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. Since 2020, the project has involved the education areas of MACBA (Barcelona), IVAM (Valencia), 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 since 2020, and throughout the process two stages can be identified:
- Lo estamos haciendo (We’re Doing it) is a publication reflecting the shared process of reflection and design of a mobile art unit intended to be useful for institutions, artists and the contexts in which they operate. The project was accompanied artistically by Itxaso Corral.
It is a notebook that aims to share some useful questions distilled from this process of collective thought, with the goal of encouraging others to set up new processes of thinking together. The notebook brings together issues that go beyond research to become collective desires, learnings and metaphors on the interstices of what it means to be an education department in a museum institution.
- ANDO RECORDS is the practical and experimental part of the project and is based on a horizontal collective process focused on rights and freedoms with input from the artists Lluc Mayl and Violeta Ospina, in collaboration with communities connected to the different institutions.
This process takes the form of a mobile sonic (not sound) publishing label: a collective platform that operates at the intersection of sound, orality and musicality through multiple formats. It is an open-source, adaptable and freely shareable brand that seeks to provide a flexible space in which ideas can grow according to each context and community, promoting exchange between the different realities experienced in different cities. In Valencia, the working process led by Lluc Mayl and Violeta Ospina has focused on addressing contemporary fragility and the possible tools available to communities to confront it. The collectives and associations involved in the research and shared knowledge process were: Acció Ecologista Agró, Asociación de Mujeres Gitanas ROMI, AFA CEIP St. Teresa, and AFA CEIP Cervantes.
With the support of:
