Culturnautes 2021

What is Culturenauts?

A summer school, a journey through the galaxy of contemporary culture! The explorers will work on the various contents developed in the CCCB’s exhibitions and programs in the course of 2021.

We’ll be opening our eyes to life forms that coexist with us and thinking of possible ways of collaborating with them to be able to survive and repair our planet’s wounded ecosystems; we’ll be creating and acting out stories that spring up in our imagination when we look at the planet Mars and dancing to imagine new futures; we’ll also be speculating on sustainable cities. All in a creative laboratory.

Who’ll be presenting it?

Culturenauts 2020 lasts five weeks, with proposals formulated jointly by the CCCB and the collectives listed below:

• Paula Bruna, Juan Antonio Cerezuela and Alba García i Allué. Three resident artists at La Escocesa who do collaborative work in which artistic research is a form of knowledge where different disciplines hybridize.
• The Pink Pixel Collective. An illustrated literary experimentation project.
• Laboratorio de Pensamiento Lúdico (LPL). An association that uses game methodologies to generate speculative fables about possible future scenarios.
• Big Bouncers, a dance company with a long career in teaching dance and contemporary creation. Created by Anna Rubirola, Cecilia Colacrai and Mireia de Querol.
• Mixité. Territori, Art i Comunitat. This collective directed by Marta Carrasco and Sergi Selvas seeks ways to approach the transformation of the territory and the city based on creativity, debate and critical reflection.

The educational project and the organization of the club are based on collaboration with Atlas sociocultural foundation and its team of monitors. Their proposals generate a space of relationship to create new perspectives and discover new ways of living, giving rise to an exchange of experiences and knowledge between individuals, peoples and cultures.

How is it organized?

Each proposal is independent but complements all the others. Culturenauts will attend the different workshops programmed by the collectives in the spaces of the CCCB, accompanied by the team of monitors who will be the children’s point of reference throughout.

In the course of the morning, the collectives will facilitate the creative activities in keeping with one of the proposed artistic disciplines worked on each week, with the aim of developing creativity by using certain techniques to produce an artistic element. The afternoons bring a more playful approach to the contents of the CCCB. On Thursdays, we go on an excursion around Barcelona and on Fridays, at 16:30, we put on a show for the families.

Registration is by the week.

 

Summer school calendar

Artistic Dialogues between Urban Species

Week 1 – 28 June to 2 July

Interspecies artistic creation laboratory, facilitated by Paula Bruna, Juan Antonio Cerezuela and Alba García i Allué

The protagonists of this week will be the plants and animals that coexist with us in the city, whose lives often go unnoticed. In the workshop we’ll be opening our eyes to these life forms. We’ll be experimenting with artistic techniques based on scientific methodologies that allow us to approach the daily lives of these “non-human citizens” and interact with them. In this way, we’ll rediscover the urban environment of the CCCB from non-human points of view. The culturenauts will create pieces of visual art for non-humans or even in collaboration with them.

On Friday 2 July, their families will be able to visit the exhibition of works created jointly by humans and non-humans.

 

Greetings from Mars

Week 2. 5 to 9 July

Collaborative creation of illustrated postcard stories, facilitated by The Pink Pixel Collective (Sílvia Martínez, Marina Sáez, Ives Laborie and Zeta)

What stories would we tell if we went spent our holidays on Mars? Would they be different to the ones we have on Earth? What would the landscape and its inhabitants be like? The Pink Pixel Collective invites us on an experimental five-day journey through illustrated storytelling and collaborative creation.

Following the theme of the exhibition "Mars. The Red Mirror", the culturenauts will be entering a laboratory to create visual, textual and sound contents linked to mythology, science fiction and ecology. We’ll will explore narrative techniques that allow us to construct a joint portrait of the red planet and learn to represent them using collective art, with the emphasis on questioning individual authorship as we know it and the key role of chance in the end result.

On Friday 9 July the families will attend the launch of the first Martian Postal Service between Earth and Mars, where they’ll have the chance to make their own Martian postcards using all the graphic and narrative material produced by the culturenauts. They’ll be able to mail the resulting creations to whomever they choose.

With their experience, the visitors will be part of a creative process started by the children and, at the same time, witness the live construction of a network of collaborative creation.

 

Game of Kin

Week 3. 12 to 16 July

The future depends on your relationship with other beasts, facilitated by Laboratorio de Pensamiento Lúdico (Antonio R. Montesinos and Susana Rodilla)

Game of Kin, a project created by the LPL collective on the basis of the ideas of Donna Haraway, is a science-fiction game to imagine our future after an environmental disaster. It also aims to narrate and think about possible forms of collaboration with different living beings.

What do you think about when you imagine the future? What does it look like? Do you see a scrupulously designed landscape full of technological miracles? Or is it more like a desert where resources are scarce? Are you worried about how a climate collapse would affect the planet?

Game of Kin is a narrative game to imagine our future after an environmental disaster. This is a project created by the collective Laboratori de Pensament Lúdic (LPL) based on some of the ideas Donna Haraway presents in her latest book, Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2020).

In the course of the week, we’ll be imagining our life in a world full of difficulties, thinking of possible ways to collaborate with different living things in order to survive and repair the damaged ecosystems of a wounded planet. The various phases of the game will allow culturenauts to speculate with life forms, environments and ways of relating (based on exchange, coevolution, mutation or symbiosis), and also with complete ecosystems.

Finally, they will generate different repair fables and, on Friday 16 July, the culturenauts will show them to their families, who will discover the future scenarios and the collaborations they have created.

 

Playing with Time and the Universe of Possibilities

Week 4. 19 to 23 July

Collective creation laboratory, facilitated by the collective Big Bouncers (Mireia de Querol, Ursa Sekirnik and Magdalena Garzón)

We’ll be working with the body, the word and the imagination as expressive tools to create a collective stage game. Big Bouncers collective will be sharing some of the composition tools for creation from their play BIG BOUNCE as catalysts of creative material.

We’re interested in questioning the idea of linear time and will focus on the idea of origin, the different potentials that exist from the same starting point, and the multiple possible versions that can be traced from a beginning to an end. We’ll be imagining possible futures and multiple endings using body and word, imagination and a sense of humour

We will also work on the body as an expressive material that can generate multiple readings and trigger the imagination of participants and observer alike.

We are interested in approaching everything that can happen in the performative play space by means of collaboration and collective action, working on listening, negotiation and the involvement of everyone.

On Friday 23 July the families will be able to attend a dramatic presentation based on the tools worked on and built by all the culturenauts together.

 

Cities, Factories and Workshops

Week 5. 26 to 30 July

Creation of an experimental fiction inspired by urban nature, facilitated by Mixité

A proposal based on the exhibition "Urban Nature" that opened at the CCCB this July. The art of fiction, like theatre, cinema and photography, prepares us for constant scientific and technological advances and makes us reflect on social, emotional, work-related and environmental consequences. For the space of a week, the culturenauts will become urban planners, architects, writers, camera operators, set designers, photographers, model-makers and designers to tell a story about the city and the territory we live in.

We’ll be organizing various work spaces for the culturenauts to create a fiction that helps us understand how we live in the contemporary city and how we can adopt a stance to make it more inclusive and ecological.

On Friday 30 July, the culturenauts will invite family and friends to visit these new cities and act out and experience the fiction devised and created in the course of the week.