The Artist Collective at La Escocesa Takes Action with ‘Proyecto co-‘

La Escocesa is an expanded community of creators housed in an old factory of the Poblenou district. In the late 90’s this old run-down building was recovered and reopened by a group of artists who decided to reinterpret the space and question its hierarchical and alienating principles.

The old factory has become an iconic space for freethinkers and creatives in Barcelona, covering the needs of artists at different stages of their career. La Escocesa offers workspaces and resources for creative project development.

In recent weeks they have been working to face the “new normal” in a much more thoughtful, re-conceived and careful way. Thus, Proyecto co- has emerged.

The project converts La Escocesa into an artistic research center to face the Covid-19 crisis and propose solutions.

The prefix co- comes from the Latin cum and from the Indo-European -kom, meaning ‘together’, ‘union’ or ‘company’. These two letters are of paramount importance now that contact is something dangerous and new realities have emerged from it such as virtual connection, absent company and constantly negotiated commitment. There is an urgent need to think in community about the virus, cohabit with the virus and plan for after the virus.

An artists’ collective has gathered in La Escocesa to harvest new ways of cohabiting public and cultural spaces, to build co-responsibility and social security plans, and to share spaces for financial aid and care.

Proyecto co offers alternatives to virtualization as the only possible response to the crisis of contact between bodies that the cultural scene will have to face in the coming months.

The project is made up of three groups

El co-nsultorio connects, shares, communicates, and hopefully charges. The consultation is opened to inform and take care of everyone who needs to learn about available aid and subsidies inside and outside the cultural sector.

La co-ctelera to meet, accompany, trust and make community. This group will be in charge of filling the streets with activities that accompany the progressive lack of confidence, helping to get rid of fear of the residents in the Poblenou neighborhood, and later all of Barcelona.

El co-rpus, the body, the whole, the beginning. This interdisciplinary group will aim to return the body to culture safely, imagining and proposing packages of protocols and measures that can serve cultural centers and individual artists.

These three working groups have been articulated as an extraordinary program of twenty-four scholarships that La Escocesa has offered internally to its community, especially targeting its most vulnerable members. In this way, the composition of the groups itself functions as a first internal measure, helping to relaunch the activity and help the economies of the artistic community.