APADRINA EL TEU EQUIPAMENT
Apadrina el teu equipament (Adopt Your Cultural Facility) is an educational project coordinated by Tot Raval, aiming to improve educational equity and mitigate existing inequalities regarding participation and cultural access. It is structured around adoptions between educational centres and cultural facilities in the Raval district.
During the 23-24 school year, we are carrying out the project Per a què serveix un Centre d’Arts? Un diàleg artístic entre l’IE Elisabets i el centre d’arts Santa Mònica (What Is an Art Center For? An artistic dialogue between the Elisabets Secondary School and the Santa Mònica) with the 2nd-grade primary school students from Elisabets, in collaboration with the Santa Mònica Education Guild. Over several visits to Santa Mònica, we ask ourselves questions about what we believe an art centre is. We also explore the spaces of the centre, meet the people who work there, and visit the exhibition. The project concludes with an illustrated poster workshop where the children express what Santa Mònica means to them.
During the 24-25 school year, we continue the adoption with the 2nd-grade primary school group from Elisabets, this time in collaboration with the collective Lo Relacional. Within the framework of the ongoing exhibition CITISSIMUM ALTISSIMUM FORTISSIMUM, which questions competitive sports as a metaphor for contemporary society, we will explore, through play, humour, and paradox, how sports can also be a field for experimenting with more diverse, plural, and egalitarian forms of relationships.
High Pleasure Sport, Sponsor Your Facility
What if we altered the logic of faster, stronger, higher, smarter, more capable, more beautiful, healthier... and played with the logics of absurdity, irony, collaboration and enjoyment?
The proposal High Pleasure Sport dialogues with the exhibition Citissimum, Altissimum, Fortissimum, currently at Santa Mònica. The exhibition explores competitive sport as a metaphor for social relationships shaped by competitiveness, control, an obsession with measurement, self-improvement, performance, hyperproductivity, individual meritocracy, body normativity and the spectacularisation of our lives.
As part of the project Sponsor your facility 2024–2025, the Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica, IE Elisabets and Lo Relacional have explored sport as a way of rehearsing more plural, pleasurable and egalitarian relationships.
With the group of 2nd grade children and teachers from IE Elisabets, we distorted our bodies to take fictional photos we would never publish, played “Guess Who?” and realised how similar people in power look to each other – and how little they look like us. We invented sports with impossible rules, had a picnic on Santa Mònica’s terrace, paraded our flags from the country of friendship, from the land of people with homes, and from Happy Face nation. We danced to the sports we love and that make us feel good, following a collaborative playlist, turning the cloister-sports court into a dance floor. We laughed, cried, dodged balls, sang, talked, painted, dressed up in fantasy outfits to question the idea of uniformed sportswear, felt our bodies, felt each other, and celebrated ourselves.
At some point, we also felt we wanted more time with the group, more process, more depth, more... Wait a minute—could it be we can’t escape the logics of the -issimum? In those -issimum moments, we felt deeply cared for.
To share the process during the community closure of Sponsor your facility, we invited participants from other local sponsorships to the performance Play by dancing, a participatory and danced action to continue exploring sport as a high-pleasure practice—one where we can rehearse ways of relating through our specificities and experience the power of shared joy and delight.
Desiré & Patricia – Lo Relacional