2015

Becoming Public. Cultural Innovation International Prize

CCCB

The Cultural Innovation International Prize is a biannual competition announced by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) to stimulate innovation in the field of culture, recognise the importance of research as an integral part of projects and explore the possible cultural scenarios of coming years.

The members of the Jury have decided to award the 2014-2015 Cultural Innovation International Prize ex aequo to the projects CulTime and Becoming Public.

Becoming Public, by Oriol Fontdevila, raises the idea of reversing the paradigm by which museums/cultural institutions are “producers” of audiences, in favour of an alternative system in which audiences themselves generate cultural institutions.

Becoming Public is conceived as an experiment that revolves around publics, but above all around the public mission of the museum. A museum becomes public when the audience or general public starts to produce it, becoming one of its mediators, and helping to shape its policies.

Becoming Public is a project in which series of organisations from civil society, the art world, and the educational sphere work on a collaborative research and curating process that questions the museum institution and rethinks its potentialities by means of different interventions. The process is intended to act as a lever and to generate a prototype that will encourage ongoing, long-term dialogue between civil society, the educational sector, the CCCB, and other museums in Barcelona.

Becoming Publicis an opportunity to renew the public sphere of the museum in a totally new way: it does not conceive the museum or cultual heritage as exemplary spaces; instead, it breaks away from this tradition and considers them as a common, and therefore, debatable resources.