Culturnautes 2024

 

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.

For four weeks, we will play theatrical interventions in the street, we will ask ourselves some of the great questions that philosophy has raised, we will connect with Amazonian biodiversity through the senses and mud and we will be inspired by the filmmaker Agnès Varda to invent stories.

 

Who will be presenting it?

This year’s guest artists and collectives are:

• Eléctrico 28. Collective of artists from various backgrounds from the fields of clown, physical theatre, dance, writing and street arts.
• The Pink Pixel Collective. Collective of illustrators, playwrights and programmers focused on the processes of community creation that arise from the collaboration between diverse profiles from inside and outside the world of arts.
• Karen Shiratori, Emanuele Fabiano and Martina Rogers Manzano. Karen and Emmanuel are anthropologists and from the ECO Project, their research work is focused on the Amazon. Martina is a visual artist, based on play and experimentation, she fuses various plastic techniques such as drawing, engraving, ceramics and animation in her creative processes.
• Clara Gassull Quer and Drac Màgic. Clara is an artist and photographer, and Drac Màgic is a cooperative dedicated to the study and dissemination of audiovisual culture.

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

Urban fantasies

Week 1. From June 25 to 28

We go outside to play and occupy the public space creatively. By Eléctrico 28.

In this fun workshop we will go outside to observe what happens around us and what the spontaneous traffic of everyday life looks like. How do we want our neighborhood to be? What are we missing? What would we like to see disappear? How do we relate to others and to our neighbors? How do we occupy the streets? Which space is reserved for pedestrians and which for cars?

Through play, humor, gestural theater and intervention techniques in public space, we will create small theatrical scenes in the streets. We will interact with the elements around us in a different way than usual, building and learning collectively.

We will also question how spaces affect our habits and how our individual and collective decisions transform the streets. We may often imagine how we want to live in our homes, but we rarely think about how we want to live together in our streets. The workshop seeks to provoke a re-reading of ways of being, understanding and sharing public space.

On the last day, as a final work, we will share the theatrical scenes generated with the families and invite everyone to participate in the proposal. 

Own monsters

Week 2. From July 1 to 5

Chromatic exploration of a non-linear account of our fears. By Pink Pixel Collective.

What goes through our heads when we are afraid? Philosophy has helped us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on the issues that have worried humanity throughout history. Literature has helped us to give it a name and the plastic arts to make it visible.

Now, what creeps the culturnauts? During this week we will reflect on three great classics of fear: The Darkness, The Evil Ones and Boredom. These three monsters will be a metaphor for some of the philosophical questions that inhabit the minds of young and old, and that often generate fear, uncertainty or even taboo. Plastic expression will be the tool to make visible the abstraction of the questions discussed: What color is nothingness? Is it possible to see the weather?

Darkness will help us to ask ourselves questions about the unknown, about emptiness and difference. Why are we sometimes scared of things we don't know? We will paint with light and create the scariest stories with invisible ink.

The Villains of literature will accompany us in the exploration of cruelty and the construction of the notions of good and evil while discovering the plastic possibilities of stamping with large objects that serve as a seal.

Finally, Boredom will bring us closer to the concept of time, and loneliness and belonging, in an identity drift that helps us find out who we are. We will make time visible through color and weave a collective calendar.

On Friday, while using the textual and plastic material generated, we will spin the stories that emerged during the camp in a large non-linear narrative of the "Choose your adventure" type. Through audience decisions and collaborative writing, we will draw a collective infographic of our fears.

The journey of plants

Week 3. From 8 to 12 July

We connect with the biodiversity of the Amazon through mud and the senses. By Martina Rogers Manzano, Muntsa Pous i Pol Roig Turró (following the original idea of ​​Karen Shiratori and Emanuele Fabiano).

In this artistic and sensory experimentation workshop, we will take a creative journey from the Amazon to Europe following the paths taken by plant species. How did they arrive? What were the paths they took?

We will use clay as a means of plastic expression. This material allows us to take root, just like plants, and, through contact with the earth, trace stories that link our present to the plant world. We will play sensory games: leave footprints and print plants in the clay and connect to the memory of the material, revealing hidden stories. We will also create instruments to imagine plant voices, simulate wind and birds, and explore the sound of plant movement. We will paint roots and discover the forgotten names of these migrant plants. We will make clay dishes and utensils to reconnect with the rituals linked to the transformation of plants into food.

On Friday, the culturnauts will have transformed into plant bodies, and will show the journeys and stories of this Amazonian biodiversity.

Varda, can I tell you a story?

Week 4. From July 15 to 19

We are inspired by the universe of filmmaker Agnès Varda through play and observation. By Clara Gassull Quer and Magical Dragon.

Agnès Varda was a French artist and filmmaker, recognized for her work, originality and imagination. In this artistic workshop of experimentation with image and sound, we will play to create pasts and futures of fragments and photographs of Agnès Varda's work with the purpose of imagining the stories behind and, of this way, build others.

We will work, as the filmmaker did, paying special attention to observation: we will look for the unexpected and the random in the nearest and everything that goes unnoticed to find innocuous connections. Each of the sessions will help us to explore new imaginaries. From a curious and playful perspective, through experimentation through sound and image, we will create stories that start from the artist's work. And we will do it through the written and spoken word, the sounds and noises we can create or find, the use of everyday objects or the body itself.

On the last day, we will share with the families an installation in the form of a triptych made of fragments of Agnès Varda's work and our stories about possible pasts and futures of the images.