Project Connexions: art, education and neighborhood to rethink plastic

What happens when the school, the museum and the neighborhood think together about the challenges of the present? This question marks the starting point of the Connections Project, an initiative that, this year, has been reactivated with the collaboration between the Carulla Foundationthe Can Framis Museum and theSant Martí del Poblenou School. The proposal aims to bring artistic languages ​​closer to children to stimulate critical reflection, creativity and the ability to imagine alternatives to the problems we face as a society. In this edition, the starting point was a question as everyday as urgent: the use and abuse of plastic.

In a first stage, which began in January, the students of Escola Sant Martí visited the cultural facilities of the two collaborating entities. At the Barcelona Room of the Earth Museumthey entered the exhibition plastic Cool or kinky?which explores the origins and possible futures of this material. They also experienced its musical possibilities with the workshop Phonoplastydriven by Santi Carcassona. Al Can Framis Museumthey approached contemporary arts and discovered how it dialogues with what they live every day.

The second part of the project was the collective creation of a work of art with the support of the conceptual artist Gaston Lisak. The piece, conceived as a singular sculpture, aims to build – in the words of the artist – a time capsule. The students brought to class all kinds of plastic objects from their everyday lives, which have been preserved under a layer of vinyl that will keep them intact over the centuries. The result leads us to a reflection that goes beyond the environmental impact of waste: what does everything we leave behind say about us?

Part of the time capsule is a letter to his future self.

Both the visits to the cultural facilities and the class activities have invited the students to ask themselves what place plastic occupies in their lives, how it conditions their habits and what consequences it has for the planet. The artistic languages ​​have made it possible to place the students at the center of the reflection and make them active protagonists of the process. So, beyond being limited to the analysis of the problem, students have been able to experience and reinterpret it since creation.

This is precisely one of the great values ​​of the project. The arts help to look at the world more deeply, to activate critical thinking and to build collective responses to contemporary challenges. When education and culture work together, spaces are opened where children do not just learn passively, but also participate and imagine possible futures. The new edition of the Connections Project highlights that, sometimes, to start changing the world, you just have to look in a different way at what is closest to you.

Connexions is not a new project for the Carulla Foundation. For years it was part of its line of action, with the desire to bring cultural and educational agents into dialogue to generate changes in schools. Now, with the Foundation’s new headquarters, the initiative returns with a new perspective, more rooted in the territory and more linked to the neighborhood community. The aim is to open in Poblenou, to generate links with local entities and promote projects that make culture a tool for community and educational transformation.