Mobile Garden A place to meet
An open space, a social space. How could the Museum be more open to the needs of the neighbourhood?
Is it possible to be radically public? How public are cultural institutions? The Mobile Garden is born from this dilemma. It is a garden because it is conceived as a space of urban calm, of shared dialogue, an oasis where the community – and the Museum too – can ‘be’. And it is mobile because there are no closed or fixed proposals. While initially based on conversations with residents, communities and agents of the neighbourhood to respond to the imaginaries of those around us, it is also a free-access space on the ground floor of the Convent dels Àngels that is open to everyone. A walk-in space in a corner of the square that will be transformed into whatever its users decide. What do you want to happen? What else should the Museum offer apart from its programming? Your actions and suggestions can help us decide how the Museum and its public spaces should be used.
The Voices of the Mobile Garden
‘A construction where we can all have a voice’; ‘What do we enjoy doing and what does the square mean to us?’; ‘Spaces for active listening’. The Mobile Garden is explained in this podcast. We would like you to listen to it and share it. Different ages, different ways of looking and possible dialogues generate a space and a project that defines itself as it is being developed.
Space for dialogue
The Mobile Garden was born out of conversations and dialogues with the neighbourhood and its agents. Conversations generated after years of public and educational programmes, working groups and workshops, and ongoing projects, which have led us to establish a permanent dialogue with the citizens at an institutional level. A space for dialogue that has already given rise to meetings with schools, with parents, with the associative fabric of the Raval and with members of the neighbourhood’s institutions, to discuss the need to reorganise spaces, to naturalise the different areas of the Museum and optimise their uses. What institutional structures can we offer the community? How can we join together to transform our environment into a place that is closer to our desires?
The Mobile Garden
The Mobile Garden is a communal space, a neighbourhood space on the ground floor of the Convent dels Àngels that is free and where everyone is welcome. At street level, a place where you can just walk in and feel at home. A place to be, a space for meeting, leisure, conversation, collective learning, reading, with a suggestion box, in an atmosphere of community and urban calm, an oasis, a free place for the neighbourhood coordinated by the Museum. The initiative is based on the methodology of civilian participation of Recetas Urbanas, a studio of architecture directed for the last two decades by Santiago Cirugeda and Alice Attout.
Audios
Listen to what the Mobile Garden is in Darija, Urdu, Tagalog and bengali:
With the support of
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
Activities
Imagining New Europes
It is a collective programme which includes eight programmes from seven Spanish cultural institutions and it is curated by Jesús Carrillo and promoted by the Coordinating Office for the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU.