacity in a net between the different companies and the different cultural services and equipments (whether they are municipal, associative or local). It is about establishing a fluent dialogue between the projects, offering a range of different possibilities to the citizens so that they have the possibility to choose.

The «proximate» culture does not know about models or standards. It has to be a reflection of the social diversity of the territories, the districts, the spaces. And each territory and space will have a different answer to the need of generating processes to promote citizen participation and the organization of cultural activities which give sense to the community and, at the same time, give it its own identity.

The Ateneu, then, is a genuine project, but it can not be otherwise. Since the different projects of proximity culture in each city district must be genuine, because they are the fruit of each territory idiosyncracies.

The Ateneu has great visibility out of Nou Barris thanks to its specialization in the circus field (as it is one of the circus reference poles at Catalan level). This balance between the artistic and supralocal dimension and the local and communitarian dimension has strengthened its cultural project. But it is clear that the Ateneu, as an equipment managed by a company in an autonomous and independent way, can only be understood in the framework of a wide net of neighbour centres, youth centres, children spaces, neighbour associations, which have in common the will to work in a cooperative way in Nou Barris. Without all this network of citizens, leaders, promoters, workers, local technicians, collectives, etc… it could not be understood. The key is that all the agents, from the local administration, to associations, alternative groups, etc… have known how to create confidence spaces to discuss, debate and solve differences. And that all of them have the need of becoming accessible.

Reality allows many readings but requires a lot of attention and a critic and committed look. Being able to share and complement looks is, maybe, the central challenge to solve in the field of proximity cultural policies. It can assure an integral cultural action with a wide social scope. Bulevart. Oficina de Difusió Artística. Diputació de Barcelona http://www.diba.cat/bulevart

Bulevart is a programme of the Office for Artistic Promotion (ODA) of the Department of Culture at the Diputació de Barcelona. It was born in 2001 with the aim of invigorating the non-professional artistic sector and of improving the quality of its creations. In order to achieve this, Bulevart acts in the fields of training, interrelation and communication between its protagonists (artists and associations), provision of resources and assistance for production and distribution of artistic

cdoc@diba.cat 13

projects. Bulevart responds to a demand that the Board of Arts Councillors addressed to the Diputació de Barcelona. The councillors were seeking solutions to the multiple needs of the diverse groups of non-professional artists. The driving force of this programme is primarily the town councils which, through a membership protocol, can form part of Bulevart and benefit from the services of this programme. What is demanded of them is that they promote the amateur artistic activity in their town, make known the needs of this sector and inform the local amateur groups and/or artists about Bulevart so that they can take advantage of the instruments of assistance for training, communication, production or distribution of projects that Bulevart offers.

The project Baix Gira falls within the diverse work strategies in collaboration with the towns to offer tools to non-professional creators. Baix Gira offers a training programme aimed at all those interested and participating in the performing arts, formal groups (amateur theatre groups or theatre workshop participants) and all those citizens who feel some affinity with some of the manifestations of the performing arts. Baix Gira is an initiative of diverse towns in Baix Llobregat (Gavà, El Prat de Llobregat, Sant Andreu de la Barca, Sant Boi de Llobregat, Sant Joan Despí and Viladecans), coordinated through Bulevart.

One of the main instruments offered by the programme is the portal for the non-professional arts Bulevart.org. It is a space of promotion and communication, open to all artistic languages and which offers diverse resources especially aimed at non-professionals. It has a database of artists and creative bodies of theatre, music, dance and the visual arts, communication resources such as the show listings or an advertising space and other services specific to the sector. The portal is also the space that brings together and responds to the demands for promotion, training support or other needs of the amateur artistic sector and is thus a platform of contact between the diverse agents who operate in the field of the non-professional arts.

Annually and with the aim of contributing to enhancing the quality of amateur productions, Bulevart advises and offers financial support to both production and training proposals with a determined profile. It is a requirement that creative or training projects have the involvement of professionals in the key areas of the production process, that they integrate different artistic languages and that they have interests beyond the strictly local ambit.

Burn Station. Platoniq. Barcelona http://www.platoniq.net/burnstation/

Burn Station consists of a device for copying, distribution and free promotion of audio, which takes place in a public space, of free access and non-profit making. The programme of this consultation and downloading point is a client-server system for GNU/Linux and is released with the GPL licence. This point of consultation and downloading allows anyone to have access to the contents of its database. The users can bring their CDs and freely download and copy archives, and even introduce new archives, provided they are the authors. The module is mobile and transportable so that the actions of exchange and distribution can be undertaken in different areas of the same city.

cdoc@diba.cat 14

This self-service of digital contents is mainly music and its database is formed by productions of independent musicians and authors, who use free licences about which information is also provided. Burn Station decriminalizes the action of copying and appears as an alternative to the copyright system and invites us to actively reflect on the demand for free culture. To this end, it is important that the process of exchange takes place in the public space as in this way it achieves the visibility that the Net does not allow. Under the motto «take Internet to the street», Burn Station provides a social application to technology as it favours the construction of a network of contacts and groups which share resources and knowledge and generates common projects and activities. Citizen participation is at the base of shared, self-organised and public culture, at which projects like this are aimed. From the outset, Burn Station has temporarily or permanently set up in different cities of Europe and Latin America (such as Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Bogotá and Lima).

Platoniq, a cooperative cultural system formed by Ignacio Garcia, Susana Noguero and Oliver Shulbaum, is a platform of selection, production and distribution of projects that relate new technologies to culture, a net culture label that, moreover, organises free activities in the public space. Since 2000, Platoniq has sought to take Internet to the street and promote, form and share other ways of acting on information, knowledge and connected culture.

Platoniq moves in the field both of communication and digital creation. Its work concentrates on the search for bridges between the work of the cultural agent and the producer. The central point lies in the interaction between new technologies, popular culture and the social event; everything with the aim of establishing connections between Internet and the new media (defined as «online») and the public physical space (defined as «onsite»). Among its most recent projects is the organisation of the international festival Open Ràdio at the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona; the public streaming server (audio broadcasting on Internet), Opserver.org; and the conference on media activism Media Space Invaders. In January 2004, Platoniq, together with the lawyer Abel Garriga, created the first free licence in Spain and within the Spanish legal framework. This licence is called Aire Incondicionat and since its appearance it has been used by different groups and projects, independently of the Platoniq activities. El Camp de la Bota. Francesc Abad. Barcelona http://www.francescabad.com/campdelabota/

The works of Francesc Abad have always focused on the concern for the fragility of (individual and collective) memory, for its recovery, to show how history is reconstructed and manipulated from each present. And he has very often related –and contrasted – art and thought through many different means (objects, audiovisuals, photographs, installations, etcetera) recovering the words and texts of thinkers, writers and poets such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Paul Celan and Primo Levi. In this project, Abad undertakes a work in progress on El Camp de la Bota; this place full of tragic history that the constructions of the Forum of Cultures 2004 covered and concealed, the place where 1,704 people were shot by the Franco dictatorship between 1939 and 1952, implacably, coldly and

cdoc@diba.cat 15

calculatedly, once the war had ended, that is, during the post-war period and not in the midst of the war.

Presented at the Fundació Espais de Girona, the work on El Camp de la Bota next went to Lleida (partially), and at the start of 2005 it began to travel to different exhibition galleries and museums in the province of Barcelona (Prat de Llobregat, Manresa, Santa Coloma de Gramenet. Vilafranca del Penedès Sant Adrià del Besós, Mataró, Roda de Ter, Mollet del Vallès, Terrassa, Súria and l'Hospitalet de Llobregat) which continued until mid-2007. In each place, testimonies and documentation of all kinds are added to it. The project – which has received the award Ciutat de Barcelona 2005 – has the support of the Department of Culture at the Diputació de Barcelona (the Office of Artistic Promotion was in charge of the production and itinerary, and the Cultural Heritage Office, of the documentary research in the towns The exhibition features two large photographs, one with seven empty chairs and another with the same chairs occupied by relatives of those executed, a text by Walter Benjamin, a DVD with the voice and images of diverse testimonies, as well as documents, photocopies, photographs, etcetera. The project also has a website under continuous construction that can be consulted at any moment; a place where new documentation can be added and which includes, among other things, a kind of firmament with 1,704 stars, each of which corresponds to a specific victim, a name and a story.

Abad’s aim is for the website to be a perennial work, which can be used and is capable of penetrating the public sphere, «so that a creation, in principle conceived from the artistic field, becomes a real work tool in the social sphere». Canals temàtics. Antoni Abad. Barcelona http://www.zexe.net

The recent initiatives of Antoni Abad are audiovisual mobile communication projects addressed to groups without an active presence in the most notable media. The latest generation of cellular telephones allows the immediate release on Internet of multimedia contents, using telephones with integrated camera. This context makes possible the creation of group channels of mobile and remote transmission, without the sophisticated and costly recording and transmission equipment, traditionally used in television. The receivers of these broadcasts have the possibility of bringing their own criteria, thus becoming active users of the communication device. With this criteria, Abad has created Sitio Taxi for the association of taxi drivers in Mexico City; Canal Gitano is aimed at the community of gypsies in Lleida and León; Canal Invisible at prostitutes and transsexuals in Madrid and Canal Accessible is an initiative where 40 handicapped people photograph with their mobiles each obstacle they find in the street. Through multimedia messages they outline on Internet the cartography of inaccessible Barcelona. This channel has received the Golden Nica 2006 in the category of Virtual Communities of Arts Electronica. For Antoni Abad the greatest success of the project would be that these groups, already provided with multimedia mobiles, were able to organize themselves to give continuity to a communication device with which they are familiar. Out of the four groups who participated in the experience, only the taxi drivers of Mexico City wanted to

cdoc@diba.cat 16

continue. However, the sponsor had to recover the mobiles. Nevertheless, they created an association of taxi drivers to make themselves heard and express their demands. The gypsies of Lleida and Leon, and the prostitutes of Madrid considered the experience finished.

Antoni Abad: graduate in History of Art from the Universitat de Barcelona. Multimedia artist. His projects have been exhibited at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2003; P.S.1, Long Island City, New York, 2003; Hamburger Bahnof, Berlin, 2002; Media Lounge/New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 2001; invited artist at Le Fresnoy, France, 2000; Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 1999; 2ª Bienal Iberoamericana de Lima, 1999; ZKM’net condition, Karlsruhe, 1999; Dapertutto/Venice Biennale, 1999; Espacio Uno/Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 1997. He won the Arco Electrónico award with his work 1.000.000 in 1999. Can Xalant Centre de Creació i Pensament Contemporani. Mataró http://www.canxalant.org

Can Xalant, located in El Pla d’en Boet in a 16th century Catalan farmhouse in Mataró, is the first Centre for Contemporary Creation and Thought resulting from the new policy of the visual arts management in Catalonia and the agreement signed between Mataró Town Council and Mataró Autonomous Board for Cultural Promotion of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia. Can Xalant, managed by Trànsit Projectes and Mataró Association for Contemporary Culture (ACM), is the pilot project of a structure of creation centres that will be displayed through the territory. It is not a space for exhibitions or the promotion of the arts but rather a spaced aimed at production, at providing spaces of work and residence, workshops and multimedia technical equipment, services and resources necessary to develop projects, focusing attention on emerging artists linked to the territory and the social context. «We believe that creation in general and contemporary visual arts in particular are the combination of research, production, documentation, exhibition and training with the desire and the objective of reflecting and having an effect on the socio-cultural reality. The efforts of the management team of the Centre focus on attracting, exploring and supporting these initiatives. For this reason, Can Xalant is defined as a place of experimentation and innovation.» This is revealed on its website, where it is possible to follow the projects undertaken and the projects underway. With reference to the programmes, they have designed five proposals, along with providing public services such as the documentation centre.

Laboratory Programme. It puts at the disposal of artists three rooms to rent – from 30 to 40m2 –, at a price lower than the market and a wide offer of multimedia services. In total, there is a video editing studio, a postproduction studio and an audio editing and recording studio.

Residences and exchanges. The artists’ residence in the Centre is one of the most effective mechanisms to promote Can Xalant as a place both of production and training. The resident artists are invited by the Centre itself to develop a project, a workshop, etc. and to publicly show their artistic work through presentations or lectures.

cdoc@diba.cat 17

In some cases it has the collaboration of contemporary art centres interested in the production and/or exhibition of the resident artist. The residence programme involves the making of a specific project to publicise Can Xalant in the first place. The relation with other international centres of similar characteristics makes possible, based on an open call and a later selection, a programme of exchanges allowing Catalan artists to live abroad for a period while Can Xalant receives the artist proposed by the Centre with which it has an agreement.

Curatorial and promotion. The Curatorial programme includes a series of activities that can be generated by the management of the Centre or entrusted to specialised cultural agents, although most of the activities will be directly linked with the remaining programmes, especially with residences. Moreover, the promotion of creations will also be one of the basic lines of Can Xalant. The Centre plans to maintain close links with other art spaces and sign agreements with the schools so that they can visit in situ the preparation of the projects. It is also planned to create a periodical publication featuring the projects undertaken. Cultures d’arxiu. Jorge Blasco Gallardo. Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Barcelona http://www.culturasdearchivo.org

Cultures d’arxiu was born at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in autumn 2000, designed and produced by Jorge Blasco Gallardo, an independent curator and researcher at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. In terms of the means used and the presentation, it has a historiographical nature in which many of the systems that organize images and texts share a common genealogy. Despite this, its starting point does not lie so much in this genealogy as in the interventions that 20th century artists and narrators have made on the issue of the archive and in the light that these works shed on a form of containing information, constructing memory and organizing reality, which undoubtedly has marked and marks our whole cultural and social field.

