Món Llibre 2011: Children’s Book Festival

The Món Llibre 2011, the children’s book festival this year being held on 9 and 10 April at the CCCB and Macba.

Among the over a hundred free activities and workshops being held, children will be able to share experiences with the Japanese illustrator Taro Gomi, the creator of Gargots: a book for drawing, painting and creating (Un llibre per dibuixar, pintar i crear).

What’s more, there will also be a series of merry-go-rounds through Japan, on which children will be able to take a tour in tribute to their Asian counterparts and listen to traditional Japanese stories.

The festival includes other disciplines, such as music, dance and theatre, which offer alternative ways to tell stories to young children.

The performer Sònia Gómez will be doing a dance version of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, while Joan Garriga, from La Troba Kung-Fú will be inviting children to live a pirate’s tale. There will also be puppets to suit all tastes, rappers like the Hipnotik Faktory.

Among the Book World areas that you really must visit is the Asterix: The Albert Uderzo’s Archives exhibition, with secret works by one of the two creators of this legendary Gaul.

Món Llibre – April 09 & 10, 2011 – Free Entrance
CCCB -> pl. de Joan Coromines & MACBA -> pl. dels Àngels

Zoomvi, Festival of VideoClips Artists

The Festival de Realitzadors de Videoclips de Catalunya, Zoomvi (Festival of Video Clips Artists), lands in Barcelona at the CCCB on 1 and 2 April to show the best productions created by audiovisual and music fans.

The festival is held simultaneously in Barcelona, Reus and Olot. The finalists in the 2010 competition will be screened, along with the documentary Bankrobber.doc , various video clip projects will be presented and there will also be a battle of video clips. Plus there will be concerts, with Le Petit Ramon and Myriads, for example, where video clip projections will be mixed with the live music.

Programme

- Screenings, Battle of the Video Clips, New Formats, Bankrobber.doc, Luís Cervero

- La Ciudad Sumergida (Dorian), I Love Ü (Murfila), Kenneth Russo, Atleta, Le petit Ramon/El Chico

A unique opportunity, then, for fans and producers to exchange practices and experiences.

Theatre CCCB, a new venue in Barcelona

Seventeen years after the inauguration of the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), the venue is adding the finishing touches to its extension with the opening of the Teatre CCCB, a product of the revamped Antic Teatre de la Casa de la Caritat.

The new venue, which is connected to the current building by an underground corridor, has two multi-purpose rooms, the Sala Raval, on the first floor with seating capacity for 170 people, and the Sala Teatre, on the second floor, with room for 600 standing spectators and 450 seated spectators.

The rehabilitation work made the most of the remains of earlier buildings, the old theatre designed by Josep Goday in 1912, and the façade of a cloister in the old Casa de la Caritat. It is also equipped with escalators, one of the characteristic features of the CCCB’s main building.

It also has a new entrance, at Plaça Joan Coromines, where the new theatre, painted white, invites comparison with another white building, that of the MACBA.

The first activity it is to play host to will be the Kosmopolis literature fest, which starts on Thursday 24 March.

Theatre CCCB.

OVNI (Unidentified Video Observatory), audiovisual exhibition at CCCB Barcelona

The CCCB is holding the 13th “Unidentified Video Observatory” (OVNI), from 22 to 27 February. This year it will be reflecting on the concept of “disreality“. It will feature 45 items selected from the 190 acquired by the observatory’s archives this year.

Silvio Berlusconi‘s media model is reflected in his television which, among other things, draws a grotesque, vulgar and humiliating image of women. This is the reality portrayed in Lorella Zanardo’s documentary Il corpo delle donne.

Life 2.0, by Jason Spingarn-Koff, shows how Second Life has become an alter ego of reality. And Goldfarmers, by Ge Jin, reflects on the duality of secret workshops in China, where men spend hours playing multi-player games online to win virtual goods.

All these films reflect on reality. Or, rather, on “disreality“, which is the main theme of the audiovisual exhibition OVNI (Unidentified Video Observatory).

An archive that contains over 2.000 items of video art, independent documentaries and media archaeology, it aims to encourage criticism of contemporary politics, culture and society.

Festival audiovisual OVNI 2011 ‘desrealitat’
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona -> C Montalegre, 5 | Ciutat Vella

Emergencia! 2011 – 3rd Independent Music Festival of Barcelona

From 6 pm in the afternoon until 12 at midnight for the two scenarios will center a selection of the most outstanding artists in the emergent music scene both national & international with proposals from the pop and rock as the experimental sounds.

For the third year running, Emergencia! becomes a showcase for upcoming sounds in independent music, going out on a limb for a series of new names. Fiera!, Ornamento y Delito, Caballo, Dotore, Me and the Bees, and Patrick Bower or Stranded Horse are all coming to the forefront, and Emergència! has chosen them to present to the public on the two stages at the CCCB.

19 February 2011 – Limited capacity
Admission fee: 7 €
Concessions for students, senior citizens and the unwaged: 5 €.
Free admission for Friends of the CCCB

Disappeared Exhibition at CCCB Barcelona

For decades photography has helped to denounce the worst aspects of human barbarism. And this is one of the best examples of photojournalism with a firm commitment to denouncing these crimes, an exhibition which reveals the emotional involvement of its creator, the photojournalist Gervasio Sánchez, who has worked on it since he was a student at the Bellaterra faculty of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

In Disappeared, an exhibition you can see at the CCCB, Sánchez has documented the forced disappearance of thousands of people in ten countries in Latin America, Asia and Europe, along with the drama experienced by the families of the disappeared when their corpses are found (the ones that are found!) in common graves, identified (those that can be identified!) classified and stored and, finally, returned to those closest to them.

The remains were found in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iraq, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Spain between 1998 and 2010. “We weren’t able to document the graves there are in Catalonia because no Catalan government has ever wanted to exhume the bodies. The pain of the victims has been forgotten. It’s shameful”, says Sánchez.

Only 231 graves with 5.300 victims have been found in Spain, half of them unidentified because there is no DNA bank and many relatives of those killed in the Civil War have long since died.

Montalegre, 5 – 08001 Barcelona

BAC! 09 – The Barcelona Contemporary Art Festival

The Barcelona Contemporary Art Festival BAC! 09 opens Pandora’s box. At least, this year’s date with international creation is subtitled “Pandora’s Boxes“. An ironic title, as we won’t find all humanity’s ills there, rather an assertion of feminine art, but without any of the clichés normally associated with it.

Neither social criticism nor discourses on gender discrimination; the sixty-or-so female artists whose works are on display in BAC!’s main exhibition at the CCCB, free of charge, prefer humour, irony and a fresher perspective.

This is what we find in Ariadna Arnés’s photos, in Hanamaro Chaki’s illustrations and Bárbara Sánchez Barroso’s embroidery. You can be sure to find installations and videoart there too, such as those by Marta Jiménez Salcedo and Ms Woolman.

One of the highlights of this tenth BAC! is the section entitled “BAC! CAM“. This will feature one of the fullest retrospectives on women’s videoart.

To be more specific, the programme called “Indomitable Women” reviews female videoart over the last forty years, from the field’s pioneers like Maya Deren, celebrity names like Yoko Ono and Joan Jonas, up to more recent creators like Dora García, among others.

X Festival Internacional Barcelona Art Contemporani – BAC Pandora’s Boxes  – website Festival
From01/12/2009 to 03/01/2010
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB): C/Montalegre, 5

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