PHASE 1
Idensitat + LaFundició + Sinapsis + Transductores
Introduction
Living in-between is proposed as a plan designed to activate the Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Centre as a creator and catalyst for interaction between artistic practices and social spaces. It aims to offer the means to collate and respond to emerging new approaches to how cultural institutions should be reconceived and reinvented, viewing artistic practices and collective processes as essential tools to activate strategies of change that influence both the cultural ecosystem and the social context. This proposal is based on collectively occupying a space while reflecting the shift from its past as a factory to its current role as an art centre that is also on the way to becoming a cultural institution with a more complex or systemic structure. The programme is aimed at critical questioning using approaches that combine investigation with production, archiving, mediation, participation and debate, as well as expanding on this by activating networks and socialising contents and experiences.
It also aims to try out different ways of occupying cultural facilities with structures that are more highly committed to the culture-society relationship, consequently experimenting and openly debating the structure of current models for art centres and the cultural policies that provide their framework.
The rolling out of the programme proposed explores a concept of Fabra i Coats Contemporary Art Centre which is directed towards collectively prototyping a work model that redefines the parameters determining the concept of public service in relation to an art centre.
The programme structure
During its first phase, Living in-between is based on four different programmes or areas that are articulated and interconnected with each other to highlight the combination of artistic practices, mediation processes and citizen involvement. Interweaving, Transcendent Culture, In Transition and Antenna are the four programme areas developed over the art centre’s three floors. Here exhibition devices exist side by side with work activities and processes, with the aim of combining and mixing disciplines and promoting cross-pollination.
The programmes propose a set of actions on three levels:
- Exhibition of local and international case studies, organised according to their location and type.
- Activation and socialisation of the content exhibited through talks, workshops, seminars and other formats.
- Promotion and production of creative processes and projects materialised through hybrid and collective processes. These three levels relate to each other, generating a set of interconnections and mutual input between spaces, programmes and actions.
The notion of mediation
The Living in-between project sees mediation as a critical, transformative process for cultural institutions, relations and ecosystems. In this respect, the proposal aims to set up different types of production, circulation and representation that combine artistic practice, mediation and education as an active part of the social system but with its own mode of cultural production and of collective research that generates knowledge. Diversity in mediation practices should be understood as the different ways in which citizens can become involved in and experience culture, as well as from a critical perspective that highlights the problems but at the same time explores the boundaries and potential.
Community management as a form of mediation
The Living in-between project is managed jointly by a working group made up of four collectives: Idensitat, LaFundició, Sinapsis and Transductores whose activities are organised via a single programming board. The role of the board is to manage and create content and take decisions. It is flexible and can adapt according to the needs of the processes and projects in question and also includes people, groups and organisations involved in these processes. The programme’s management is the responsibility of a technical coordination team linked to LaFundició and Idensitat.
A project that interconnects contexts
This proposal aims to set in motion alternative forms of co-production connected on different contextual scales: territorial (tracing neighbourhood and local links with international), relational (involving different spheres of the social fabric), temporal (incorporating elements of memory to activate these in the present and project them towards the future) and spatial (investigating in depth the very concept and place of a creation factory).
Ways of working that become goals
- Strengthening networking and a collaborative framework based on shared governance, favouring dialogue taking as its starting point the processes and contexts of the new institutionality, local and international alike, that might trigger questions for debate and build up a new model.
- Generating elements for connection and mediation in different realms of social space and cultural ecosystems. Processes are proposed that combine artistic practice with citizen involvement and collaborative strategies as elements for constant mediation between territories, artistic practices and certain diversified sections of the social fabric.
- Experimenting with art’s capacity to construct its own elements of exploration on a conceptual and formal level, while also combining these with its potential to cross between disciplines and enable hybridisation.
- Investigating and testing exhibition and socialisation formats in order to roll out and expand the potential of their component elements. Design, formalisation and space management are distributed thematically while also presenting the complexity of artistic practice and ways of using and occupying the centre. The strategies proposed for the space are also a means of citizen mediation and education for the city.
- Recording, filing, ordering and communicating procedures and practices, potentially using such material as the basis for prototyping centre models and improving the transparency and visibility of the work process, making it possible to replicate models.