Hi! My name is Ines David and I moved to Barcelona recently to work together with Gisela Chillida on EARTs new residency program proposal.
EART is a Centre of Art, Education and Mediation based in Gràcia Barcelona since 1993. It has now been 2 months since I have joined this project via EYE’s collaborative program. I wrote my first article for EYE a month ago about getting to know the team and settling in Barcelona. At that moment I was solely working with Gisela. Since then we have had the chance to receive a new additional member to our team: Bianca Dentellato, (current project coordinator in all projects related to mediation and archive). Bianca joining has been very helpful in directing us in our benchmarking of potential host spaces and advising us on useful connections for further counseling on how to structure the residency. Currently we have advanced quite quickly in our residency planning, and have more or less finished the initial research stage of the program: benchmarking of residency programs, possible residency partners and financial analysis, as well as analysing visible gaps & opportunities in terms of residency structures, this research has also been incredibly useful fo own residency project, and will help me optimise my own research process.
Some exciting news is that one of the potential financial models for this new residency line would be to apply to become part of Creative Europe’s international cooperation program! This would greatly change the course of our current vision of the residency, as this type of project typically tends to be on a bigger scale, involving 2 to 3 actors/partners as opposed to just 1 partner as is the case for EARTs previous residency line with Brussels.
Additionally, I have been getting more involved in the archive project. EART has a very impressive archive of all their activities in mediation, event and exhibition production and other creative projects. They are currently in the process of digitalising this archive and I have been helping them out with this task. This has been very interesting for my own personal residency project as reading through their projects has given me a lot of insight on how EART started out as a cultural center.
Lastly, over the last 2 weeks, there is the July summer camp organised at the center, where our offices are located. This means that over 40 kids are here every day, jumping and running around the place. This has been a challenge as a lot of the usual spaces like the library are now no longer accessible, although it’s also brought a lot of liveliness and amusement to our days.
