Utopia Rambles

Santa Mònica arts centre is calling all those who wish to take part in the project "Utopia Rambles", an initiative curated by Itziar González Virós, Elena Blesa Cábez and Enric Puig.

The project will start in October 2022 and will be deployed publicly from January 2023. Its aim is to bring together a group of artists to carry out one or several interventions that employ utopian imagination and creation in the immediate geographical and social environment of the centre: the Rambles area.

1. The Rambles

The Rambles area includes the connecting streets and squares. This genuinely civic urban axis, in constant transformation, with its specificities and complexities, will begin in September 2022 a remodelling process devised in 2018 by Km Zero, a transdisciplinary team that presented a community-based project based on the logic of citizen participation and with a strong desire for transversal connection.

1. Utopia

The Rambles, in the same way as Santa Mònica itself, acts as a bridge between two neighbourhoods: between the maritime city of the port and the bourgeois and ordered city of the Eixample, between the walled city and the Raval, between what remains outside and what remains inside the narrative of the city. It is a place with a condition of threshold, of nexus, of undefined and ambivalent characteristics, and it is precisely from this undefined condition that its utopian power is presented, of what it is not yet.

1. Assembly

The Rambles has been and continues to be a universal reference of democratic space, a place of visible and centralised struggle of marginal expressions, as well as a manifestation of community. For this reason, it is necessary that the artistic exercise of imagination that is proposed be carried out in an assemblage form, physically from the rooms of the centre.

In the project, the creation and the derivations of the exhibition are not conceived individually or through a hierarchical structure, otherwise are activated through cooperation and joint deliberation. There is no logic of majorities, but rather, with the support of the curatorial team, a capacity for communication, listening and agreement. In the project, the federation of competencies becomes a creative strategy to achieve a common goal.

1. Who is the project for?

This practice, which also aims to redistribute resources from the budget of an exhibition cycle, responds to Santa Mònica's objective of conceiving art as an apparatus for the creation of possible or potential futures, an apparatus currently at the disposal of the public and not just the property of a specific sector.

For this reason, this call is not only addressed to professional artists, but also to all those people who feel challenged by the subject matter, by collective processes and by the word "art", understood as a mechanism for activating utopias.

1. Phases

The project is structured in four phases of participation:

Phase 0. Exploration (October-December 2022). Collective initiation process in the Rambles area, based on four meetings with the curatorial board in dialogue with other agents or collectives.

Once Phase 0 is over, each participating artist will decide whether to continue.  Participation in the following phases will imply accepting an employment relationship with Santa Mònica arts centre, remunerated with 3.000 € for participant.

Phase 1. Assembly (January-March 2023). Santa Mònica will host the physical work and meeting space for the participants. The framework of operating agreements for the rest of the project will have to be agreed upon. 

Phase 2. Action (January-March 2023). Activation, production and exhibition tasks by the assembly, which are expected to have an impact on artistic actions in the Rambles area. In this phase, priority will be given to working from the physical space of the arts centre in order to promote synergies between agents and not to enter into self-exploitation dynamics. 

Phase 3. Exhibition (March-May 2023). The different actions and prototypes devised in the previous phases will lead to an exhibition at Santa Mònica. The resulting exhibition is conceived in principle as a compilation of the traces of the work and actions deployed throughout the previous phases, both within Santa Mònica and in the public space.  

The whole set of actions, from phase 0 to phase 4, must be understood as a continuous and choral process of search that goes through different intensities of public activation and that contemplates the final exhibition not as a priority, but as a compilation of the traces and documentation of the whole creative process.

Image source: Arxiu Cooperació ciutadana de la UTE Km Zero.

How to register

To register for the project "Utopia Rambles", please fill in this form .

The registration period will be open from 1 to 30 September 2022.

A maximum of 44 participants will be selected. The selection criteria will be based on the degree of commitment of dedication, experience or motivation in the work in federation of competencies and work skills in relation to the utopian imaginary. The results will be communicated in October.