Thinking Together About a Mobile Art Unit

“Thinking Together about a Mobile Art Unit” is a networked research project that sets out from the idea of a “museum outside the museum” and mobile art units as catalysts able to spark participation in culture in terms of creation, establishing new discourses and stimulating the poetic and political imagination. In particular, the research explores the possibility of setting up projects situated and co-created between the community, artists and artistic mediators who experiment with prototype mobile art units that are not objectual but conceptual, replicable and expandable into other contexts.

Taking part in the process are the education areas of MACBA (Barcelona), IVAM (València), Centre d’Art la Panera (Lleida) and Es Baluard Museu (Palma), with the support of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation. These teams have chosen “the right to the city” as a transversal line of work for each of them to approach it on the basis of their own circumstances and specific nature and, among the communities close to each of the institutions taking part, help to nurture spaces for collective emancipation strategies.

The four institutions have been working together wince 2020 and the research has crystallised in two forms.

Firstly, Lo estamos haciendo [We’re Doing It], a publication containing the collective thought process supported by artist Itxaso Corral about the idea of designing a mobile art unit. It is a notebook that aims to share some useful questions distilled from the intense experience this process of collective thought has involved, with the aim of encouraging others to set up new “thinking together” processes. Questions that go beyond the search for a mobile art unit design to become collective desires, learnings and metaphors concerning the interstices of what it means to be education departments in our institutions.

Since summer 2024, we have also been working on -ANDO RECORDS, a practical and experimental process to start up a horizontal collective process concerning rights and freedoms in urban contexts, including artists Lluc Mayol and Violeta Ospina and communities close to the different institutions. In the context of Palma, we work with a group of neighbours from the two neighbourhoods close to the Museum, specifically with the Associació de Veïns del Puig de Sant Pere, Santa Creu i Sa Llotja and the Associació Barri Cívic de Santa Catalina i Es Jonquet.

This process takes the form of a sonic (rather than sound) publishing label in movement. A collective platform that sets out to work in the intersection between sound, speech and musicality in multiple formats. It is an open code, adaptable and freely shareable brand that aims to provide a flexible space for ideas to grow in line with each context and community, to encourage exchange between diverse realities that are experienced in different cities from a perspective of rights.

Participating artist biographies

*Itxaso Corral, I work as an artist who breathes, moves, sounds and thinks between the performing arts, teaching, writing and publishing. I work together with the education and outreach departments of different arts institutions, including MACBA and the Fundació Joan Brossa. I am an expert in choreographic calligraphy, allowing me to insist on the absence of separation between body and thought. I do performance in unexpected time/spaces and formats, because performance can show how we are inter-sustained in our lives. I am preparing a Paranormal Doctoral Thesis that asks, poetically, “What does it mean to be alive on this planet of the contemporary?”

*Violeta Ospina graduated with a degree in Plastic Arts and holds a master’s degree in Theatre and Performance Art from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2010). She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Sound Art (2025) at the Universitat de Barcelona and is also the artist in residence at Arts Santa Mònica (2023-2024). Her works, performances and actions, both as a solo artist and collectively, have been held in Llibreria Blanquerna (Madrid, 2023), La Escocesa (Barcelona, 2022), CCCB (Barcelona, 2022), Arts Santa Mònica (Barcelona, 2022), La Escocesa (Barcelona, 2019 and 2021), Museo de la Universidad Nacional (2014 and 2007), Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (2013) and Museo del Banco de la República (Bogotá, 2012), among many other non-conventional and street stage sand spaces. Between 2010 and 2019 she held four individual exhibitions between Bogotá and Barcelona (Alalimón – Art Nou 2019, El Catascopio, Laagencia, Nuevas propuestas – Alianza Colombofrancesa, 2011).

She has also formed part of the RWM working group since 2016. At MACBA she has taken part in the following activities: Open Essay (2023-2024), Let’s Sound with… Radia Cava-ret (2022), Picó, for Lorem Ipsum: Situated Music (2021), Casa-cos-parla in Barcelona Dibuixa (2021), De com es pot radiar i fer reverdir el museu (2020), Estados distanciosos in P2P. De igual a igual, and ¡Radia el museo! (2019). She has also taken part in Pensando juntas un dispositivo de arte móvil (2021).

*Lluc Mayol bases his projects on relationships that he establishes between editorial work, education and artistic creation, activating collective processes that materialize in formats influenced by artist publications, fanzines and free radio stations. In a back-and-forth between public institutions and community and self-managed spaces, it maintains a critical position in both contexts. He has been the promoter of several independent cultural platforms such as Saladestar, La fanzinoteca ambulante, also being part of collective projects such as Nau 21, Artdoules, La Automática, Escuela Meme, Catxirulo Lab, La higuera and Massa Salvatge. Currently, he lives and works in Valencia.