Sustainable cities. making visible the invisible. INS Les Aimerigues

The core of our project has been the approach from a scientific and artistic perspective to the problem of air pollution and sustainability in the cities. Urbanism, the very same idea of the city and, of course, the climate emergency are other ideas and concepts we have been working on as well. 

We departed from an initiative of Terrassa Major House, La revolució verda (The Green Revolution) (https://www.terrassa.cat/larevolucioverda). 

Our project wanted from the beginning work in a citizen science framework. We have closely collaborated with other institutions: scientific or technological as Global Health Institute of Barcelona, ISGlobal (https://www.isglobal.org/en/), FabLab BCN (https://fablabbcn.org/) and Smart Citizen Kit (https://smartcitizen.me/); and cultural as MACBA (https://www.macba.cat/es=), artists Imanol Buisan (http://imanolbuisan.com/es) and Mixité (https://www.mixite.cat/), RutaDeAutor (https://rutadeautor.com/) and, specially, the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, CCCB, with whom we have been working the last two years on the ALIA projects (first in “Health and cities” and, this year, in “Consciousness in comic strips”), (https://www.cccb.org/en/multimedia/playlists/alia-consciousness-in-comic-strips/rel-event/239616).

A website has documented all our steps. 

https://erasmus207.wixsite.com/sustainablecities

To start with, we made a workshop with ISGlobal experts, who gave us the knowledge and tools to begin measuring and understanding the air pollution problem in our city. At the same time, departing from the "Show your stripes" project of scientist Ed Hawkins, we made our own approximation to the climate emergency topic too with the "Everybody knows" exhibition in collaboration with our other partners in the project. You can follow the development of this "action" in the blog of our webpage (https://erasmus207.wixsite.com/sustainablecities/post/everybody-knows-that-s-how-it-goes-i)

Simultaneously, our workshops with artists Imanol Buisan and Mixité allowed us to get deeper in the idea of the city, of the extreme complexity of the interrelationships between the physical and social aspects at play. 

Departing from our dialogues with them and our own approximation to the contemporary art, via the idea of collage, all this work gave birth to two exhibitions in our school (Everybody knows, City collage) that were included and expanded in our final major exhibition on air pollution in the ciies, “Nous somme tous des respirateurs”, inspired by the work of avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp, that included the two infographies ellaborated in our ALIA project (https://www.cccb.org/publicacions-digitals/alia-ciutats-i-salut/ciutats-saludables/article_fer-visible-contaminacio-atmosferica.html). 

Picture of the teachers route through the "Nous somme tous des respirateurs", that occupied the whole 1st floor corridor.

Both aspects, scientific and artistic, met again in the publication of the first number of our new school science magazine, Zoom, that presented officially for the first time all this work to our school community (https://issuu.com/ccarrascosa/docs/revista_zoom_final). The magazine collect the different activities, workshops and exhibitions made during the project and included besides other scientific and literary works and activities made by the whole Les Aimerigues community.