Fundació Eina's research and cultural programming platform, *einaidea was founded in 2019 in Barcelona with the aim of altering the normalised practices of art and design. *einaidea approaches these practices as a generative and common ground, through whose combinatory potential it aims to bring out the profiles that will define creation in our immediate future: radical singularities, choral and interdependent practices, alterities that *einaidea's activity insists on cultivating and promoting through new formats and methodologies.
*einaidea arises from the need to reactivate the dialogues of the school with the city and its cultural and research institutions, both in the arts and in science and technology, taking and permuting their spaces (workshop-laboratory-classroom-museum-street-forest) as scenarios for speculative practice and critical exploration. Each project is a cabinet, a conceptually singular workspace, with tactical objectives defined according to the agencies involved. Using variable temporalities and typologies under an ever-collaborative model, *einaidea aims to be an intensifier and incubator, a propagator and a fermenter, bringing the reflective work of the university into the field of production. *einaidea proposes an annual open programme with practical seminars, conferences, performances, publications and exhibitions co-organised with like-minded entities, through which both students and citizens are challenged. As a think tank, *einaidea creates production spaces in the manner of a nomadic studio, which receives commissions from its collaborating entities for tasks ranging from strategic design to graphics, curating or critical-poetic analysis.
Public and open programming constitutes an important part of *einaidea's activity. With it, we want to rethink art and design practices in an expanded and continuous framework for device invention, sometimes ephemeral or immaterial tools, ritual prostheses or residual amulets, with which to alter, cure or transform the course of daily life. The emergencies of the present guide *einaidea in the rethinking of the disciplines and teachings of the art-design axis, aiming to respond to the planetary predicament and new post-human scenarios.
We use the building of Eina Bosc as pedagogical material and a place of practice, performing the values of transversality, transformation, inclusivity, diversity, resilience, feralness. In this way, we weave circuits of physical and digital, territorial and international cooperation, with creators coming from different cosmologies and latitudes, working with situated or alien methodologies, working enzymatically with concepts, tracking and collecting, instead of predefining or scripting. A learning against gravity, where art and design function as mantics of the present in their graphic, visual, verbal and corporal manifestations.
Manuel Cirauqui, Director
