The flying saucers, a mediation project of Nau Ivanow

From Nau Ivanow, we have been pushing for years projects with international artists who pass through our center for connect the arts and culture with the educational centers and the families of the neighborhood. Today we present to you the last project we carried out last year, which resulted in an extraordinary book that you can consult in digital format on our website: The flying saucers.

During 2025, at Nau Ivanow we organized several gastronomic gatherings with the families and students of the Escola l’Estel de la Sagrera. Through the kitchen, we created a meeting and bonding space where we got to know very different life stories that allowed us to discover and enjoy the great diversity that exists in the school.

As a result of these meetings, the recipe book is born The flying saucers, we hope you love it as much as we do and enjoy her recipes from all over.

In this article, we wanted to give the floor to Nacho Tamagnoactor, dramatist and cultural manager of the La Parisina cultural center in Córdoba (Argentina) who has coordinated meetings between the students and their families at the Nau Ivanow.

“Our language, the language that identifies us, that which we feel as the most intimate and constitutive of our identity, is the result of endless displacements and migrations: an open system and in constant movement, composed of differences articulated among themselves.

we say thank you para dar las gracias, an expression that comes directly from the French. please is a medieval expression that comes from vulgar Latin. neighborhood, alcove y sugar They are of Arab origin. theater derives from the Greek théatron (θέατρον), a word that means “place to see”. dramaturgy is a Greek word that means “the work of doing actions”. A dramaturgy operates in the form of a text. text comes from textLatin word meaning “weave” or “weave”. Migrator comes from Latin to migrate: literally “move, move, change place”.

For some years now, together with Nau Ivanow, we have been working on a series of projects that, from different strategies of expanded dramaturgy, seek to weave y to knit together migrant and non-migrant people from the neighborhood within the same creative process. The flying saucers is one of these projects.

The project was developed together with the families of the AFA of the Escola l’Estel, in response to a very specific problem: the migrant families did not speak Catalan, the Catalan families did not speak the language of the other families, and this created a rift between the families of the school. How to solve this linguistic and cultural barrier?

In order to work on this situation, we created a space together with the Nau Ivanow, a common space centered on a simple premise: to understand all of us as migrants and to start cooking together, so that we all become enmeshed (entangled) in the same action: that of cooking.

At each meeting, two families from the school shared a recipe from their country, around which we got to work and gossip. Cooking and talking, we discovered the hidden life story behind that recipe, that person, and the whole landscape that that person means in themselves.

For more than two years, we cooked together on the terrace of the Nau. In this time, we have prepared, tasted and listened to food and life stories from Paraguay, Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Morocco, Italy, Venezuela, Honduras, Catalonia, Madrid, Chile, Argentina and many other places. We have traveled to each of these corners, getting to know each mother’s life story. And through this journey, we have managed to get to know each other in depth, beyond our language barriers, weaving new emotional bonds between us and a significant alliance with the space of the Ship.

Recently, we collected this whole process in a book, which compiles the recipes and life stories of all the participating mothers, written collaboratively with each one of them. Each story is accompanied by illustrations and photographs taken by the children, who portrayed us and them throughout the process.

It is a multilingual edition, with texts in Catalan and in the original language of each family. A device for meeting and intercultural coexistence, at the same time as a useful tool to introduce ourselves to the language of each family. In this way, going over each recipe reminds us of ourselves, while teaching us, all together, a new new language in a sensitive, tasty and entertaining way.

Our language is a disputed territory: but also a common territory, in which migrant words that move and make us take refuge and mix.

thank you, i love you, hello y see you soon they are migrants Our cells migrate. We ourselves migrate all the time. What we love most is the result of a displacement, a migration, a movement.

As our language, through this project we have built a new common space that brings us together in the same fabric, within the same plot. A space where the theater opens up to the public space and becomes one place to see (us). And write us: as a neighborhood, as a collective and as people.»

Article published in the magazine All of Sagrera in July 2026