CCCB Veus

On 10 June we will find out who has won the Cultural Innovation International Prize, organised by CCCBLab to discover answers to the question “What can we say about “audiences” in the context of cultural institutions?” The call for entries attracted the presentation of over 150 projects from 25 countries with all kinds of proposals that offer an interesting analysis of the state of the issue.

The theme was sufficiently broad to allow participants to offer an extensive range of solutions, which in come cases involve projects of an artistic nature and in others a transformation of the curatorial or organisational model of cultural institutions. From all of them, ten were selected that propose different alternatives to the competition’s question.

For example, Art Meal (Netherlands) uses the experience of going to a restaurant as a metaphor to create an innovative exhibition format. The CCC Tv Tú (Spain) proposal transfers the museum to the street through screens in different areas around the city and goes out to seek its audience, a proposal similar to In-Visible (Italy), which creates a game of cubes with QR codes with which the audience’s experience travel around the city and also finds points in common with Beep Beep (Argentina), which aims to bring the rural world closer to the urban world through interventions in places such as automatic cash machines. Cultime (Netherlands/Spain) consists of a time bank and a social network through which participants share time and cultural experiences, similar to the idea proposed in Píndoles culturals (Spain), which also makes use of new technologies (in this case an app), so that visitors to a cultural centre can expand on the exhibition contents after their visit.

The collaborative projects aim to involve the public in the choice of cultural activities. This is the case with Esdevenir públic (Spain), which proposes a collaborative curatorial process between civil society, artistic groups and the education sphere in order to involve the different agents in the creation of a cultural programme. La Baraka (France) takes as a starting point a set of Spanish playing cards to develop the identity of the Raval neighbourhood, and Dar lugar (Spain) aims to convert the CCCB’s Pati de les Dones courtyard into a public square where projects are formulated in open code. Finally, CICDB (Spain) is a collaborative project structured into three lines of work: a curatorial programme and a collaborative art project, an informal architecture laboratory and a dialogic archive.

These ten finalist projects are being evaluated by a jury made up of agents from the cultural sector who on the day of the awards ceremony will offer different open dialogues to the public. Nina Simon, Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of History & Art and creator of the blog Museum 2.0, and Conxa Rodà, Head of Strategy and Communication at the MNAC, will talk about the participative museum and about the challenges and dilemmas of the institutions with regard to co-creation with the public. Mark Miller, Youth Programmes Convenor at the Tate, and Fito Conesa, head of Habitació 1418, the programming space for young people at the CCCB and the MACBA, will talk about collaborative practices to attract the younger public and on how to expand the institutions to a broader audience. And, finally, Marcos García, head of Medialab Prado in Madrid will talk about citizens’ innovation and cultural mediation and how to create spaces for creation, production and dissemination for artistic, cultural and citizens’ groups.

These debates will be held as a complement to the workshop which, under the title “Audiences in Action” will be held on the afternoon of 9 June and during the entire day on 10 June. The workshop, coordinated by La Mandarina de Newton, will consider new ways of working with the audience through the creation of prototypes and new collaborative dynamics, and the results will be presented at the end of the afternoon, shortly before the awards ceremony.

The ceremony itself (also in streaming) will begin at 19.30 with the screening of the CCCB’s Soy Cámara television programme devoted to the subject of audiences. Following this, participants from this first edition of the prize will present their projects, and the jury will reveal the winning project, which will obtain the prize of €10,000. The ceremony will finish with a concert by Wooky accompanied by audiovisuals by Videocratz.