Dear friends, students, teachers and staff of EINA,
I hope that all of you and all your families are well. Should any of you have suffered the loss of a family member or friend, I would like to express my most sincere condolences; my thoughts are with you.
I would like to thank you all for your hard work in making it possible to carry on with our academic work, despite the huge difficulties posed by this exceptional situation. With the contribution of you all, thanks to your flexibility and ability to adapt, we have been able to organise the online courses with more than considerable success. It is still too early to know how the course of the pandemic will evolve and what the guidelines will be with regard to the lockdown and subsequent return to some level of normality. So it is still too early to assess the extent of this success and to know what overall mark to award this course, and especially how to finish it to everyone’s satisfaction with the least damage possible.
We will carry on doing what we have been doing to date, and as events pan out, we will adapt the best way possible to all your needs and to our responsibility, which is to make EINA work, ensuring the utmost quality and meticulousness in fulfilling our mission.
This was to be a year of renewal for the EINA project. Covid-19 has prevented it from being carried out fully, and it has especially prevented us from doing it in the presence of us all. However, led by the Management team, Pau de Solà-Morales, Ramon Parramon and Manuel Cirauqui, we are in the midst of a far-reaching transformation of our courses, their concepts, form and organisation. To this effect, it is appropriate to highlight the start-up of Eina/Idea. This was presented at Barra de Ferro shortly before the lockdown and we have not been able to develop it in the way and on the terms we had imagined. However, we have done it via digital channels and shown the huge potential that it may come to have in these areas. Eina/Idea is a platform for aesthetic reflection and knowledge and is at the forefront of this desire for transformation of these courses that I mentioned. Eina/Idea is the strategic instrument for the acceleration of this transformation.
Also with our gaze focused on renewal, we have new spaces situated very near Casa Sentmenat, the present site, and alongside Casa Manuel Dolcet, which was the very first EINA site. We do not know when the building on Carrer Bosc will be ready, but we have to steadily move into it over the coming academic year.
EINA was founded in 1967. Just 27 years after it was first opened, the school moved to Casa Sentmenat and began a new era. Next year, at the start of the 2021-2022 academic year, it will be 27 years since that second opening and that second era. It is, then, the time for a third era, a true “refounding” of EINA.
The time has come to consider again why we are what we are and how we should respond to the world we live in, to consider the more immediate future when we emerge from this nightmare, and one in which its very survival has been threatened. All of us at EINA are committed to making it better. And we will do this in the way we know how: thinking, creating, designing; forming ideas and doing; with imagination and action.
We are the heirs to an important tradition. EINA was founded under difficult conditions in the years of the dictatorship, yet it became a benchmark for culture and critical thinking about the arts and design in our country. The school has trained a great many of the best artists and designers, and the school has been home to the best Spanish and international teachers and intellectuals. We have the tools to be this benchmark once again and we have the desire. On behalf of the EINA Board of Trustees, I undertake to put in place the necessary conditions for this third and new “refounding”. I am certain that all of us in the EINA Community will be able to be more than a match for the challenges lying ahead.
Now, however, it is time to face the situation created by the pandemic. We must take care of ourselves and seek the best way out of this. We are aware of our responsibility and I can tell you that we will do everything in our power to reduce the damage that the state of emergency might cause now and beyond, both individually and collectively. No one in EINA should feel alone or abandoned at this time: whatever their problem, they must know that they will be listened to, and as far as is possible, we will do what it takes to find a solution.
My very best wishes to you all and to your families. Keep strong and stay safe.
Miquel Molins i Nubiola
President of the EINA Foundation
Barcelona, 28 April 2020