Over the years, the project has dealt with different fields, whether through its website, exhibitions and publications or through workshops, seminars and lectures. Cultures d’arxiu has carried out, since 2002, a series of workshops held at ETSAB, UPC (Barcelona Higher School of Architecture) (ETSAB, UPC). These workshops form the core of the project. Although they are less spectacular than the exhibitions, or archive-spaces, they give birth to fundamental work meetings and spaces. The workshops are based on a simple principle: they consist of approaching the documentary sources of the city where they take place without using them as a source of illustration of a previously agreed cultural discourse or pretext; in contrast, the pretext of the proposals that emerge from these workshops are in fact the documentary groups localised and what they narrate as they are systematized, labelled and organized within the totality of the archive. The case of the workshop organized in 2003 in collaboration with the Municipal Archive of the district of Sants (Barcelona) should be noted. The main interest of this archive is the collection of photographs it contains. A historical collection of images of Sants practically from the beginnings of photography. Its main characteristic is not having been created by the institution; it comes from the Associació Excursionista de Sants and the residents of the area, who for years

cdoc@diba.cat 18

concerned themselves with compiling, dating and organizing these images until the collection became too large. At that moment an agreement was reached with the Archive to deposit it there. The organization of the images is the same that the residents gave it in their day, and it is largely residents of the area who today continue the work of conservation and organization of the collection and of the new additions. For Cultures d’arxiu it was fundamental to incorporate a case of this kind, where the public institution and the residents’ initiative seem to fit together perfectly. Moreover, it must be borne in mind that there are parts of the port and the Zona Franca that belong to Sants and that before were its beaches. Can Tunis, an especially complicated area of the Barcelona geography, also forms part of it. Having the opportunity of seeing the archive representation of the zone made by its residents was extremely interesting. Some work groups focused precisely on the way the first photos of the section grouped as «Beaches» – from the late 19th century and early 20th century – corresponded to romantic visions where the boat, the house and the wave were recurring themes; also on how these were chronologically followed by the photographs of the Civil War period – most of them aerial views – and on how the series «Beaches» ended with black and white photographs of families with their picnic and their balls, posing before the camera. After this period, nothing. There are no images of what the area is like today, an area denied in the self-representation for obvious reasons. Desenvolupament Cultural Comunitari (DCC). Granollers http://www.dccgranollers.info

Desenvolupament Cultural Comunitari (Community Cultural Development) is a methodology which uses culture as a vehicle to impulse and channel social transformation processes in a community that needs to report, change, discuss and make its voice heard. The DCC peculiarity lies upon the fact that it recognizes, encourages and strengthens the communicative and transformative abilities of the processes and manifestations in the artistic languages. For this reason, the artist, mediator artist, pedagogue artist, brings artistic tools to the community so that it can express creatively through cultural products that create an inner debate in the community and a change in society.

For over ten years the Granollers Town Council has been articulating from the civic centres and public spaces of the town, social and cultural activities with the community and from the community. This will has been growing and maturing until it has been formulated nowadays into different action lines which have as central axis the principles of the Agenda 21 for Culture of Granollers: expression, empowerment and accessibility.

However, and before this contextual framework, the most dynamic cultural agents of the city, from the Culture Service to the organizations and civic centres, were already working intuitively to obtain these principles in each of the projects they were carrying out.

In a coherent and committed progression and, after experimenting with different initiatives such as the Rana de Can Bassa [Can Bassa´s Frog]– starting from a

cdoc@diba.cat 19

shared reflection about the community’s identity, a common icon was created with the help of expressive languages in plastic arts and the arts of the fiesta -, Àvies amb Ganes [Willing Grandmothers] – from an everyday life activity for them as it was knitting, they created laborious pieces of clothes with recycled plastic, achieving on the one hand, a public proof of their creativity and, on the other hand, the strengthening of their personal and collective self-esteem -, La Ventana [The Window] – from the proposal of intervention of public art in the main square of a district, there was a neighbour reflection about the occupation of public spaces in order to participate in the square’s transformation process -, and, more recently, El Sueño [The Dream] – project carried out in collaboration with the Australia Council for the Arts to develop a project of DCC in a district in full urban transformation process intervened by an Australian CCD worker who chose photography as the collective voice, photovoice, of the neighbours, organizations and associations of the territory -, we have detected the need to study in depth through training, practice and reflection as a way of doing and understanding culture, which, although it is not new, is beginning to demand a bigger attention and dedication from all the social, cultural and political agents in the local field.

This way the community cultural development programme appeared in 2004, from the Culture Service and the town’s Civic Centres Network, Órbita Cultural, with the will to get integrated like a transverse line in all the town services and areas, working from the practice and reflection.

With the purpose of analyzing the constructive potentialities that culture offers to communities, they thought there was a need to celebrate, for the first time in our country, a professional meeting which joined all the agents, national and international, that worked in some way or other with this methodology for the cultural development and the social growth of fairer, participative and democratic communities. The First International Conferences of Community Cultural Development of Granollers, art as a tool for social transformation, were celebrated between October 2005 and March 2006, they took on this challenge in order to offer a unique meeting, dialogue and reflection space that the Segundas Jornadas de DCC (Second Conferences of DCC) will gather together and will be celebrated by March 2007, whose objective in this occasion is to discover the potentialities, experiences and links between the DCC and the most festive manifestations of popular culture, Las artes de la Fiesta [The Arts of the Fiesta].

During the first conferences it was concluded that one cause for the vagueness of these sociocultural projects was due to the lack of interdisciplinary training of the different agents involved. As a reaction, some necessary steps were done to make the most of this opportunity and offer to Granollers and all the region some innovative superior studies, a graduate degree diploma course in Community Cultural Development, fostered by the Culture Service and the Universities Committee of Granollers Town Council, the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University and Technologic Centre of Granollers. This postgraduate degree offers strategies, tools, experiences and skills to answer the different needs, problems and anxieties of all those professionals in the social, cultural, artistic and educational fields.

cdoc@diba.cat 20

Similarly, the programme develops through the everyday invigorative action of the territory which is done from the civic centres, specially nowadays, with the project COMUNITARI, an initiative for the encouragement of the citizens’ participation in the local culture and the dialogue between artists and publics, with activities such as Compartiendo palabras y café [Sharing Words and Coffee], a weekly women’s meeting who have a lot to say, Pásame la receta [Give me the Recipe], a space for the interchange of different cultures around the gastronomic world, la Coral Infantil [Children´s Choir] an activity addressed to children of all nationalities to approach them to the local culture traditions with popular songs and Christmas carols, and to finish, e-Voluntariado [e-voluntary work], a project of digital literacy which characterizes for the commitment of the pupils themselves to transmit the acquired knowledge to the others. Escola de Música-Centre de les Arts. L’Hospitalet de Llobregat http://www.l-h.es

The Centre de les Arts de L’Hospitalet is the instrument created by L’Hospitalet Town Council to develop its education policies for the arts and the promotion of artistic practice. In response to a certain citizen demand for the creation of a school of music and a conservatoire, L’Hospitalet Town Council created, on 25th May 2005, the Escola de Música – Centre de les Arts as a municipal institution capable of providing artistic training to citizens of all ages, capable of developing projects of community arts in the education centres, making citizen activities of artistic practice grow and attracting the interest of citizens traditionally distant from artistic practices. L’Hospitalet Town Council, going beyond the establishment of a provision of artistic learning anchored in the most conventional concepts and formats, offers the citizens the possibility of practising the arts from different levels of demand; learning with socializing approaches – both from the point of view of methodologies and artistic practices –; opening its activities to diverse disciplines and trends, overcoming the specific citizen demand with a wide-reaching response that allows them to be in tune with the multicultural citizenship, with a low cultural consumption and with the need to explore creativity through new channels unlinked with tradition. Although the form of management of the institution is direct, the aim of the organisation is to enhance collaborative work with the different local agents working in this field of action. To this end, numerous cases of partnership have been set up with local institutions that develop projects of cultural invigoration through artistic training, which makes the organisation stronger and links it to the territory while contributing to the development of local organisations. Some of the most relevant elements of the project are:

Education in different artistic disciplines (music, theatre – visual arts and photography –) Plurality of aesthetic trends

cdoc@diba.cat 21

Display in the territory (total in the first phase of the project and partial in the second phase1) Didactics and methodology (especially innovative in the music section: group pedagogy, integration of musical language into the learning of the instrument, and organisation of provision and teaching in instrumental ensembles) Wide range of activities:

Long duration during the whole academic year Summer activities (theatre and hip-hop) Training of music teachers (the provision has been conceived with their collaboration and will be available in the next academic year) Interventions in the framework of compulsory education:

During the whole academic year (Pau Vila) Occasionally as complementary subjects (Steel drums) Occasionally as a community project (6 proposals for the curricula in the academic year 2006-07)

Provision in partnership with local artistic organizations (through different formulae). Espai Eart. Experimentem amb l'art. Gràcia (Barcelona) http://www.experimentem.org/

At the end of December 2003 a new space of creation was inaugurated in the district of Gràcia in Barcelona: L’ESPAI Eart. Experimentem amb l’Art. It is a group of people linked not only with the world of art but also with that of education. It has worked since 1993 with the aim of encouraging creativity and fostering a critical look at the contemporary reality, while preparing educational programmes. This space seeks to provide a meeting, creation and work point for the different artistic manifestations (music, dance, painting, sculpture...). It has twelve workshops for the artists, offered at a modest price, so that for two years they can develop their creativity. It is an open space for exchanging experiences, meetings of both artists and viewers, but also of artists with artists and of viewers with viewers. In short, a new concept of the artistic space. L’ESPAI Eart basically follows three lines of action. The first is an educational line to offer proposals for a better understanding of art and the creative processes while encouraging the creativity of future generations. This line has characterised the thirteen years of existence of the association and is its foundation. Through educational programmes, the artist becomes a direct mediator between art and society. Within the framework of Interferències’04 in Terrassa, and with the subtitle L'instant: l'ara que ja no, they created an activity which sought to be a way of bringing the viewer closer to contemporary creation, to understand its processes and try to make the strategies of the artistic processes their own. From here comes the album of moments, mailboxes full of postcards written by citizens recalling their best temporal heritage

1 First phase: the centre does not have its own base and carries out its activities in primary schools and municipal cultural centres. Second phase: the centre has its base in Can Trinxet (1910 Manchester factory) which hosts the three performing arts (music, dance and theatre), maintains the territorial supply of courses for children and starts other activities: production, creation and artistic promotion.

cdoc@diba.cat 22

of lived moments. Bringing art to personal experience and breaking down barriers between viewers and creators is the aim of the education line. The second is a line of creation where artists from all fields can develop their projects, but can also have direct contact with the viewers. The exchange of experiences and open workshops always enrich the creative processes. The third line, which is the culmination of the two earlier ones, includes exhibitions, publications and debate sessions to reflect on issues related to contemporary reality. Graffnollers. Granollers http://www.grajove.net/

The project Graffnollers, promoted by Granollers City Council, was born in mid-February 2006 with the objective of facilitating the creative process of young people from the city and regulating determined artistic practices that today take place outside the law. Up to now, only associations and groups of youths were authorized to paint murals and graffiti on the walls of the river Congost, with the consent of the Board for the Defence of El Besòs Basin, but the youths considered that it was not the best showcase for their art, and had therefore asked for authorization to paint other spaces. This project envisages the localization of all the public and private walls where graffiti can be painted, as long as they are not close to a listed building. Owners or those responsible for the space will be informed about the project and will be asked for their authorization in writing to paint these walls. The authorized walls will bear the mark of the project and some vertical signs that will limit the space that can be painted. All the youths who wish to paint on a wall must fill in an application at the Council for the Youth Department requesting authorization. Once the request is received, the Council will contact the interested party and an agreement will be signed according to which the youth promises not to soil, obstruct the way to public spaces, make excessive noise and include violent, political or pornographic contents. The artist creating the graffiti or mural will be its intellectual owner, although the Council reserves the right to repaint the space if it does not fulfil the requisites established or if 9 months have passed since the start of the creation. It is expected that this project will continue until 31 December 2006, on which date the Council will evaluate the results. If the project continues, it is expected to create a catalogue of the different murals of the city. Grup de Patrimoni Industrial del Fòrum de la Ribera del Besòs (FRB). Barcelona http://www.forumriberabesos.net/

The Fórum de la Ribera del Besòs was born in 1992 at Barri Besòs Secondary School. Although initially it focused on the education field, it soon expanded its scope and different working lines were created: revision of town development plans, industrial heritage, housing, facilities, etc. The tactical framework is the undertaking of an alternative Plan for the Ribera del Besòs, which has made the Forum an agora of discussion on the city model, from the perspective that the

cdoc@diba.cat 23

physical transformations must always be accompanied by the concerns and desires of the people who live in and move through the city.

It comprises the area of the five districts of Barcelona between Ciutadella Park and the river Besòs (Poblenou, Diagonal, Maresme, Besòs and La Mina), although its interventions sometimes exceed these limits. It is defined as a «second level network» or a «bank of ideas» formed by individuals and by around 35 associations, mostly residents of the aforementioned districts, but also by people from other parts of the city. The presence of different themed networks ranging from neighbourhood to institutions of the cultural network of excellence (some departments of the University of Barcelona, MACBA, the Science and Technology Museum Association or Tàpies Foundation) and of different levels (district, seafront, city) has enabled the enrichment of the debates that take place and access to a great many resources by the associations participating in the Forum.

The Industrial Heritage Group of the FRB has been one of the driving forces of the «Salvem Can Ricart» Association (www.salvemcanricart.org), together with the Poblenou Residents’ Association (AVPN), HANGAR, collectives of artists as NAU21, affected companies, and other persons, institutions and entities.

Can Ricart is the only complete prototype manufacturing site from the invention of industrial modernity in Barcelona of the mid-19th century remaining in the city and an important part of the contemporary heritage of Catalonia. The conflict of Can Ricart derives from the 22@bcn Plan.

The 22@bcn Plan represents for Barcelona the most important urban transformation started in recent years because of its strategic consideration as a productive motor of the metropolitan region in the so-called «new economy».

The scientific and professional community has had a fundamental role both in the writing of the Plan and in the opposition to determined aspects of the Plan, especially in terms of the conservation of industrial heritage. In the case of the writing of the Plan, the ideas for the transformation of Poblenou were influenced by the literature on the regional economy and the innovating environments in urban areas. These ideas have been reinterpreted by a group of professionals and business people related with new technologies. Moreover, a critical focus has also been formed among the town development professionals who have questioned how the specific ideas included in the Plan have been developed. In this sense, the work of the Industrial Heritage Group of the Ribera Besòs Forum is important, which includes the participation of Mercè Tatjer, Joan Roca, Salvador Clarós, Lluís Estrada, Zaida Muixí and Josep Maria Montaner and I. Martínez, among others.

The Industrial Heritage Group of the FRB accepts the main ideas of the 22@bcn Plan as a motor of reinvigoration of Poblenou, but seeks to establish a dialogue with the needs and desires of the inhabitants themselves, among other means through the defense of the industrial sites as part non only of the identity of the neighborhood, but of the whole of the city, Catalonia, and European heritage as well. The FRB, the AVPN and other institutions and entities have developed a discourse based on the acceptance of the main ideas of the Plan, but demanding substantial modifications to it when they feel it appropriate.

cdoc@diba.cat 24

Throughout the development of the 22@bcn Plan, the neighborhood movement has developed all kinds of actions, simultaneously combining institutional, political and social activities: collecting signatures, conferences, neighbour assemblies, rallies, banners on balconies, meetings with the Authority, street lunches, claims, appeals, demonstrations, etc. The FRB has acted as a laboratory of ideas with the publication of articles, report writing and holding of conferences and has helped the AVPN and other institutions and associations of the neighborhood and the city to maintain a central position offering proposals in the conflict, especially in terms of conservation of industrial heritage.

The Forum de la Ribera together with the Poblenou Residents’ Association and the Poblenou Historical Archive, it has had a leading role in the periodical organization of the conference «Industrial Legacy and Innovation» since 2003 which has brought together neighborhood leaders, politicians, administrators and academics. This experience supposes a way to approach to people and wide groups for the spread of the cultural heritage and the historical memory

For the moment, the demolition has been suspended and Barcelona City Council presented (on 20th July 2006) a new «Pla de Millora Urbana de la Unitat d’Actuació 1» (Urban Improvement Plan of Action Unit 1), which affects the manufacturing site, meaning very notable advances in terms of the previous plan. Moreover, the Association has submitted claims because, in its view, it does not offer solutions with sufficient criteria. Allegations have also been presented to the Plan of the Industrial Heritage (modification of the catalog) proposed by the Town Council and currently is awaiting the result..

The Heritage Group of the FRB reflects in this way on the experience of Can Ricart: «Maintaining the autonomy between the fields of research, debate and proposals for action has allowed not only the social accumulation and distribution of an asset of important discursive rationality but also the preservation of the autonomy of each of the processes and each of the agents. This differentiation of fields, as tenuous as it may sometimes be, has been instrumental in achieving rigorousness in the analysis and has prompted many proposals. And this allows the marking of distances both in terms of the unyielding opposition called the culture of «no» and of the discouragement when the distancing between the citizenry and authorities weakens the public sphere. «If everything has come off in the case of Can Ricart it is because in the debate on this exceptional site, on the cultural level and in the most material realities of town development, productive activities and social life, many of the issues that affect the past and future trajectory of the social majorities somehow come together.» Hangar. Centre de producció d’arts visuals. Barcelona http://www.hangar.org

Hangar opens on June 20th 1997 as an answer to a series of needs in the artistic community which arose from changes in the cultural creation and production. Following the European model of the use of old factories as a centre of creative development, the Associació d´Artistes Visuals de Catalunya ( Visual Artist Association of Catalonia) asked Barcelona City Council to use the old industrial

cdoc@diba.cat 25

warehouses as a place of creation and meeting , as it was impossible to find reasonable rents. Finally they got a part of a factory situated in Can Ricard, an old textile factory of the XIX century, in Poblenou´s industrial area.

At present, Hangar is an artistic production centre whose objective is to give support to the new generations of artists from any creative school and methodology. This support consists in a series of technical services and facilities which favour artistic creation. Hangar assigns a large part of the building to renting spaces for artists; in total 14 workshops of 30 and 60 m2, a polyvalent space of 200 m2 and three spaces for groups that investigate in the electronic field. The demand for these workshops is much higher that the centre possibilities, for this reason a Committee of Programmes has been created to choose among the received petitions with a public convocation. Hangar also offers the possibility of hiring all kinds of audiovisual material, editing panels, cinema sets, or the support and advice of a specialist technician. Furthermore, Hangar develops an interchange programme with several centres all over the world. The first agreement was in 1998 with the prestigious non profit PS1 Contemporary Art Center of New York (nowadays merged with MOMA) and consists in a year-long stay for an artist in one of its workshops with a maintenance and production grant.

Moreover, Hangar has interchange programmes with the Centru Beeldende Kunst of Rotterdam (Netherlands), Asterides and Triangle France of Marseille (France) and the Fondazione Pistoletto de Biella (Italy); it organizes workshops or meetings for debate and meditation about some aspects of contemporary reality and culture.

In the coming years Hangar will experiment a deep transformation with the opening of new headquarters in Granollers which will fit in the project Fàbrica de les Arts, a Granollers Town Council project that will transform the old factory Roca Umbert into a cluster of art and technology, the enlargement of its facilities in Poblenou and the cooperation task with the net of production centres, public or private, which appear in Catalonia.

Hangar is managed by the Fundació d´artistes visuals de Catalunya, this foundation chaired by Ignasi Abellí, works for the defence and improvement of the artists´ social condition and the defence of the social interest in art. Hangar gets support and special support from the Generalitat de Catalunya Culture Department, and also from the Culture Institute of Barcelona, the Ministry for Culture, the Culture Area of Barcelona City Council, Fundació Caixa de Catalunya, Fundación Arte y Derecho and Fundació Banc Sabadell. Idensitat. Calaf, Manresa http://www.idensitat.org

Idensitat is a programme which is developed with a biannual periodicity with the will to bring mechanisms to articulate creative projects in the field of the public space and with relation to the territory. With this it is pretended to stimulate creative practices which experiment new ways of social involvement and participation, in connection with the existing practices and dynamics in the territory.

cdoc@diba.cat 26

The critical intervention, the social interaction processes and the hybridization between different disciplines are objectives which are worked on from the start of this programme. They constitute, nowadays, some aspects investigated by a high number of artistic proposals that pursue to establish a relationship with specific territories, to articulate an online work with people and collectives, as well as to participate in an active way in the transformation of specific elements of the social reality. From this perspective, Idensitat seeks to generate a structured framework, divulgation and debate which is articulated, at first, from an open notice and a selection of invited projects; as well as an amalgam of activities and educative actions which, on the whole, contribute to reinforce the idea of a claiming the social space through creative practices.

Since 1999 projects and activities have been started up in the village of Calaf and, progressively, relationships with other locations have been established with the aim of making possible the development of projects adaptable to different variables and to the specificity of each place. Idensitat 07, in the same way as the former edition, is developed in the villages of Calaf and Manresa. Both towns in the province of Barcelona are acting as an impulse to this programme, in close collaboration with Generalitat de Catalunya´s Department for Culture and Barcelona Provincial Council. In this new edition the territorial net is widened with the development of a project in the city of Mataró, by means of Can Xalant, Centre of Contemporary Creation and Thought.

In the fourth edition of the programme, Idensitat 07 proposes the motto Home/ Visitor with the intention of promoting all the activities that shape its totality into three specific contexts, characterized by the respective urban expansion and transformation processes that are occurring at present. However, Idensitat 07 is created as a territory observatory and a laboratory for project development, giving the opportunity to participate actively in urban processes when there is an important expansion and growth phenomenon, as well as redefining the identities that characterize them. This transformation of the territory is happening simultaneously in different towns. So, it is intended to favour a field of action, experimentation and discussion which, started with the previous edition of the programme (Idensitat 05), will take into account the moment of intense urban evolution lived in Calaf, Manresa or Mataró, so as to articulate a series of dynamics of artistic activity which include critical, analytic or proposing looks to involve specific population segments or to enable the creation of alternatives in order to perceive, face and participate in particular urban processes which happen at a specific moment. Joystick. Barcelona http://www.jstk.org

With the use of Internet as a fundamental platform for the exchange of information, the launch of projects, calls and the publication of works (its own or from other groups), Joystick is a group based in Barcelona, whose members come from Medellín, Colombia. However, its work is not only developed on the Net but they also carry out a series of projects that use other media and feature them in non-virtual settings: street events, performances in art galleries, coordination of video

cdoc@diba.cat 27

shows, the release of CD-Roms or the organization of concerts. With the objective of establishing alternative channels and spaces of communication, Joystick’s proposals seek to build bridges of communication and cooperation between Colombia/Latin America and Barcelona/Spain. To this end, they have a website (conceived as their main base of operations to find information about both their projects and the works by other artists and groups). Taking a virtual journey through the website, we find a section called Airport which contains online monographic exhibitions of non-digital proposals by young artists. This is the same spirit of the section txt, an archive of texts that aims to generate a direct channel of communication between the authors of the aforementioned texts and their potential readers. The website also has a section called Archivo offering information on the projects and events organized by the group – or to which it has contributed – and which are now complete. This is the case of Playtime, an event organized by fiftyfifty.org for the Artfutura 2002; La vidéo a tué les stars de la radio, an experimental French video and audio exhibition held in May 2003 in the Raval district in Barcelona; or Trash, a kind of shop/exhibition of furniture collected from the rubbish which was held at the Saladestar gallery in Barcelona, with a presentation similar to that used by certain multinationals of the sector (but with the particularity that the public/customers could freely take the products they liked). Under the motto «reuse your life», Trash connects with the project Gracias a la basura que me ha dado tanto, an approach to the process of collecting and recycling objects found in rubbish containers in the great urban centres of the so-called first world. The current project TRASH (bis) continues its research into the issue of waste in the city of Barcelona.

Another of the active projects of Joystick is Antena 01, an attempt to create a space of multidisciplinary dialogue between Colombia and the rest of the world through Internet to generate processes of information and discussion where contemporary art practices, new technologies and cultural activity on the Net come together. Committed to the use of free software and independent technology, the objective of Antena 01 is to set up a more or less stable programme of connections and videoconferences via streaming in real time with audiences in Colombia. In this sense, Joystick participated in the seminar Media_Space_Invaders and collaborated in Bogotá in the first meeting of hackers and media artists held in Colombia in October 2003 (simultaneously with the holding of the Hackmeeting 03 in Iruña-Pamplona).

Práctica kittin’ is an initiative by a group of residents in the district of Gràcia in Barcelona which encourages citizens to remove the posters and adverts placed by estate agents everywhere in the city. When they heard about this initiative, the members of Joystick decided to join in, and now help in the graphic part and have created a space on Internet to promote the practice of «kittin».

With the aim of promoting experimental digital creation in Colombia, Joystick has released a compilation on CD-ROM, Rojo.miho, which includes electronic music, computer applications, flash animations, video proposals... created by authors and groups from the Latin American country. The idea emerged out of a similar project undertaken by Fiftyfifty on the Barcelona digital scene funded by the magazine Rojo, which covered the production expenses. During the Art Sonor festival in

cdoc@diba.cat 28

Barcelona, Zeppelin 03 presented Joystickers, a joint project to illustrate urban sound spaces. Majories Urbanes 1900-2025. Fundació Antoni Tàpies. Barcelona

The programme Majories urbanes seeks to be a framework to contribute to collective reflection on the 21st century commitments in Barcelona and in Catalonia in general. One hundred years after the launch of the term «noucentisme», with the controversial aim of cultural control by the elites, the incorporation of the majorities is the key challenge of the collective future of the city and the country. Just as one century ago, the challenge is posed in the midst of a wave of technical and demographic changes (then, electricity and the internal combustion engine, now, the ICT; in the past the start of Spanish immigration, now of the whole world) and of redefinition of the scales of political power (then, the municipal unification of Barcelona and the aspiration of a Catalan power, now the reformulation of Europe, Spain, Catalonia, and the metropolis). In this context, research on the dense trajectory of the 20th century metropolis, with its shifts, becomes strategic when establishing a platform from where to outline the components of a «citizen culture», so that the role of the great cities and their fitting into wider political and cultural fields will be as or more decisive now than in the 20th century. The programme commits to working discretely «from the bottom» and in the «mid-term», with a task of research and conception rather than management. The Fundació Antoni Tàpies must act as a node of research and archive, capable of networking with other institutions from the cultural, educational and association world that wish to incorporate. The objective is to achieve synergies that permit not starting from scratch, but from the much work that has already been done, with a view to enhancing an intellectual climate with shared questions. A network with a first core formed by the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, in collaboration with other cultural and educational institutions and social bodies of different types from the whole metropolitan sphere and from other towns of the Catalan urban fabric. The results must be materialized in serialized publications, seminars, courses, symposia, itineraries and other formats while the effort made in the lines of work started and shared in accordance with other institutions must periodically lead to public manifestations of the project Majories urbanes 1900-2025, both in the city of Barcelona and in other towns of Catalonia. Memòria Viva. Callús http://www.atlasdeladiversidad.net/memoriaviva/

The project Memòria Viva de Callús took place from March to June 2005 in collaboration with Callús Town Council, the Fundació Aplicació de Callús and the Department of Education at the Diputació de Barcelona. Its main objective was to establish an innovative pedagogic model based on the interest that past history awakens and, with the help of the new information society technologies, to help older people to train themselves in the use of the ICT so they can use them in the generation of new contents gathering experiences and points of view on different aspects of the 20th century closely linked to local history. In this way, they can train themselves in the social values based on the cooperative

cdoc@diba.cat 29

work of sharing an exchange of gained knowledge with companions from other towns and villages with whom they have shared the same historical moments with similarities and differences that the project helps to discover.

As a result of this process, the ATLAS of living memory has been made up: an Internet database containing the contributions of all the participants. These have information, tools and proposals that encourage them in the exchange of experiences with the aim of consolidating a community of communication and learning capable of undertaking the multiplying effect of the project. Obrim Finestres. Xarxa de Centres Cívics i Culturals. Mollet del Vallès. http://www.molletvalles.net/

It is a community work project based on the social and cultural centres located in Mollet del Vallès linking different groups in participatory processes of creation through intercultural workshops to foster the complicity between artists and the everyday environment. As happens in these kinds of projects, more attention is paid to the process than to the product that can finally result from it and a plurality of artistic languages and techniques is used. These allow the generation of a range of opportunities that favour the creative process that makes reflection, transmission of ideas and dialogue the ideal factors for exchange and personal enrichment. The project is justified with the objective of working with the local communities as the main players of their own development based on artistic processes which can lead to positive and enriching social dynamics – promotion of sociability and solidarity between different cultures, favouring the adaptation and integration between the members of the same community, creating a flow of satisfactory social exchange of beliefs, values, social rules, ideas, cultures and traditions… –, and, in short, empowerment and social cohesion. The project is also defined as transgenerational because it seeks to involve people and groups of all ages in the social and territorial context where it is located, to be specific in the districts of Can Borrell and La Plana Lledó. Obrim Finestres involves the carrying out of two concrete projects: L’Art de la Paraula and Diàlegs de Barri which will take place during a four month period with actions undertaken through a participatory process with different expressive language and which will culminate with a final intervention. Following the methodology of community art projects, the central stage is occupied by the citizens who participate in the different workshops and proposals of L’Art de la Paraula and Diàlegs de Barri under the guidance of different specialists in artistic languages and the invigorating role of the professionals from the social and cultural centres of the city. La Plataforma d’Entitats i Veïns de la Mina, Sant Adrià de Besòs http://www.desdelamina.net/plataforma/

The Plataforma d’Entitats i Veïns de la Mina in Sant Adrià del Besòs (Barcelona) is an association that encompasses different bodies and residents who work with the objective of improving the dignity and quality of life in the district of La Mina. The

cdoc@diba.cat 30

task of this association exemplifies the idea of the organization of specific social sectors that foster alternatives based on community participation. This group has worked since 1997 with the aim of promoting strategies of participation that have had an effect on La Mina Transformation Plan. It is a town planning project that affects the habitat and the social structure of the area and a process that constitutes a form of cultural representation based on the experience and knowledge provided by the fact of living in a determined place. At the same time, it means a kind of negotiation and participation between different groups and residents in the district of La Mina with the authority promoting the Transformation Plan. Further information: Plataforma d’Entitats i Veïns/es de la Mina, in: De la Marginación a la Ciudadanía, 38 Casos de Producciónn Social del Hábitat, Forum Barcelona, Habitat International Coalition. Case study, 2006 http://www.hic-net.org/documents.asp?PID=179

Processos Oberts (P_O_). Terrassa

http://www.p-oberts.org/

Processos Oberts (P_O_) is a research project resulting from the collaboration between Terrassa Town Council and Hangar (centre for the visual arts production of the Associació d’Artistes Visuals de Catalunya), held for the first time in Terrassa in 2004. Its main objective is to enhance the proposals of artists and groups that see artistic production as a work in progress based on constant research; that work in the physical space understood as a network of relations established with the context; networking and the active participation of the public. The third holding (February-July 2006) of Processos Oberts, P_O_3. HIPERPOP, whose curators were Eduardo Pérez Soler and Àlex Mitrani, was structured around the relations between the current artistic creation and the consumer society. Under this name, the diverse proposals of P_O_3. HIPERPOP explored some of the spaces of hybridization between cultivated art and pop culture, from different perspectives and promotion channels.

Within this logic, P_O_3. HIPERPOP consisted of several proposals – framed in such different artistic disciplines as music, procedural art, press interventions and animated cinema – which had the city of Terrassa as their field of reference and their field of action. The final aim of P_O_3. HIPERPOP was to promote the production of projects capable of impregnating the social context of the city using strategies similar to those of the products of the consumer society.

Pauli Fondevila and Francesc Ruiz prepared Striptis, a comic strip, published daily in the pages of the Diario de Terrassa and in the online edition of the digital journal Terrassa.net, which narrates the adventures of the artists through the leisure spots in the city. Chuso Ordi worked in Ráfagas, a series of short animated films, broadcast by Terrassa television (Canal Terrassa 36 UHF), inspired by Mr. X., a fictional character popularised in the blog that the artist publishes on the website of P_O_3. Azucena Vieites, with Som aquí, produced a series of t-shirts and fanzines inspired by the iconography of several feminist, lesbian and transsexual groups in Terrassa. Nuevos Ricos, the Mexican record label, made an advertising campaign of its bands, which included several radio programmes broadcast by the radio stations of Terrassa, Ràdio Kaos and Ràdio Star, and which could also be heard through the

cdoc@diba.cat 31

website of the project and which culminated in a series of concerts by Silverio, Aux Raus and Jessi Bulbo. Sessió contínua. Oficina de Difusió Artística de la Diputació de Barcelona http://www.diba.es/oda/s_continua.asp

Sessió continua is a collective exhibition commissioned by Montse Badia that gathers a selection of videographic works realized between 2000 and 2005 by some of the most significant and relevant contemporary artists in our context, and it seeks to reflect the consideration of the cinematographic format (or, in general, image in movement) as one of the most usual ways of the visual experience nowadays. It is not a coincidence that the artists participating in Sessió continua belong to the same generation: the one grown up with television and to which the television and cinematographic experiences are an absolute part of their quotidianity.

Sessió continua is an travelling exhibition: it was presented at the Contemporary Culture Centre of Barcelona (CCCB) at the end of 2005, within the Videoart Festival Loop, and it will travel to twenty towns in the province of Barcelona until the end of 2008. It is a project from the Visual Arts Programme of the Artistic Diffusion Office (ODA), a service of the Culture Area in Barcelona Provincial Council that, from the last ten years, gives support to the artistic programmes of the town councils in the province of Barcelona by means of the encouragement and diffusion of the theatre, music, dance and visual arts. The Visual Arts Programme of the ODA gives support to the local policies of contemporary art and stimulates town cooperation projects of creation, training and, specially, diffusion.

All the projects produced by the programme put a stress in the audiences and, through the years, this priority has been developing progressively with different strategies that we can call today of proximity: documentation fields, educative services (with dynamic visits, experimental workshops, family sessions, own expositive areas, didactic dossiers, specialized professionals…), parallel activities, shows, etc., always trying to combine excellence and access and encouraging participation and debate. Sessió continua is the most recent production of the Visual Arts Programme of the ODA and it is specially significant in this sense, not only for its contents (a), but also for its formal aspects (b), and for the services to the visitor (c) it offers.

A) Contents: the exhibition displays three independent video programme plannings which are grouped around three thematic lines to allow the visitor to choose the wished «route» (in this case, viewed):

1. Construccions de la identitat I altres antimarques [Identity constructions and other antimarks]. It collects works that explore the communicative ability of the image in relation with the identity construction. The advertising world, fashion, design and pop culture have also an outstanding presence. This programme is formed by the works of Carles Congost, Cova Macías and Joan Morey.

2. L´estatus de la imatge [The image status]. It is about the essential role the cinema referents develop in the constitution of a «collective cultural mind». The works of Martí Anson and Mabel Palacín form part of this programme.

cdoc@diba.cat 32

3. Condisionaments socials, causes i casualitats i altres contradiccions [Social conditionings, causes and coincidences and other contradictions]. It is focused on the contradictions and paradoxes that determine our relationships with the others. This programme is integrated by the works of Dora García, Antonio Ortega, Tere Recarens and Fernando Sánchez Castillo.

B) Formal aspects

Different formal aspects of «Sessió contínua» have also been produced with the aim of providing an easy access, among others. The exhibition has been conceived as a group of «multirooms» where the three mentioned video programmes are projected and the edition of each of the three video programmes allows the constant identification of the projected work and how much is left for the end of it. The notices, apart from the usual credits and technical aspects, also include brief introductory texts. The artist Xabier Salaberria has conceived, designed and built the furniture in the documentation space and the dividing elements in the three projection areas in order to structure the three exhibition itineraries in an adaptable way to the different kinds of exhibition halls where it will travel. The exhibition includes also an area to show the videographic works realized in the educative workshops with furniture which pretends to be specially appealing to its participants, basically teenagers.

C) Services to the visitor

And to contribute also to what was mentioned, before combining excellence and access, and promoting participation and debate, like all the exhibitions of the Visual Arts Programme of the ODA, Sessió continua offers: documentation space, catalogue, website and educative service, with dynamic visits and experimental workshops, addressed to different segments in the audience: schoolchildren ( in this case, over 12), other arranged groups ( youth groups, elder people groups, organizations, etc.) and unarranged visits. The videographic works done by the participant groups in the workshop are shown at the exposition space. And, as a novelty in the programme, the exhibition also offers and promotes:

1. A course for community centres titled «Reading images (in movement). Video, cinema, television and contemporary art». With the objective of widening the audiences for contemporary art among those people who usually do not attend to centres specialized in art, this course explores and analyzes the role developed by the image in movement in a society like ours, clearly defined from the visual presence, with three sessions that take place at the correspondent community centre (civic centre, community centre, etc.) and, in the fourth session, people is invited to put into practice the previous «reading exercises» in the exhibitions hall where Sessió continua is.

2. Specific activities for each town. They can be developed by the educative service tem, the artists, the exhibition commissioner and/or other professionals. For example, in Mataró, Cova Macías has realized two videographic works with students from 6 secondary schools of the town; in Vic, Antoni Ortega is producing a TV quiz for a local TV with students from the Adults School and the support from different organizations and institutions (HAAC, the University, the School of Art); in Castellbisbal, Carles Congost will do a project with an advertising format for a town

cdoc@diba.cat 33

sport centre; and in El Prat de Llobregat, Martí Anson will teach at a workshop about cinema and soundtracks at the specialized music equipment La Capsa.

All in all, with the confidence that, with proximity strategies (which relate art, education, the media, leisure, etc.) the Visual Arts Programme of the ODA will help to provide useful tools for the life and wellbeing of the citizens in our territorial demarcation. Sitesize. Joan Vila-Puig. Barcelona http://www.sitesize.net/

Joan Vila-Puig understands art creation as a cultural service of exchange. All his projects are aimed at a new interpretation of the landscape linked to the identity of a territory, to social practice and the landscape as a symbolic asset, while relating it to visual culture and new forms of representation. On his website it is possible to follow the struggle of the different projects to create pedagogic reactions in order to strengthen situations of manifest weakness of the social communities faced with new emerging territorial spaces. For Vila-Puig, today the artist goes to the territory and tries to weave a transversal and horizontal exchange of knowledge with society, in order to stop the deterritorialization of local imaginaries, the loss of identity and the disintegration of social relations. «Inventing the current landscape should also mean measuring the value of exchange with emotional values, collective references, the parallel creation of a symbolic capital rooted in accumulated identity, and this must be done from social practices». He expresses these ideas on his website, where his projects with the collaboration of Elvira Pujol on the culture of landscape can be followed.

R.C.C. Regió_metropolitana-CULTURAL_Comunitària is a research project on the forms of cultural participation in the definition of the metropolitan social space, which seeks to generate cultural contents in the metropolitan region, in order to re-establish the emotional reasons that make the landscape a collective construction and proposes methods to generate knowledge in order to establish community cultural values of cohesion. In this work, as in others, he starts from local dynamics and works in collaboration with public and private institutions. Another of the proposals is SIT Manresa, within the framework of Idenisitat, on the growth of the city of Manresa in relation to the definition of a metropolitan imaginary.

Poble 9: transformació local is a work in progress on the meaning of what is urban, citizenship and the tension between tradition and global modernization. Audio and video archives, testimonies of the people affected by town planning, and diverse actions, initiatives and responses.

Riuripoll.net is a website, which proposes an exercise of representation of territorial identity of the space of the river Ripoll on its route through the city of Sabadell. An evaluation of the public image of this place, constructed in parallel with its physical, environmental and social recovery. The first part of this collective work corresponds to what was prepared within the workshop T.A.O. riu Ripoll-Sabadell (oficina temporalment autònoma) undertaken at the Municipal School of Art ILLA in Sabadell, within Visions de futur 02 – interferències. Context local>espais reals.

cdoc@diba.cat 34

Raval: Gestió local, website and weblog of the Coordinadora del Raval on issues related to town development speculation and identity in the district of El Raval in Barcelona (http://www.coordinadoraraval.org/). The website has as its homepage the «Ravalblog»: an open meeting point for the community to exchange ideas and create debate. There are also sections dedicated to the district of El Raval in Barcelona in relation to speculation: calls for participation, links, press cuttings, town development plans... Suburbe. Xarxa Oberta de Cultura Suburbana. Barcelona http://suburbe.bitacoras.com

The Suburbe project is a proposal of the artistic group Estenent el Desastre, conducted by the Cultural Association Octubre, a non profit association. Suburbe, as its name shows, wants to claim the role the suburbs have as motors of the societies, and thus, tries to invigorate these zones so that they are included within the cultural benefits of the city. Suburbe is a network of authors, performers and communication professionals that works for the strengthening of cultural proposals of social intervention and transformation in those zones most socially excluded from the city.

They work for the defence of the social cultural divulgation making it reach all the city corners. They do this through artistic proposals of the society groups that have little access to the cultural circuit. These objectives are articulated in four projects: Suburbe Propagant (digital and paper publication), Reciclant (Archive of artistic experiences) and Transformant (a project laboratory).

With the same objectives Suburbe Propagant has been created, publication which through creative proposals centers on the main world problems. This publication is in digital format or also in «Mural d’actualitat» (Mural of current events) format, it is published quarterly and it is freely distributed in the Metropolitan area of Barcelona. The main premise that leads this publication is the right of everybody to have access to information in an independent way, accessible, documented, clear and contrasted. They want to contribute to the spreading of a civic conscience, social integration and people’s criticism, being these understood as the core of all democracy. They also want to contribute to popularize an art committed and responsible with the society as well as it contributes with the communication and interchange of experiences among different cultural and artistic groups. Within this framework, from October 2004 to February 2005, they placed in different Civic Centres and Libraries of Barcelona, Badalona, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, l´Hospitalet de Llobregat and Sant Adrià de Besòs some mural magazines – recovering the idea of those done during the Civil War – showing articles about current problems with works that also thought about these subjects.

Following the same line they have created de documentary archive Reciclant, which gathers cultural and artistic experiences and projects with a social character, giving more interest to those news which, being unofficial, get lost in the information circuit. The aim is to recycle all the cultural experiences which have been positive to the society’s progress.

cdoc@diba.cat 35

Transformant is a laboratory of interdisciplinary projects of artistic intervention in the public spaces. The main activity is the Biennial Art Show about the city, a joint exhibition which is developed in underground stations. Over eighty artists exhibited in a dozen underground stations of Barcelona, Badalona, Santa Coloma de Gramenet, l´Hospitalet de Llobregat and Sant Adrià del Besòs. The displayed works were chosen through and open call to everybody, the result of the election was a big representative show of several society sectors from poets, pedagogues, publicity agents… people from the Penitentiary Centre Quatre Camins or pupils from the Job Training Centre for Mentally Handicapped “Maregassa”. The show was structured in three thematic fields, a reflection of the main problems in the current world: La Ciutat Sota la Ciutat [The City Below the City] (the relationship between the centre and the outskirts and social injustice), La Gran Boca [The Big Mouth] (a meditation on the role of the media) and Naturalesa Captiva [Captive Nature] ( the relationship between man and nature). With this project four aims are sought: intervention in the public space, invigoration of the associative fabric, the diffusion of local authors as well as the creation of collaboration links with art schools and specialized educational centres, and the use of creative activity as a means of the social integration of people from groups with exclusion risks. Terrassa Acció Creativa. GOTAC. Terrassa http://www.gotac.org/

Terrassa Acció Creativa (TAC) is a Project promoted by Amicsa de les Arts i Joventuts Musicals [Friends of Arts and Musical Jouths] of Terrassa and developed by a highly heterogeneous group of people (GOTAC), but they happen to be strongly imbricated in the cultural and associative network of Terrassa, with the collaboration of Faktoria d´Arts and Les Pupil·les Gustatives, and sponsored by Terrassa Town Council.

Its immediate objective is to show year after year everything creative – and emergent, too – which is being done in this city and its environs within the cultural and artistic field. But they also have a deeper, longer-term objective, as they think that, apart from showing, it is about facilitating through empathies and synergies the development of interrelations and interactions between creative people and receptive ones (not just spectators, but active and critical receivers) in order to favour the regeneration of the values in the community coexistence and put a stop to the excess of expressive individualism, communicative superficiality and spectacular consumism which are threatening us and they do nothing else but impoverish both the society’s net and the people’s consciences that constitute it.

The project, in this year’s first edition 2006, has concentrated on the presentation of creations from different disciplines in an exhibition offered in different city spaces for ten days. The exhibition has included from plastic arts and photography creations to concerts of classical music, jazz and popular (electropop, Catalan song, hip hop, heavy), apart from interactive equipments, talks, round tables, theatre performances, dramatized poetry, graffitti creations (with the permission of the walls’ owners!), dj’s sessions, short films showing, videoartists improvisations, catwalk of alternative clothes design, etc.

cdoc@diba.cat 36

«There was in the artistic and cultural atmosphere of Terrassa the impression that an iniciative like this was necessary, a project that brings together creators of different disciplines and different generations, creators emerged from different districts, centres, organizations and institutions; of new creators with different professional levels or semi-professionals; which favours the creation of new multi or interdisciplinary projects and the materialization of a space for socialization to improve the collaboration and friendship among all this people and their possible active incorporation to the different existing organizations and groups or the creation of new ones.

Terrassa is much more full of artists than it seems, there are more than the ones we use to see in the press, in the galleries or the local stages, even many more than the ones doing workshops at the art, music and theatre schools…

We think it is highly positive for the artistic tendencies and anxieties that are often developed in the background to emerge, to have their own place and time for protagonism in the city and for the city. And it is greatly positive that these mentioned tendencies are not put down in the anonymity to which the demographic and urban growth often condemns us, and in the lifestyle that lets us few time for reflection and feeling, because it is absolutely necessary that both individualities and collectivity mature in interaction and reach respectively richer and balanced states in emotional and intellectual configuration and in density of social fabric».

For all these reasons, its promoters started Terrassa Acció Creativa, an open space to everyone in Terrassa who has anything to say in the creative field: poetry, painting, sculpture, music, theatre, graffitti, installation, photography… in any artistic discipline.

They want to place this exhibition out of any other framework, that is to say, it has to be an objective in itself, so that it can have its own identity, and also they want to keep the natural growth of a big meeting where young and not so young people, school artists and autodidacts, can make a name for themselves, where they can hold hands and swap experiences, a place that becomes a reference point where, however, everyone can have access. Trans-Art_06. Laboratori de Pràctiques artístiques. Fort Pienc (Barcelona) http://www.trans-artlaboratori.org/

Trans-Art_06. Laboratori de Pràctiques artístiques is an independent initiative conceived by the Young Alternative for Interculturality Association, with the direction of Lídia Dalmau and Cristian Añó. It is developed in a municipal context, the Equipments Island Fort Pienc (Fort Pienc neighbourhood,Barcelona) between September 2006 and February 2007. The project is carried out with the collaboration of Barcelona City Council/Eixample District.

The proposal involves the management, mediation and production of a series of artistic proposals that are closely linked to the context where they are realized.

The Fort Pienc Island gathers in the same architectonic space a series of public equipments (civic centre, library, town market, old people’s home, CEIP (primary and secondary school) and nursery). This constructive typology answers the

cdoc@diba.cat 37

political will of building in the urban tissue certain points of social intensity. The gathering of these spaces fosters the strengthening of the social network and the dynamization of the cultural fabric.

The project has the participation of six artists or collectives each one of them develops an artistic project in relation to one of the equipments that form this urban environment.

The kind of projects mean an intervention in the public sphere with the particularity that they relate the artist’s imagery with the equipment users´ imagery, and vice versa. Then a collective work is produced that helps establish an artistic practice with a strong bond to the place where Trans_art_06 is located. The proposal and discipline diversity (visual art, sound art, artistic education, collaborative art, animation films and architecture) contribute to the construction of a polyhedral look on the socio-cultural context in which it is intervening.

The first phase of the project (January-July 2006) consists of the consolidation of a work platform that includes the active agents of the context which is being worked in. This investigation and exploration process precedes the election of the artists who will be invited to participate.

The artists´ projects are redefined from the debate with the people responsible of the equipments and the directors of Trans_art_06. This is the way to syntonize the proposals and their methodologies with the features of the place and so the artists interventions are not away from the users of the participating centres and do not become a set of individual juxtaposed proposals.

In a second phase and for two months (September-October 2006) the artistic processes are done in each equipment. In parallel, in the exhibition hall of the Civic Centre, the Taller Obert (Open Workshop) is installed, a workshop-exhibition where there are six work spaces where artists can reelaborate the material which is being generated in the different projects. This space works as an open exhibition to the public where the creation process is shown and where meetings to share and exchange information about the evolution of the works are realized. In these sessions both artists and the public that is interested participate.

There is also at public disposal the documentation and investigations space EDiTA, which gathers information, bibliography and documents related with the context where Trans_art_06, artists, the management process… are located. The compilation of material is part of a research process which has as objective to put the project into context relating it to other proposals and practices with which it shares positions and ways of doing. It has been conceived as a modular and transportable artefact that makes easy the circulation of saved information and its itinerancy, so continuing its development beyond the end of Trans_art_06.

There is also an Initiation Course in contemporary art with the objective of facilitating to publics not initiated in the contemporary practices an approach to Trans_Art. This strategy of adding relations to the context is complemented by an editorial project. Three informative bulletins distributed in the neighbourhood where, in a graphic and entertaining way, the work process and the results are explained.

cdoc@diba.cat 38

The results of the six artistic projects are shown in a final exhibition (January-February 2007). At the same time there are some round table conferences in which the projects are presented and it is discussed the efficiency of this kind of projects, their virtues and defects. A critical analysis of the work process of Trans_Art_06 is done. Turisme Tàctic. Barcelona http://www.tacticaltourism.org/

Since the year 2001 the group Turisme Tàctic, formed by Mariano Maturana, Maite Ninou, Xavier Manubens and Consol Rodríguez, has made interventions in the public space using tourism as a communication medium. These interventions have been carried out under different formats – such as a tour on foot or by bus – combining the audiovisual media, radio, publication and performance. The group has also designed projects of interventions over the air with wireless technology. Turisme Tàctic sees tourism as a social practice with some accepted behaviour codes. We could say that there is a special relationship between the tourists-viewers and the guide who moves them or, rather, guides them through the unknown space and time. This relationship is similar to that which takes place between the audience and the performer. With the movement of the public and the performer through the «places of memory» they propose an intervention in the public space where the viewer does not look to the landscapes that exist, does not contemplate the monument or the place as it is now but rather must imagine what had been, must project, in short, must reconstruct history. The projects of the group have as one of their objectives the recovery of forgotten aspects of the history of a place, posing the re-production of the collective memory and history-identity. This research and documentation work is done through the interviews with witnesses or specialists, and the consultation of diverse archive materials such as publications, photographs and maps. This is expressed on their website, where you can follow the projects.

Love Story. Several love stories were the leading thread of an unusual tour through El Raval district in Barcelona. The tour brought together the real historical memory of the town development transformation of a district that is now defined by the coexistence of people from very different cultures and origins, and linked with the personal experience of the key characters of the plot. The action took place over two hours through singular places such as restaurants, grocer’s shops and other emblematic spaces in the district. The participants left in two groups with five minutes difference. Each participant chose the group to follow. The first group was guided by a man and the other by a woman. One told the version of the male lover and the other of the woman loved. At the end of the tour the participants could exchange information. Through a mobile phone, the images and the sound of the performance could be viewed and heard via Internet.

La Ruta de l'Anarquisme emerges from the need to rescue the forgotten and silenced facts that the anarchist movement has left in Barcelona, also known as «La Rosa de Foc». For this exercise of memory, the group Turisme Tàctic proposed a tour by bus including audiovisual documents, street performances, graphic

cdoc@diba.cat 39

documents and publications in which anarchists were given a voice to tell their story.

Vostè Està Aquí. This project by the Metro Lleuger de Can Cuiàs in Barcelona was based on constructing an auca (pictures with captions in rhyming couplets) explaining the history of the neighbourhood through maps and aerial photos. A chronological look at the maps is an immediate vision of the evolution of the human settlements in the area. The images of maps and the photos, along with giving us information on the location of the place where we are, become symbols to be interpreted from different perspectives and they especially provide us with an immediate idea about the town planning evolution. They are, in short, cartography of power and the control of the area. In this auca, however, the facts were seen from a perspective and scale different from the habitual, especially from the aerial photos that were incorporated into the series.

The project La Ruta de la Infàmia began in February 2005. It was based on the creation of a tour through the monuments and places of Barcelona, Catalonia and the rest of the world, which citizens could consider infamous. People could participate through a forum and include images, comments and places that they consider infamous. On 5th January 2006, this forum was attacked and its contents destroyed by a Spanish extreme right group. The group considered this project of public participation finished.

24 hores, una línia en la ciutat. POCSassociation. Barcelona http://www.pocs.org

This project organised by the group POCS is held for the fourth time. It is a project of ephemeral urban art, whose preliminary phase started in June 2006, takes place during 24 hours in several places in the centre of Barcelona on 27th and 28th October and will conclude with an exhibition and the publication of the results on 29th April 2007. This fourth year of the international games seeks to consolidate the network of international exchange that has been interwoven in previous years and has contributions from Manchester, Foggia, Medellín, Quilmes and Sao Paulo. The ephemeral urban art games will include 20 simultaneous networked artistic interventions in different venues of Barcelona and with the active participation of around 500 residents, along with promoters and different invited artists from abroad. The project consists of constructing a line of ephemeral urban art made up by the interventions of groups of artists that carry out interdisciplinary actions and with the relational component involved in the active participation of citizenship. This component of activism is undoubtedly one of the elements that defines the project and, by extension, the group POCS itself that focuses its work on artistic interventions that encourage the involvement of and the relation between artists and the public, resulting from the conception of the art that wants to explore its most committed side, both with reference to its aesthetic component and its potential for experimentation and social transformation. The project endeavours to contribute to the development of new spaces of reflection and experimentation and, above all, new forms of participation and appropriation of the urban space of Barcelona. To this end, a series of thematic

cdoc@diba.cat 40

lines have been defined: interpersonal relations, migrations and interculturality; regeneration and urban production; relations between society and nature. Xarxa de Museus locals. Oficina de Patrimoni Cultural. Diputació de Barcelona http://www.diba.cat/opc/

The cultural heritage and identity could be considered the part of culture nearest to the citizens, what comes to define us; the heritage marks so deeply that a district or a town ends up with the name of the monument it holds, the monastery of Sant Fruitós del Bages or the Sagrada Familia district of Barcelona are some examples of this fact.

Local museums are centres which preserve and divulge the heritage of a place, a town or a region and, as centres of protection and knowledge of the identities around them, they are best situated to be reference centres and emblems of the community they belong to, but not all the heritage and museum centres which hold the name of local museum do or can do the functions they are entrusted and especially the interaction with their community.

Local museums do all kinds of activities: from high research with the university to workshops addressed to schools. The Museum is a crucial equipment that works and has worked both to revitalize a district and to emphasize the national fact of a country, it is a cultural equipment among learning, discovery and pleasure, which is not limited to its walls but continues showing its works and monuments in the street and the city.

The Culture Area in Barcelona Provincial Council has been working with museums since 1989, first through the Cooperation Committee of Local Museums and since 2001 through the Xarxa de Museus Locals (XML). This network relies on 53 museums which belong to 42 Town Councils. The XML is a net of community equipments devoted to the cultural heritage, which gathers expertise, prestige and a high capillary infiltration in all the territories of the province of Barcelona. It is a town network, as it is formed nearly exclusively by municipal equipments, and it is a proximity network as it is devoted to the interaction with the community and the society to which they have to serve.

Among the numerous activities this network does we emphasize four for their social involvement and innovating transversality:

First, the exhibition titled Modificacions. Art i identitat en el cos humà (Modifications. Art and Identity in the Human Body) produced by the Museum of Sant Boi. It goes over the history of tattoos and piercings. With this show the Museum undertook a new expositive line addressed to a young public. Second, the Immigration Museum of Sant Adrià del Besòs and the Cultural Heritage Office produced the exhibition D´immigrants a ciutadans (From Immigrants to Citizens). One of the aims of this exhibition is to contrast the historical memory with the present. Putting in contact the individual experiences and memories with the rigorousness of the scientific analysis must allow us to know better which is our role as individuals, and that of our neighbours, in the building of a society in constant formation and change. Third, the exhibition Viatjant vides (Travelling through lives)

cdoc@diba.cat 41

visualizes very different feminine practices, stressing their qualities with regard to the social integration strategies and the cultural adaptation to the arrival place. It is about the foreign feminine migrations to Catalonia, adding some references to the feminine migrations from the rest of Spain. The commissioner of this exhibition is Remei Sipi, member of the Women Association E´Waiso Ipola and President of the Federation of Guinean Associations of Catalonia. It is produced by the History Museum of L´Hospitalet, the MhiC (Museum of the Immigration History of Catalonia), and the Cultural Heritage Area and the Equality and Citizenship Area of Barcelona Provincial Council.

Finally, the multidisciplinary proposal which the artist Empar Rosselló has designed and is developing through the year 2006 is a new cultural proposal whose aim is to revitalize the museum activity by means of an activity that includes theatre, dance, singing, music, video and at the same time seeks to bring the museum nearer to new audiences. Starting from the most singular elements of different museums which belong to the Network, Rosselló proposes a scenic exhibition different for each museum.

At present these exhibitions are itinerated by the Cultural Heritage Office of Barcelona Provincial Council through the Local Museums Network.

cdoc@diba.cat 42

Madrid

Basurama. Madrid http://www.basurama.org

Basurama is a group dedicated to research and cultural management since 2000, when it focussed its study and action area on production processes, the generation of waste that they involve and the creative possibilities emerging from this contemporary situation. Born in the School of Architecture in Madrid, it has evolved and adopted new forms since its origins. It seeks to study real and virtual phenomena inherent in the mass production of rubbish, bringing new visions that act as generators of thought and attitude. It detects fissures within these processes of generation and consumption that only arouse questions on the way of exploiting resources but also on the way of thinking, working and seeing reality. Among its projects is the Festival Basurama held for five years and which has evolved and changed over this time. The festival, which currently takes place in La Casa Encendida in Madrid, focuses on four categories: workshops, a season of lectures, a season of films and an exhibition.

This year the festival Basurama industrial Valdemoro (Madrid) has been held for the third time, an initiative of the Department of Culture and Tourism in Valdemoro Town Council. Basurama Industrial is an urban festival which seeks to rediscover the industrial area as a part of the city and as an area that generates waste. Several companies from the town cede waste from their manufacturing processes and for a week in May this material is used as if it were new, giving it a new life. The festival includes four activities: a Creative Jam Session, in which around thirty artists and designers work jointly with the citizens on this waste; as well as workshops, films, exhibitions and the Spermöla, free interchange of waste. All these activities make up during the whole weekend this industrial meeting in the centre of the city. Other projects by the group include Ya en tu kiosko, a contest called by Basurama, in March 2006, with the collaboration of the Diputación Foral de Guipúzcoa, consisting of inventing-designing-conceiving an insert-advert with non-advertising purposes. The Basurama B is an international project consisting of an experience of collaboration with different Belgian and Dutch groups undertaken with EU funds and which allowed the holding of the festival in Brussels. The activities included workshops, lectures, concerts and an exhibition. Spermöla!, an exchange between individuals of useful objects, and a workshop of exchange and recycling of furniture in order to promote neighbourhood activity and the exploitation of used objects, was organised in October 2004. Basurama reproduced the forum of used objects or sperrmüll organised in cities of some European countries, adapting it to the characteristics of Madrid, in the building of trade union UGT Fundación Progreso y Cultura. Also in 2004 it contributed with the workshop Me bajo a la calle!, organised by the Laboratorio Urbano with the conference of [R]ACTIVA at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. The workshop consisted of a series of activities

cdoc@diba.cat 43

aimed at the promotion of the relationship of the neighbours and especially children with their closest urban environment. Bordergames. La Fiambrera Obrera. Lavapiés (Madrid) http://www.sindominio.net/fiambrera/bordergames/index.htm

The process of construction for the videogame Bordergames is framed within the methodological research-action-participation proposal by the group La Fiambrera Obrera in the Madrid district of Lavapiés. But the initiative started in April 2000 when La Fiambrera Obrera went to the California School of Arts (CALARTS) and the Museum of Contemporary Art of California (MOCA) as invited artist. «The biggest impact was the comment by some of the students about our work, praising its political precision although they considered it impossible in the context of Los Angeles, where, according to them, there are no social movements». The group left CALARTS and in the centre of the Californian city contacted Homis Unidos, an organization of youth gangs, mainly Latin American (Mexicans, Salvadorians, Chicanos) «bound from a young age to gang warfare» and «who were organizing to stop killing each other». It was said that the police had arrested the «leaders» of this organization and «threatened to deport them». When the group suggested «doing something together with all this, the youths said that what they wanted was to make a videogame where they could define the rules». This meeting was, then, the germ of Bordergames Lavapiés. Bordergames is conceived as a work environment, a platform at the disposal of young Maghrebians so that, in the workshops held, they can decide which stories they want to tell, what they want to complain about and what aspects of their lives they want future players to experience. Bordergames seeks participation in the process of construction of the videogame by the same people who experience the reality in which they intervene and that they see this process as their own, both in terms of the production and the later use of this tool. Bordergames confronts the multiple problems in which immigrant adolescents who live in the neighbourhoods of the «First World» big cities are immersed. These problems are approached from their origins, consequences and possible alternatives.

The project’s main objective is the construction of a tool, in videogame format, that allows the youths to develop expressive and organizational autonomy to represent themselves and depict the present of their community, in an environment in which their cultural traditions mix with the cultural context in which they currently live. In its turn, Bordergames works as an instrument of political, social and cultural coordination and communication to generate and share useful information through the game. In 2006, Bordergames has had two contextual editions in the urban environments of Figueres and Berlin.

La Fiambrera Obrera http://www.sindominio.net/fiambrera has been and is part of neighbourhood and political networks such as Red de Lavapiés in Madrid or La Alameda Neighbourhood Assembly in Seville. It has collaborated with organizations such as Amnesty International, Molotov or Ninguna Persona es Ilegal jointly preparing campaigns and materials.

cdoc@diba.cat 44

It is co-responsible for the publication of some books on critical art and direct action such as Manual de la Ciberguerrilla, Ed. Virus, Barcelona, 2004; Modos de Hacer: Arte político, esfera pública y acción directa, Ed. Universidad de Salamanca, 2001; or Manual de la Guerrilla de la comunicación, Ed. Virus, Barcelona, 2000. Members of La Fiambrera have been invited by some academic institutions to explain and discuss their work, among them Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Klartext Konreferenze Berlin) in January 2005; NYU (New York University Performing Arts-Instituto Juan Carlos I) in 2004; and the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Visual Arts Dpt.), 2001. Moreover, La Fiambrera has been commissioned with some projects such as Las Agencias, MACBA, Barcelona, 2001; or the exhibition Ninguna Persona es Ilegal, La Casa Encendida, Madrid, 2002.

Capital Confort. Colectivo El Perro. Alcorcón http://www.capitalconfort.org

The project Capital Confort is an initiative of the group El Perro which has been developed since 1997 in Alcorcón (Madrid). An experience that, based on art, seeks to effect socio-cultural aspects acting on the public space of the street. Based on the work developed by different invited artists, urban representation strategies are prepared based on cultural approaches and discourses which are made up in the public space. Beyond the aesthetic occupation of the urban space, the aim is to question the use of this space as a channel of communication, whether from a critical or leisure perspective, but always considering the complexity of the context of the city and the activities developed. The street is strengthened as an ambit of discussion and confrontation that makes the existence of opposed experiences possible. A space where it is possible to stage conflict and where contemporary art finds a possible space and directly competes with the multiplicity of messages which come together in it. Capital Confort supports the proposals that rethink the traditional notion of street art and questions the fact of conceiving the city in terms of the economic profitability of the space, the representation of power or the promotion of entertainment.

The group El Perro (http://elperro.info), formed by the artists Ramón Mateos, Iván López and Pablo España, works on its own artistic proposals and also organizes group exhibitions and projects of public art and publishing. Since 1994 it has organized the group exhibitions Enseña tus heridas (1994) and El mal de la actividad (1996) in an obsolete warehouse in Atocha railway station; and La montaña viaja (1997) on the streets in the centre of Madrid. It has collaborated with the alternative venue Garage Pemasa on the group exhibitions La voladora del Maine (1998) and Qué hago Yo Aquí (1999). It formed part of the curators of MAD 03-Arte Público. Together with Aitor Méndez it publishes the magazine Qué hago yo aquí. In 2004, within The Democracy Shop, it set up the brand “Democracia”, a logo that could be painted on walls, printed on T-shirts and inserted on skateboards. This logo represents the soldier Lynddie England torturing one of the prisoners in the Abu Graib Iraqi prison. In January 2006, it participated with Security on Site in Helsinki, in one of the main artistic events in northern Europe: ARTS 06, held at Kiasma Museum.

cdoc@diba.cat 45

Precarias a la Deriva. Madrid http://www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm

Precarias a la Deriva is one of the most enlightening experiences of militant research from recent years. A painstaking subjective cartography of the trends followed by the metropolitan circuits of precariousness has been drawn. Precarias a la Deriva opens a collective means of investigation in the search for new complicities and cooperation and knowledge strategies. The collective research process embraces questionnaires of personal lives, and of others, creating a rich fabric of knowledge, critical skills and alliances between different types of precariousness.

Based on a feminist analysis and the transformations experienced in the metropolises, Precarias a la Deriva has left behind any reduction of precariousness to an exclusive labour issue reflecting on the intersection between social stratifications (class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and identity, training, etc.) and the new frontiers of the precariousness of existence. They have also permanently searched common names, links and strategies. They have used the following «basic tools»: drift, as a device of disconnection between the crazy and daily space-time of global mobilisation and rediscovery, with new eyes, the common eyes of the circuits of precariousness; the studio as a place to share ideas and explore issues more deeply; and the assemblies, as a space for self-analysis, detection of problems and formulation of some work and action hypotheses. Their numerous talks and public presentations, which are a reference point for discussion for all the European realities of movement, are a goal for first hand knowledge of the precariousness of existence. After an early stage of research, a DVD and a book – A la deriva por los circuitos de la precariedad femenina (Madrid, Traficantes de Sueños, 2004) –and a new experiment – Todasacien. Agencia de Asuntos Precarios – have been produced. The latter is a physical space that allows a combination of consultancies, workshops and meetings between women to invent mechanisms of grassroots mutuality and development of the precarious instinct that articulate a collective response faced with precariousness. In the context of precariousness of existence and the exploitation of «feminine qualities» for the production of profits, culture – the creation of the «imaginary» – has become a strategic device. According to Marta Malo de Molina, a member of the group who defines the artist/creator as someone capable of synthesising ideas that exist and surround him/her, in the field of culture it is possible to observe the effect of precariousness both in the contractual conditions of cultural workers and in the fact that the recognition and remuneration is always individual although any creative event always depends on a «collective magma». And what is paradoxical is that, when exclusively enhancing the compensation of the individual authorship, a competence emerges that ends by reducing this collective magma. For this reason, Marta Malo de Molina stresses the need to conceive strategies and tools that foster a collective cultural production.

cdoc@diba.cat 46

Valencia

Cabanyal Portes Obertes. Plataforma Salvem El Cabanyal. València http://www.cabanyal.com/

The association Salvem El Cabanyal is made up of citizens who work to counter and put a brake on the town development plan that endangers the historical identity of El Cabanyal district in Valencia. This is a maritime district which still conserves the reticular urban system derived from the barraques, the old dwellings typical of the area. One of the initiatives of this association led to the project Cabanyal Portes Obertes, where the artists are invited to carry out their proposals on the streets of the district or in the homes of the residents. In this way, they have managed to enhance and publicise the demands formulated by the Association. The experience developed by the association Salvem el Cabanyal exemplifies the hybrid component where concepts such as urban participation-cultural representation and cultural participation-urban representation fuse.

