A-PLACE LINKING PLACES THROUGH NETWORKED ARTISTIC PRACTICES

The purpose of A-Place is to design and implement art-centred place making activities that cut across disciplinary, cultural and geographic boundaries. Over the next four years (2019-2023), a series of actions (i.e. performances, installations, debates, and video and photography productions) will be carried out in six European cities: Barcelona, Bologna, Brussels, Lisbon, Ljubljana, and Nicosia. This site-specific research will examine the role of artistic practices as a catalyst for connecting and strengthening communities.

A-Place partnership includes nine organisations from six European countries: three schools of architecture – School of Architecture La Salle, Barcelona (Spain); Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia); KU Leuven, Department of Architecture (Belgium), one Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal)-, three multidisciplinary groups focusing on arts and community engaged urban interventions – Alive Architecture (Belgium), prostoRož (Slovenia), and Urban Gorillas (Cyprus)-, and two cultural agencies specialised in film and video art – Screen Projects (Spain), and City Space Architecture (Italy).

From its very beginnings, one of the foremost concerns of LOOP Barcelona has been to offer artists opportunities to reflect and enroll in practices that strengthen the various social commitments they want to address in their works. And so it happens that many of the artistic practices that we support are prone to capture the complex layers that animate public space and the various constructs that define people’s sense of belonging, as well as those intimate ways in which they relate with the world. In short, we feel the need to acknowledge and promote that, at the root of their creations, there is a clear intent to uncover the symbolic function and construction of place, a hidden layer that seldom manifests itself in material terms. This place is not an evident place, and so, its making often goes untold. Our contribution to this European cooperation project is to help artist achieve this uncovering aim.

In this 2020 edition we are happy to present the following works that we have helped to complete: