Expanded
education

Expanded Education can happen anytime, anywhere. We started working this proposal in one of our festivals, 10 years ago. Since then, the term has changed from being a way to refer to informal education practices that gather knowledge outside of the system to a transversal methodological tool that intersects with a critical understanding of new technologies and with the production of mediation devices. The concept has been accepted as a stream of practices that propose the rethinking of unilateral visions of knowledge transmission.

ProjectsPosts

Mediation

We understand mediation as the capacity to produce tools and meeting spaces in which citizens, social agents and various kinds of institutions can participate in decision making about things that affect the lives of everyone in our society. Mediating also means identifying power dynamics between persons and with institutions, and thinking of ways to balance inequalities and to work towards having everyone’s voices heard in the public sphere. The goal of mediation, as we understand, it is to create a more democratic and inclusive society.

ProjectsPosts

New
narratives

What languages, tools and narrative formats allow us to better express our experiences and also imagine other possible realities? What kind of cultural productions activate lasting relational spaces that have diversity as an underlying value? These questions push us towards forms of storytelling that go beyond traditional models of narration, and that often lean on codes and languages that came out of the digital spheres. Making life worth living involves redefining how we talk about the realities around us, and thus push for material transformations.

ProjectsPosts

Hackcamp

Hackcamp is a model of encounter with a very concrete methodological purpose: to bring together a group of people with different knowledge and skill sets for at least two and a half days to respond to challenges faced by a community or institution. The result is always a prototype that partially meets the posed challenge. This model of meeting facilitates creativity and collective intelligence, relying on visual, performative and non-verbal tools to foster meaningful knowledge exchange between persons coming from different social spaces and backgrounds.

ProjectsPosts

Social
innovation

We believe in cultural processes that develop as a result of the concrete needs of communities and citizens and that produce benefits in their life conditions. There are no magic solutions, and we do not believe that technology is capable by itself of successfully improving the wellbeing of citizens and communities in a specific context. We like to think of social innovation as a tool for examining questions that affect everyone or a specific community and then propose creative, collective solutions to the problems that we face as a society.

ProjectsPosts

Communities

With the rise of digital technology, the notion of community has changed substantially. We like to think of the concept of community as a way to relate to other entities, organisations, citizens and social movements. We believe in communities instead of audiences when it comes to talk about culture. We think of ourselves as an agent that mediates among different communities. This allows us to develop activity that provides value to collective intelligence, the commons and expanded education as indispensable conditions of coexistence.

ProjectsPosts

The Commons

The Commons are a type of resource available in a community or social collective. It is considered a third management model, beyond private and public, and allows community members to decide the conditions of use and access to the resource. This resource can be material (such as water) or immaterial (such as knowledge). In the last few years, public institutions and private entities have introduced the teachings of the Commons into their operations. We trust in the ability of this tool to enable the redistribution of power in society.

ProjectsPosts

Critical
culture

We believe in the capacity of culture to produce tools that directly question the stories and material conditions that sustain our reality. Culture has come to define many different processes, but cultural industries have ended up hogging the spotlight in the last century, splitting it up in different sectors such as cinema, literature or music. Otherwise, we have advocated for thinking of the term culture as a constant, transversal process produced in all societies that can help to confirm or challenge the way these societies function.

ProjectsPosts

Care

We emphasise bringing care to light in order to analyse who and in what conditions it is managed, changing from an economy that focuses on the benefit of capital to one that considers care as a central aspect of life. This implies changing from competitive relational models to societies with more solidarity; from a hierarchical model of production to the democratisation of decision making; from accumulation to redistribution. Care can be understood as a tool that uncovers invisible but key social practices in western production models.

ProjectsPosts

Methodology

Redistributing access to taking part in the public voice implies developing methodological tools that keep in mind that not everyone has equal access to different types of languages. We believe in an approach capable of creating space for horizontal relationships among citizens and with other institutions and social movements. It is essential that we approach other languages and forms of relating reality that don’t involve just words, given that ways of talking about the world and processes also involve power relationships that need revision.

ProjectsPosts

Participation

Participation is about having the capacity to make decisions on political questions that affect us all and do it in a horizontal, radically democratic and binding way. Participation in decision making means, at the same time, learning to live together and effectively redistribute power. During this process we must value diverse practices, forms and ways of doing, being radically inclusive. Our work is to foster a culture of participation that promotes the idea of the active and committed citizen and includes diverse identities and forms of knowledge.

ProjectsPosts

Audiovisual
source code

Audiovisual source code is a format of scenic lecture that can be produced in different contexts. When we talk about “source codes” we use the metaphor of the code found in any computer system and we apply it to the field of culture. We all have a “cultural source code”, a recipe that allows us to project ourselves onto and relate to other people’s stories. Sharing our source code is nothing more than recognising that we construct our identities interdependently, and in doing so we see ourselves in others and allow others to see themselves in us.

ProjectsPosts