Culturnautes 2023

What is Culturnautes?

A summer camp linking culture, leisure and education. A space to spark kids’ curiosity as they explore new ideas through a range of different artistic disciplines.

We invite art and science collectives to create a fresh take on the CCCB’s exhibitions and activities by designing and running a series of engaging activities to bring culture closer to children.

Who will be presenting it?

This year’s guest artists and collectives are:

• Xesca Salvà. Set designer, artist and educator who works on theatre, dance and circus projects. She eagerly explores how we interact with the spaces we live in and how we can create new ones collectively.
• Urati Lab. Art collective made up of Marta Lofi, Albert Chamorro and Sergio Camacho. Together they use a performance research lab to analyse the clash between the virtual and corporeal worlds.
• Violeta Ospina. Artist who weaves between the visual and performing arts. She focuses on sound art through collaborative processes and flashes of fun.
• Marta Cartu. Comics artist who specialises in drawing and education and explores visual narratives.

The camp instructors team is created by the Fundació Sociocultural Atlas.

Each artist or collective designs and runs a week’s activities at the summer camp, with the support of the Fundació Sociocultural Atlas’s team of camp instructors.

How is it organised?

Each week focuses on a different area of interest linked to the CCCB’s exhibitions and activities. Artists are invited to design and run the morning activities, which aim to engage children in the creative, eye-opening processes at the heart of cultural languages. We share the results of each week’s creative exploits with families and the general public every Friday at 4.30 pm, which brings the week to a close. Afternoons are given over to recreational summer activities run by the team of instructors, and on Thursdays we go on an excursion.

To help children forge ties and discover shared interests, and to provide the best working environment for exploring ideas, they are usually put into groups with children of a similar age.

Participants sign up for one week at a time.

Summer camp calendar

Week One, 26 to 30 June 2023
Houses on the Move

Games for building and shifting objects and ideas linked to houses, squares and neighbourhoods. Led by Xesca Salvà, Maria Magdalena Garzón and Marc Villanueva Mir

Can we open a window onto anywhere? Could we live in the middle of a town square? How much does a house cost? How do we make our way through different spaces?

This week we will be building houses we can take apart and take on the move, while thinking about what it means to have a house and how we relate to public and private spaces. We will also create spaces for conversations about imagining and building a collective house whose windows open out onto the neighbourhood. But that’s not all! We will also build our own settlement at the CCCB for us to customise, discover, move and shake to its foundations while playing games and having plenty of fun.

Each session will get under way by considering a series of specific questions and challenges designed to lead us to listen to the neighbourhood, create sounds, invent short stories, dance, draw, build, put together, take apart, look through...

On the last day, we will show families some of the spaces we have built and invite them inside to explore some of our ideas on what it means to have somewhere to live.

 

Week Two, 3 to 7 July 2023
AI: Expanded Imagination

A workshop to spark children’s imagination through artificial intelligence. Led by the Urati Lab collective (Marta Lofi, Albert Chamorro and Sergio Camacho)

Does AI help expand our imagination or stifle our creativity? Can we use these high-tech tools to create new worlds of the mind? Is imagination a uniquely human trait?

In this workshop we will explore the potential of artificial intelligence to create new worlds of the mind. Guided by artists through a range of engaging activities, children will work together using different forms of AI to create sounds, images and texts in a virtual universe ready for their return to the real world, where they will immerse themselves in hands-on activities with painting, paper cutouts, fabrics and carboard to modify the materials they created by interacting with AI. Together we will create a giant visual, sound and space landscape. The key idea is that AI is a resource that doesn’t provide definitive images but suggests starting points for letting our imagination take off in new directions.

On Friday we will invite families to explore our landscape and share the experience of conjuring up an imaginary space based on artificial intelligence.

 

Week Three, 10 to 14 July 2023
Radia-fan-zine

Games of radio improvisation and creative drawing, using voices, bodies and words. Led by Violeta Ospina, Patricia del Razo Martínez and Yazel Parra Nahmens

Can we draw sounds? Or give drawings sounds? When happens if we move while talking or if we dance when drawing? Can we create a radio magazine?

This week we will explore the universe of sound art through a range of activities playing with words, sounds, drawings and movements. We will become talking machines, create self-portraits out of sound, draw sounds, voice words and make lots of noise! We will also visit the cabosanroque collective’s art installation No em va fer Joan Brossa [I Wasn’t Made by Joan Brossa] as we take a journey into a space full of moving mechanisms and objects producing sounds and music, much like a piece of poetry by legendary Catalan poet Joan Brossa.

All this culminates in a radia-fan-zine, an expanded combination of radio and fanzine. A fanzine is a cheaply made magazine covering various issues (alternative neighbourhood cultures, comics, thought, music, life experiences, etc.) with a limited print run. We will create our own radia-fan-zine out of the drawings made at the summer camp this week: a culturenaut publication, a graphic artefact and also a score of our sonorous experience these past few days.

On the final day, we will share our radia-fan-zine with families, performing these scores through sound and movement and turning ourselves into a live radio station.

 

Week Four, 17 to 21 July 2023
BOOM! An Explosion of Comics Heading this Way

An expanded comic workshop. Led by Marta Cartu, Nadia Hafid i Bàrbara Alca. 

Can a comic be expanded? Can we draw on real life as a source of inspiration for new stories and spaces? How many different ways can we modify and expand the narrative resources of conventional comics?

A chance for our culturenauts to rove through the world of comics. Over the course of the week we will create a special expanded comic that will take over the space around us in different forms and formats. All that is required is a playful sense of experimentation and a readiness to have fun!

To do so, we will set off from the CCCB and take a stroll through the city, taking a good look at the everyday lives and stories taking place all around us. We will then group our ideas together under different headings to help us imagine and create the stories and characters in our comic. Each session will be structured around different activities designed as small games to reveal the language of comics and help us master its key components, narrative devices and creative processes.

On the last day, the culturenauts will stage the expanded comic they have created and perform a unique reading of it.