The environment appears as a cluster of complex emotional relationships that link us to the place we inhabit and at the same time constitute our identity. Structural inequalities are perpetuated in the unequal distribution in cultural capital: cultural clusters are urban.

Urban mutability buries ways of life far removed from the delusions of productivism: gentrification has no limits, post-capitalism absorbs everything, and the city seeks to profit from all its constituent elements.

COVID-19 showed a necessary shift in perspectives. Contemporary fictions that look to bucolic rural settings appear as a condition of possibility. It is seemingly too late.

Is art a resource to create a sense of permanence against change? How can art become a catalyst for generating utopias in new spaces and ways of life? How can artistic proposals be established that break with institutional logic and force spaces for meeting, shared reflection and the creation of collective memory?

PROGRAMME:

11:00 – 13:00

Open debate – ‘Territori, lluita i creació’ with Alexia Medici and Anna M. Andevert.

‘The environment as an emotional space, the town-city binomial and the unequal distribution of cultural capital. We will talk about urban mutability, city productivism and individualism and the rural setting as a place to host contemporary fictions.’

13:00 – 14:00

A participatory workshop led by Desenruna, which actively works to free up plots owned by the company Nuñez i Navarro and turn them into communal urban orchards.

We ask ourselves: how can art be a tool for complaint, collectivism and criticism when it involves a group of people who share a common territory?

14:00

Solidarity meal for World Refugee Day.

Organised by Emergencia Frontera Sur BCN, Esquerra de l’Eixample Acull and Mercat de Pagès Germanetes. Price €7 (reservation essential).

COL·LECTIU BORD
The col·lectiu bord group is made up of Aina Canyelles, Iris Verge and Eduard Olesti. We are three individuals involved in very different fields such as journalism, design, neighbourhood activism, communications, illustration, philology and stage management.

As a collective, we consider it essential to install artistic discourses from a perspective of responsibility for the place occupied by cultural production in contemporary society. This is why we are committed to practices that respond to the three primary areas involved in the class perspective: anticapitalism, feminism and antiracism.

We think that art is a communication tool and therefore offers the potential to alter gazes, actions and social movements. However, we believe that artistic practice is often entropically alienated in artistic circles and fails to take into account the reality of women residents who do not have access to certain cultural capitals.

For these reasons, we think that art should be collectivised rather than sectorised.

We therefore ask ourselves how we can convey these debates around the link between artistic practice and political transformation processes involving a return to society. Whilst we are aware of the complications this task entails, we firmly believe in the potential of artistic and cultural mediation. This is why one of our main objectives is to establish direct dialogues between political movements, collectives and communities.

GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT
Our curating programme is based, abstractly, on pointing out and emphasising the tensions between ethics and aesthetics. We want to bring a politicised curatorship project to fruition; explicitly anticapitalist and responsible towards the place occupied by cultural production in contemporary society. More specifically, we want to encourage Sala d’Art Jove artists to propose the kind of dialogue they want to establish with society over time beyond conventional artistic circles: with local women residents and political organisations and collectives.

We believe that the artistic forces the artists selected for the Art Jove Creación 2022 grant bring should be transferred to their relationship with the problems affecting society today. As such, we want to relocate training sessions and debate for artists, taking them to open spaces in the very neighbourhood Sala d’Art Jove inhabits. We want the various entities not explicitly related to artistic circles to be able to access, collaborate on and participate in the workshops we propose in order to put artists’ narratives in contact with the society which they are part of.

The Nova Esquerra de l’Eixample neighbourhood is densely populated with few public leisure spaces and hardly any cultural facilities. For years, the various entities in the neighbourhood have been struggling to free up spaces, create links and form a solidarity-focused, active and politicised network. For this reason, we believe that Sala d’Art Jove must opt for closer links with local women residents and entities in order to join the fight for neighbourhood sentiment.

CRISI Y TECNOLOGÍA DESCRIPTION
We have divided the 18 artistic projects into three blocks of thought, aiming to create rhizomatic experiences between artists on these three discursive strands that, whilst not isolated, can establish an enriching dialogue.

The first block, which will be the focus of the 21 May session, is entitled Crisis and Technology.

We perceive an indissoluble concern regarding the spread of digitisation and technological devices that are increasingly sprawling uncontrolledly into more and more facets of our lives.

The future is uncertain for a generation that has been raised in the period of abundance and optimistic capitalism characteristic of the historic moment our parents lived through. The result, due to the cyclical and unavoidable crises of late capitalism, is profound generational disenchantment; an absolute lack of imagining a hopeful future and a passive and nihilistic anticipation of the end of the world.

The projects selected this year, discussing crisis and technology, are based on two political concepts that have clearly materialised during the government’s management of the pandemic: dystopia and fascism.

We seek to have an impact on a reflection about the cause of this generational dystopian imagination and the relationships it has with alienation and the futuristic abstraction that does not address the dystopia of the present.