Portes Obertes is a project that emerged from the group of artists who live and have their studios in El Cabanyal, as a contribution to the fight of the association from the field of art, and with some clearly defined objectives: to provide a voice for the problems of the district encouraging the arrival of the highest number of people possible, generating an image capable of showing the true complexity and gravity of this situation and which counteracts the attempts of the local authorities to hush it up, and the exploitation of the media by the promoters of the Plan. In the second place, the initiative sought to have an effect on the residents of the district encouraging their participation, strengthening their feelings of identity and generating a certain pride in being from El Cabanyal. The proposal was very well received by all the residents who formed part of the association and, in fact, has only been possible thanks to their involvement in the project. Portes Obertes has had a different structure every year, but with the common denominator that the works are shown in the homes of the residents, who for three weekends have the doors of their houses open to the public. All the artists who wished to express their solidarity with the situation of the district – between 150 and 200 artists per year – participated with personal works that did not always deal with the problematic of El Cabanyal but, in any case, showed their commitment and support. In 2005, in its eighth and last holding, a set of artists were asked to contribute with a specific work about El Cabanyal, whether about town planning and social issues or about the houses themselves as a formal element of culture or identity. Sixteen houses participated linked by a route which crossed the heart of the district inviting the public to get to know its streets and enter some houses which are models of the popular Art Nouveau architecture characteristic of this area of the Mediterranean, which was considered of cultural interest by the Government of Valencia.

cdoc@diba.cat 47

Virtual spaces

Els hacklabs o laboratoris de hackers http://hacklabs.org

Hacklabs or hacker laboratories have been the leading experience of alternative social technology in Spain since the year 2000. 22 have been created in such different places as Barcelona, Terrassa, Bilbao, Alicante, Tenerife, Seville, Minorca, Saragossa or Vilanova i la Geltrú. Their peculiarity is that they mix up technology with the political and social in physical and virtual spaces, as a place of action and meeting. Hacklabs are meeting points for getting in touch and sharing knowledge, debating the social usage of technology and protesting against the private appropriation of communication instruments. Their objective is to undertake projects aimed at free software, networks, security, operating systems and also to maintain a permanent debate and a constructive criticism on the social and political side of technology. Neuralgic centres of a large part of hacktivism, their physical spaces are social centres, rented or squatted, and virtual spaces: mailings, chats, websites or wikis. All of them are self-managed, and therefore decisions are taken in assemblies. Hacklabs are well-integrated into the social centres, acting as technical and media support for their groups. A key element is self-sufficiency. To maintain this capacity, hacklabs are self-funded with the sale of T-shirts, distributions of free software, sales of refreshments, parties and individual contributions by each of the members of the project. Often municipal subsidies to associations are refused as this could mean a lack of operational independence. With the perspective of providing support to the free circulation and distribution of knowledge, hacklabs offer workshops and courses related to the wide range offered by new technologies: networks, programs, graphic design, etc; all of them, of course, use free systems. Promoting the use of free software is an non-negotiable objective of hacklabs. Some of their actions take place outdoors, such as Hacking The Streets, which consists of taking for one day computers and free programs to the neighbourhood square and showing them to the neighbours; a party is organised as well as chats, distribution of free software, showing its use in the creation of wireless citizen networks… It is a good opportunity for communication and interrelation for hacklabists and neighbours. It is also worth mentioning the inter-hacklab campaign Compartir es Bueno, with actions in public places, with the distribution of CDs with free music or the downloading of songs from P2P networks. As groups of people interested in computing, hacklabs have their origin in the meetings of computer enthusiasts in the 1980s, around a label of software or a BBS (intranet services). In the 1990s, they evolved towards the closed groups of hackers and the open groups of Linux users. What differentiates hacklabs is their social character and the action in a physical space, something they share with

cdoc@diba.cat 48

citizen wireless networks. Both emerged with the new century. But their direct influence is the Italian hacklabs. The travelling Hackmeetings promoted them, as they established the tradition of creating a new hacklab where a hackmeeting had been held, to exploit the technical resources generated and the people summoned. When, in 2000, hackmeetings started being held in Spain with them came the tradition of hacklabs. During the Leioa Hackmeeting held in Bilbao, in 2001, the first Spanish hacklab was presented: the Kernel Panic, in Barcelona. Later, the WH20O1 (better known as Cielito lindo) was born in the district of Lavapiés in Madrid, the Metabolikk BioHacklab in Bilbao, the Downgrade in Saragossa and the Cuca Albina in Alicante. At present, all of them are the most outstanding hacklabs.

Hackmeeting de Leioa (http://www.sindominio.net/hmleioa01/) Kernel Panic http://www.sindominio.net/kernelpanic/portada.html. WH2001 http://wh2001.sindominio.net/ Metabolik http://wh2001.sindominio.net/ Downgrade http://lacucalbina.org/ Cuca Albina http://downgrade.hacklabs.org/

cdoc@diba.cat 49

Europe

Arts Ambassadors Unit. Manchester. England http://www.aam.org.uk

The Arts Ambassadors Unit (AAU) was a three-year project that sought to develop audiences for creative events from the African, Caribbean, South Asian and Chinese communities of Greater Manchester and to build audiences generally for work produced by artists and cultural practitioners from these communities. At the start of the project in 1998, research showed there was a very low take-up of mainstream provision by Black, Asian and Chinese audiences.

The work of the AAU was about informing wider audience development practices and «joining-up» with other strategies and programmes, so that it ceased to be seen as the «Black initiative» within Arts About Manchester (AAM) and took its place as part of their core programme of audience development activity.

The AAU made a significant difference to the development of Black audiences and audiences for Black work. The project was especially successful in reaching young people and generated goodwill and credibility with key partners. The work of the unit created a detailed body of knowledge, insight and expertise about how to target and reach communities.

There is now a much improved partnership infrastructure and an explosion of provision for arts and young Black people at key venues. New resources, both knowledge-based and practical, are now available to support venues and partners, as is a network of trained workers to support outreach and marketing programmes.

AAM has created a new part-time post of cultural diversity project manager, which has so far focused on working with large-scale providers and building more detailed audience information that moves beyond analysing Black and Asian audiences as a homogeneous group. Such research has been undertaken by ambassadors and data collectors at supported events.

AAM is now focusing on working with mainstream venues to use the learning from AAU in planning, programming and marketing, and to establish structures for communicating with attender panels and user advisory groups.

Arts Council England, North West has also allocated funding from the Arts Council’s New Audiences programme towards definition of the legacy for AAU in Greater Manchester and has tested the transferability and sustainability of ambassador activity in Liverpool, Merseyside and East Lancashire.

cdoc@diba.cat 50

Bij’ de Vieze Gasten (The Dirty Men). Gant. Belgium http://www.deviezegasten.org/

This collective works in the social and artistic fields in different dynamization projects in the Porte de Bruges neighbourhood and has support from Gant’s Town Council. This neighbourhood is one of the oldest of the city and nowadays it is characterized by its social and town-planning problems – low rent levels, high immigration rates, etc – but at the same time its cultural vitality stands out.

The Vieze Gasten, having as operating base a small theatre – Theaterbom -, carry out activities with the objective of encouraging the population’s active participation, fostering creative processes through artistic projects in the neighbourhood. Their approach and work logic is compared to the “community arts” approach, that is to say, considering socio-artistic work as an intervention and social transformation vehicle. Among their projects there are theatre, music and photography workshops and the creation of a brass band «De propere Fanfare Van De Vieze Gasten» with numerous members from both sexes and different origins and social status. They meet, rehearse, get to know each other and act everywhere… To participate they start from the artistic abilities and vocation of the person, but not from his/her problems [ that is, putting first the fact that we are in neighbourhoods (and people) with projects, rather than neighbourhoods (and people) with problems].

Sometimes some famous artists, actors or musicians visit and work in these workshops to promote and appraise the participants. In the brass band case, as with the others, it is intended to have a transversal relationship with all the neighbourhood, they must go out and act, not shut themselves away. The brass band works as an assembly, it is not professional. The instructors are people employed by the neighbourhood’s managing company, which receives municipal subsidies. Participation does not mean the users have to pay a membership fee. Chocolate Factory. London. England http://www.thechocolatefactoryartists.co.uk/

The Chocolate Factory Cultural Quarter in Wood Green, North London, opened in 1997. The catalyst for this development was the Haringey Arts Council (HAC) which leases and manages 5,000 square metres of floor space at the Chocolate Factory, a former Bassetts sweet factory, to provide studios for over 120 local artists, film/video, music, theatre, photography, printing and crafts-based businesses and training and seminar spaces. The refurbishment began in 1997 and has created 75 artist studios, sculpture studios. One floor has been converted to become North London's largest photographic studios, offering a range of services and training programmes. Another floor is soon to become a 'Learning and Enterprise Centre', also housing HAC's sound-recording studios. The site is shared with other organisations and businesses that have created rehearsal studios, theatre scenery construction and design workshops. A cafe/restaurant has now opened (to ‘rave reviews’). The Chocolate Factory is a key centre of production for the creative industries in North London. The Factory forms the heart of The Wood Green Cultural Quarter, an SRB-funded project. Flagship projects within this quarter include Quicksilver Gallery, which houses Middlesex University's School of Fine Art; Mountview Theatre School, which leases premises for its theatre training

cdoc@diba.cat 51

programmes; Scanlan Studios (animation) and 'The Decorium', a high quality banqueting suite. Cittadellarte. Biella. Italiy http://www.cittadellarte.it/

Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto was founded in 1998 as the physical embodiment of the Progetto Arte Manifesto (1994) with which the artist Michelangelo Pistoletto proposed a new role for the artist: the role of creating an interaction between all the diverse spheres of human activity that form the society.

Cittadellarte is a huge laboratory where creativity acts as the crossing point between the diverse cultural, economical and productive sectors. It is a massive generator of energy, and a place for rethinking things, for sharing views, for studying and for doing research.

The name Cittadellarte incorporates two meanings — that of a citadel, namely a protected and defended area where artistic projects can be nurtured and developed, and that of a city, which suggests openness and complex interrelations with the world.

The activities of Cittadellarte are based on a vision of «creative involvement», where art interacts directly with all dimensions of the social system — from economics to politics, from science to production, from education to behaviour — in order to achieve a responsible transformation in human civilisation.

To achieve its mission — to inspire people towards responsible change in society through ideas and creative projects — Cittadellarte has chosen a systematic approach, where all activities are focused on five basic objectives, and structured through a range of offices, which are called «Uffizi», and carefully chosen model projects.

The Uffizi are the operational nuclei of the organisation and each one of them conducts its own activities in a specific area of our social system and aims at creating important signals that can inspire people towards a responsible change in society. The currently active offices are devoted to art, communication, economics, education, nutrition, politics, production, spirituality and work.

The Fondazione Pistoletto is supported by the Piedmont Region and the Municipality of Biella, and is located in a disused textile mill by the river Cervo in Biella. ECObox. (La Chapelle) Paris. France http://www.iscra.fr/page_387.php

The project ECObox forms part of a proposal of eco urbanity and is presented as an alternative to the usual procedures of urban intervention. Its objective is the temporary occupation of uninhabited or disused pieces of land in order to arrange shared gardens and install micro-facilities of proximity (for example, a mobile cooker which allows you to make community meals and in different places when activities in the neighbourhood are organized). ECObox currently occupies uninhabited «industrial» land, the Pajol warehouse, old workshops of the SNCF. In this place the residents of the neighbourhood have been gradually creating micro-gardens from wooden pallets. The «neighbour-gardeners» have free access during

cdoc@diba.cat 52

the week to their plot. The place is open to all on Saturday afternoons. In this way, ECObox develops at the level of proximity – La Chapelle neighbourhood, in district 18 in Paris – but also at the scale of the Parisian metropolis given that regularly, on Saturdays, artistic activities and civic debates are organized in the Pajol warehouse which contribute to putting an end to the isolation of life in the neighbourhood.

ECObox emerged in 2001 on the initiative of a group of architect-teachers and their students and since then has acted in the neighbourhood of La Chapelle, almost an urban island placed between the occupied lands of the railway stations Gare du Nord and Gare de l’Est. The neighbourhood is densely populated, the buildings are of mediocre quality and public facilities and spaces are few. «The neighbourhood of La Chapelle was inhabited until the eighties by a population composed mainly of railway workers, which gave it a certain cohesion and identity. These days, the neighbourhood is a mixture of people of heterogeneous cultures that have no occasion to enter into dialogue». Fablevision. Glasgow. Escocia. Scotland http://www.fablevision.org/

Fablevision was founded in 1984 in Glasgow, Scotland. The company has always placed the arts, people and learning at its core of its work. Much of the work of the company has been in communities across Scotland but we have also delivered projects in Ireland and South Africa.

The artistic mission of the company is to: Work creatively with people in Scotland and Internationally to invent and deliver projects which allow communities to tell and re-tell their stories using a variety of different art-forms.

«All of our work is underpinned by a cultural planning methodology. Cultural planning is a cross-sectoral approach to sustainable community/city/rural development which puts people and culture at its core. Cultural planning is a process developed through a series of socially engaged creative projects. Cultural planning reaches right to the grass roots. It flourishes if supported by policies and resources from the top down. Cultural plans are developed at the grass roots and supported at local and national level by existing public, private and voluntary sector bodies in strategic partnerships».

Over the years many new models of practice have grown from Fablevision projects. Nineteen ninety, Glasgow City of Culture year was a watershed year for Fablevision. Projects like Birds of Paradise and Ruchazie! Ruchazie! set the pattern for the future development of the company as well as those spin-off projects, which were amongst the most sustainable long term legacies of that historic year.

