During the first week of February, we will launch a series of workshops at the Bellvitge-el Gornal Cultural Center that we propose as spaces for experimentation and community cultural creation around various media and artistic practices. This offering has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Bellvitge-el Gornal Cultural Center.
We have often criticized – and it is a criticism shared by many other people – how cultural and civic centers in Barcelona and its metropolitan area have been transformed in recent years into spaces of cultural consumption, with an offer of courses and workshops that does not allow their users to establish social ties, take their own cultural initiatives and, ultimately, make culture a critical element that contributes to collective well-being: the users (and the word is not at all innocent) come, receive their course, go home and that’s that, nothing remains and little is built in common.
This dynamic is so ingrained and so common that it is difficult for a large part of the citizenry to feel attracted and involved in other ways of understanding and practicing culture within these facilities. For this reason, we have approached our “communication campaign” in “standard” terms, as a typical workshop offering. However, it is our intention to transform these workshops into spaces for collective cultural research and creation that establish relationships with the social environment and generate forms of self-organization and self-education in the community.
We want to establish links between the cultural center’s workshops and LaFundició’s new space in the same neighborhood of Bellvitge, which we talked about days ago, so that the groups and projects that may arise from the workshops find a place to develop their practices, to settle in and from which to cooperate with other groups and entities in the neighborhood. It so happens that in 2015 the 50th anniversary of the construction of Bellvitge will be celebrated, a series of projects and initiatives are being prepared for that date to commemorate the event and to which we would like to add from the workshops a reflection on the construction of historical memory and rescue those stories that are less visible in the “official” narration of the neighborhood’s memory.
The policy of workshops in cultural centers has temporality as its maxim; this condition is usually justified by appealing to the fact that on occasions the cession of spaces in public facilities to citizen groups and entities has led to a somewhat ‘private’ use of them: the groups tend to endogamy and generate activities exclusively aimed at their members. We think that temporality is not a good solution to this situation and that the facilities should promote the association of people to carry out public activities, promote cultural initiatives and processes from and for the community. Citizens must appropriate public resources, but understanding that property as the imperative to care for them, share them, build them and collectively benefit from these resources.
One of the things that excites us most about this new process is the human team that we have gathered to carry it out: apart from the LaFundició team, we will be accompanied by
Carolina Astudillo
,
Jess Espinoza
,
Jordi Mas
,
Marcos Prior
and María Zapata.
Carolina is a documentary filmmaker and journalist and has taught classes at
La casa del cine
, and will coordinate the creative documentary workshop/space from a perspective that questions the boundaries between documentary storytelling and fiction, as well as the assimilation of the documentary genre with journalism. Jess Espinoza is an artist, seamstress and social activist of the rearguard, and will teach a handmade screen printing workshop in which not only will this technique be taught, but we will also learn how to build our homemade and portable screen printing laboratory in the purest DIY/DIWO style. Jordi Mas is a dancer, researcher and thinker committed to lifestyles that bring together dance, health and community action; starting from the therapeutic virtues of motor skills, Jordi proposes an investigation on one’s own body and its relationship with space and landscape. Marcos Prior is one of the most relevant comic authors of the current scene, among other things for investigating and expanding the discursive possibilities of the ‘comic’ medium, and María Zapata is a specialist in community theater and currently directs the theater group
CandeL’Hart
.
Anyway, here you can see and download in PDF format the triptych that we have prepared for the dissemination of the workshops.
We encourage you to sign up for the workshops, not only for the technical training that you will have the opportunity to receive (at a ridiculous price), but also to be able to share your knowledge, practices, projects and experiences and to build new ones in collaboration with the neighbors of Bellvitge.
You can contact us by any of the means you will find here. We are waiting for you!