Thinking Together About a Mobile Art Unit

“Thinking Together about a Mobile Art Unit” is a networked research project that sets out from the idea of a “museum outside the museum” and mobile art units as catalysts able to spark participation in culture in terms of creation, establishing new discourses and stimulating the poetic and political imagination. In particular, the research explores the possibility of setting up projects situated and co-created between the community, artists and artistic mediators who experiment with prototype mobile art units that are not objectual but conceptual, replicable and expandable into other contexts.

Taking part in the process are the education areas of MACBA (Barcelona), IVAM (València), Centre d’Art la Panera (Lleida) and Es Baluard Museu (Palma), with the support of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation. These teams have chosen “the right to the city” as a transversal line of work for each of them to approach it on the basis of their own circumstances and specific nature and, among the communities close to each of the institutions taking part, help to nurture spaces for collective emancipation strategies.

The four institutions have been working together wince 2020 and the research has crystallised in two forms.

Firstly, “Lo estamos haciendo” [“We’re Doing It”], a publication containing the collective thought process supported by artist Itxaso Corral about the idea of designing a mobile art unit. It is a notebook that aims to share some useful questions distilled from the intense experience this process of collective thought has involved, with the aim of encouraging others to set up new “thinking together” processes. Questions that go beyond the search for a mobile art unit design to become collective desires, learnings and metaphors concerning the interstices of what it means to be education departments in our institutions.

Since summer 2024, we have also been working on -ANDO RECORDS, a practical and experimental process to start up a horizontal collective process concerning rights and freedoms in urban contexts, including artists Lluc Mayol and Violeta Ospina and communities close to the different institutions.

This process takes the form of a sonic (rather than sound) publishing label in movement. A collective platform that sets out to work in the intersection between sound, speech and musicality in multiple formats. It is an open code, adaptable and freely shareable brand that aims to provide a flexible space for ideas to grow in line with each context and community, to encourage exchange between diverse realities that are experienced in different cities from a perspective of rights.

• On February 25, 2025 at 5:00 p.m., the public presentation of the project will take place at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
• IVAM will activate -ANDO RECORDS in Valencia between April and May 2025.

Con el apoyo de