In 1999 Fablevision worked in partnership with the people of Royston to save the Townhead Spire one of the last remaining features of their much changed community. A project was created called the Royston Road project. The Royston Road project is an example of what can be achieved when artists work with people alongside a cross section of other agencies and organisations.

Whilst continuing to produce ground breaking, cutting edge projects which impact on education, health, social inclusion, regeneration, interculturalism and the built environment, Fablevision is dedicated to partnership working. Over the last three

cdoc@diba.cat 53

years Fablevision has delivered one of the most innovative and exciting arts programmes in Scotland entitled Creative Communities. Creative Communities was based on cross sector partnerships. People have played the biggest part gaining confidence, community cohesion and a sense of achievement through involvement in these wide-ranging and innovative Fablevision projects.

London Symphony Orchestra St Luke´s. London. Great Britain

http://www.lso.co.uk/lsostlukes/

LSO St Luke´s is a reconverted XVII century church, situated at 10 minutes from the Barbican Centre in the city of London. For forty years it was ruined, desecrated and abandoned in 1959 due to structural problems.

The London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) raised more than 17 million pounds for the complete restoration of the church, which since 2003 has been the LDO Discovery headquarters, a pioneering programme of education and musical access addressed to the community residing around the church. The Centre includes the acclaimed Jerwood Hall, the Clore Gamelan Room, and two Clore Rooms for workshops and a Discovery Technology Room.

LSO St Luke’s is the first musical education centre for orchestras which has opened in the United Kingdom, and LSO Discovery is the largest education programme for this kind of orchestras. This programme wants to attract the diverse public that lives near the LSO St Luke’s centre, offering regular musical events and long term activities for the inhabitants of Hackney and Islington districts, initiatives that can afterwards result in stimulating projects addressed to a wider community, to LSO musicians and to world famous artists. The centre is also a successful setting which is acquiring a great world prestige in the classical chamber music field, but it also presents many contemporary and experimental music performances, and all kinds of music. This way LSO St Luke’s is developing links with a whole spectrum of audiences, many of which otherwise would not have a direct or indirect relationship with the London Symphony Orchestra.

LSO St Luke’s Discovery works as an independent business from the London Symphony Orchestra. LSO St Luke’s has achieved in a very short time a great success as a business. The organization of the LSO has had to overcome strong difficulties in the development of LSO St Luke’s management model and still there are big challenges that will hinder the long term operation model of the centre. Maisons Folies. Région Nord-Pas de Calais. France, Belgium Maison Folie de Roubaix: la Condition Publique http://www.laconditionpublique.com

This region in the North of France has suffered a strong crisis in its traditional industry and a not less painful rationalization which has characterized by a strong introduction of industries related to equipments and new technologies and to service development. Moreover, with the inauguration of the English Channel Eurotunnel, the region and its capital Lille have become a privileged confluence space for the great European communication axis.

cdoc@diba.cat 54

Lille has been one of the referents at a national and international level in the establishment of resolute policies of citizenship participation, and has also been a referent regarding local cultural policies. The city hosted the European Cultural Capitality in 2004 (Lille 2004), a summons which promoted and introduced a new concept of proximity cultural equipment as the Maisons Folies are.

These equipments were planned and projected as the big intervention that would grant the continuity of work and investment done during Lille 2004.

The Maisons Folies are the cultural equipments for future years and are considered as emblematic symbols of a new art of living, like the modern symbols of an innovating cultural project. The Maisons Folies were created not with the objective of being an event that resulted in a succession of big cultural meetings and ceremonies concentrated in the big cultural settings of Lille, but to leave a deep legacy with a strong social and territorial influence1. In this sense it must be observed that 12 Maisons Folies were created in total scattered in different municipalities of the Nord-Pas de Calais region and also in some municipalities of the neighbouring Flanders.

The Maisons Folies can be defined as centres of proximity art, as they have as defining central idea the artistic work but with a clear tendency to dialogue with the territory where the facilities are set. Although they are interdisciplinary artistic centres, they are also oriented to certain thematic specializations.

Most of these equipments are located in old industrials spaces which have been restored and adapted to the new cultural uses. These spaces take in programme plannings of different artistic genres – music, theatre, visual arts, etc – but no only as diffusion spaces but also as production of proposals. This propitiates that all through the production process artists are in contact with people and collectives of the territory, which can be involved in the gestation process and until the formal presentation. This dimension of the dialogue between artists and public can be reinforced by the fact that the Maisons Folies have also fitted spaces for the artists to reside.

The projects then stress on this work methodology which pretends that the artist-public relationship is not limited to the moment of presentation, show or exhibition of a work, but there must be an exchange during the gestation process, and on the other hand the receiving public can also be protagonist of the creative process. And this is, in short, one of the pillars of the socio-artistic work in the community arts approach.

The Maisons Folies form a network with the following equipments: Maison folie de Maubeuge, Maison folie de Wazemmes, Maison folie de Villeneuve-d'Ascq, Maison folie de Mons-en-Barœul, Maison Folie de Moulins, Maison Folie de Tourcoing, Maison Folie de Roubaix: la Condition Publique, Maison Folie de Lambersart: Le Colysée, Maison folie d'Arras and Maison Folie de Courtrai, all of these in France. In

1 The culture budget of Lille last year was 25% of the whole municipal budget, a fact that shows the huge effort for the city that has meant the spreading of these equipments, partly responsible for these figures.

cdoc@diba.cat 55

turn we can find in Belgium the Maison Folie de Mons, Les Arbalestriers, Maison folie de Courtrai: L’Ile Buda, Maison Folie de Tournai: Choiseul.

The Maison Folie of Roubaix «La Condition Publique» is one of the biggest and can be considered as the most representative equipment of this network in a municipality of the Lille metropolitan periphery, with a certainly complex sociodemographic profile.

MIME. Migrating Memories . Malmö. Sweden http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/mime/

Europe has always been a place of migration as wars, famines and imperial legacies have displaced people and it is currently a very live issue. A collaboration between organisations in Malmö (Sweden), Nottingham (England), and Tampere (Finland) used a mixed media approach to engage young immigrants in the significance of memories, both their own and others. The project, Migrating Memories (MIME) was funded by the Culture 2000 programme. Migrating Memories was carried out from November 2000 till October 2001 with Malmö Museer as project coordinator and a total budget of 245 000 EUR.

A travelling exhibition engaged citizens in the documentation of European migration history, complete with photos, objects and sounds, whilst the internet forum and exhibition provided added opportunities to share and discuss personal stories, views and experiences. The stories of the children and their elders were presented via an interactive multilingual and open access website during the summer of 2001. The participants chose a container which they then filled with images and thoughts that related to their experiences and memories of moving from one place to another. Finally, a closing two-day seminar presenting speakers and workshops on the methods and importance of incorporating migration memory and cultural heritage and identity in museums was held in Malmö in September 2001.

Theater Zuidplein. Rotterdam. Netherlands http://www.theaterzuidplein.nl/

Theater Zuidplein in Rotterdam is located in the southern part of the city and provides two venues.The theatre presents over 300 different shows per season (September to June).

In 1998 the City Council of Rotterdam decided to appoint Theater Zuidplein as the main venue for cultural diversity. There seemed to be a real need for a venue like this since within a few years more than half of the Rotterdam population will be of a non-Dutch origin. In accordance with this shift in attention, Theater Zuidplein has since focused mainly on the principal ethnic populations in the city: people from Turkish, Moroccan, Surinam, Antillean and Cape Verdian cultural backgrounds.

Theater Zuidplein is both a presenting and a producing stage. At present, about 30% of the programming is directed towards the populations mentioned above. As a producing stage, the theatre supports both young and more advanced artists and organizes and produces yearly festivals, all revolving around the theme of cultural diversity.

cdoc@diba.cat 56

When the City Council decided, to adapt Theater Zuidplein's profile and to appoint a new managing director with the assignment to focus on cultural diversity, the theatre faced three problems.

First of all, neither the staff present nor the new management had sufficient knowledge of the cultural backgrounds of the largest population groups to enable them to compile a suitable theatre programme. Secondly, there was (and is) an insufficient availability of theatre companies and impresarios to allow for sufficiently broad programming. This prompted the theatre to start making its own productions and co-productions. Thirdly, of course, there was the question of how to draw the new target groups to the theatre.

These three problems - or rather: challenges – were approached as an integral whole, and this has led to a complete transformation of the theatre from a classic supply-centred theatre to a demand-centred theatre. This means that the audience's interest determines the programme offered. In other words, the programme is not based on the programmer's personal selection from the annual offer of companies and impresarios, but on public demand. To this end two programme committees were installed in the spring of 1999, one for youngsters and one for adults.

Programme committee. At present there is only one committee which comprises ten persons, seeking to reflect as well as possible the makeup of the population. The aim is to achieve a proportionate representation in terms of age, gender, social and cultural background.

Each programme committee member has daily access to the theatre to study the productions on offer, to examine the programmes of other theatres or to sign up for invitations to their premières.

The committee members are all volunteers. Their only recompense is free entry to theatre shows hosted in Theater Zuidplein as well as in other theatres.

The programme committee meets at least once a month and more frequently when the programme is being compiled. At these meetings the managing director and/or a staff-member of the marketing department are present to represent the theatre. The meetings are primarily devoted to discussing the productions on offer for the upcoming season. The committee examines the entire range on offer and debates which productions are appropriate to the theatre's programme..There is interest, not only in what is offered by impresarios and theatre companies, but also in what is not on offer, especially in view of the various cultural minorities. This raises the question whether more suitable productions are available elsewhere, for example in neighbouring countries or elsewhere in Europe, or whether they should be brought in from the various countries of origin. Naturally there are also the financial implications to consider.

Whenever a production is not available elsewhere, or if contracting it would pose too much of a financial risk, the question is raised whether the theatre's own production facilities could create a suitable production or co-production.

Fully independent:The committee is free to make its own selection of what the market offers and to suggest productions available from abroad. Only if and when

cdoc@diba.cat 57

asked will the managing director and/or marketing representative offer their comments. A meeting is held to decide upon a second, definite selection. It is the managing director's task to make the arrangements with the impresarios and companies concerning dates and financial conditions, but he explicitly refrains from interfering with the selection made by the committee. It is the public that does the programming. However, being formally accountable to the fund-providing municipal council, the managing director does retain final responsibility, both financially and artistically.

Working with the committee is a labour-intensive process, by far more demanding than having one single programmer at the wheel. The managing director of course also studies all that is on offer, not just for his own knowledge but also to help answer questions that the committee may have. This applies particularly to productions offered by Dutch impresarios and companies. In terms of the international market the managing director should be especially well informed as to what is being offered or produced. Working with volunteers invariably means an intensive process of interaction and support, requiring building and maintaining contact with the individual committee members outside of the meetings, as well as guiding the group dynamics.

All in all, the conclusion is that the transformation into a demand-centred theatre, with the important role assigned to the committee, is a successful experiment. The quality of the programme is easily comparable to the selection made by any programmer formerly appointed by the theatre. A matter of consideration is the degree to which the individual committee members represent and communicate with a local ethnic community. Members that do maintain an active relation to a community have proven - in close cooperation with the theatre's marketing department - to be a vital means of stimulating local interest. Zinneke Parade. Brussels. Belgium http://www.zinneke.org/

The Zinneke Parade emerged on the occasion of the choice of Brussels as European Capital of Culture 2000 and constitutes its continuation and prolongation. Its success and the enthusiasm it has prompted has given it autonomy and has made it possible to repeat it ever since. Now a biannual event, it forms part of the landscape of Brussels and is creating a new cultural, urban and popular space.

It falls within the policies of revitalization of the city undertaken by the Brussels-Capital Region. Thanks to its implementation in the neighbourhoods and the towns, with the cultural centres, centres of expression and creativity, theatres, youth centres, associations, schools, neighbourhood associations, social centres, etc., it serves to affirm the creative dynamic of the inhabitants of Brussels and of its partners in a long-term project. The Parade is the main event but is no more than the result of this process that combines contemporary artistic creation and the creativity of the inhabitants.

A project of artistic and social experimentation, the Zinnekes have put their faith in intercultural imagination. Not only ethnic groups parade. There are examples of different cultures, but the objective is, in this original group work, free and

cdoc@diba.cat 58

autonomous creation in relation to cultural origins. These multiple contributions combine to contemporaneously strengthen the values that underlie traditions; it is a question of opening and struggle against reclusion in ghettos. In collaboration with the various cultures, people of different social origins, of different ages and of different communities, including the two biggest Belgian linguistic communities. The Zinneke belongs to nobody in particular but to all those who make it possible: the participants, organizers, those who conceive it, the citizens, artists, residents, public powers that support it, those attending it, those who talk about it, the media that report it.

The process is based on the combination of a social, educational (collaboration with schools, permanent education groups, on-going training), cultural and artistic work. Through its multiple effects, this project also seeks to free the people rejected or stigmatized for the fact of living in neighbourhoods «famed for being problematic». These effects are cultural, social, environmental and must also be dealt with in their economic dimensions. The project stimulates collective effects, mutual aid, group spirit: helped by the prohibition of using mechanical motors, booming amplifiers, by the absence of a spirit of competition. As in any system, everything is connected and a change effected in one of the aspects of a given situation brings changes in the others. Intervening through culture, we provoke effects at other levels: social, educational, environmental, etc. The conditions imposed allow us to observe the positive impact of the shift from the creative workshops centred on the process to productions of a quality capable of reaching a wide audience, much more demanding at an artistic level.

The Zinneke Parade naturally finds its place in the public space, the place of everyone and the place of no one, a place in permanent transformation. Moreover, leading the participants to this scenario allows them to show their abilities, their learning independently of the professional result and the amateur functionality: «another» level is necessary, artistically appropriate but which is different, whose demands are not exchangeable. Another degree of supplementary freedom both for the amateur participants and the professional artists.