MEDELLÍN: Culture Lives Here: CATUL Network

Medellín is the capital of the department of Antioquia, Colombia, has 2,376,337 inhabitants and it is located in the Aburrá Valley. It has an extensive cultural system that includes museums, libraries, sports facilities and cultural centres. Moreover, the city’s creative sector is made up of more than 6,500 companies, 98% of which are micro and small businesses.

Comprised of 16 cultural facilities including Culture Houses, Articulated Life Units, Theatres and Sound Production Laboratories, the CATUL Network is a project of the Secretariat of Citizen Culture and the Undersecretary of Art and Culture of Medellín City Council, in partnership with Comfenalco Antioquia (Family Compensation Fund, established as a non-profit organisation). The network stretches across the city and the districts into which it is divided and impacts, on average, around 400,000 people each year.

The Culture Houses were born in the 1990s as a response to the wave of violence experienced during those years. They worked together with the communities, but were not associated with one another.  In 2014, the Culture Houses began to work together under a coordinated network model.

The project involves artists, grassroots organisations and community groups through the dynamization of spaces for co-creation, co-management and shared responsibility, in order to provide training and foster free and collaborative learning experiences, recognising the diversity of subjects, communities and territories. At the same time, it is committed to defending traditional knowledge and practices as forms of legitimate expression and understanding of the social reality.

The following actions are developed within the framework of the project:

• Co-Creation Laboratories: Meeting spaces for creation, experimentation and the exchange of knowledge among established artists and artistic and cultural actors of the territory.
• CATUL Festival: Presentation of experiences and processes developed throughout the year across the Network, brought together in an event to publicise the proposals, workshops and actions undertaken in the various cultural facilities.
• Neighbourhood Museographies: Processes of museographic creation of contents developed in the facilities, with the aim of making these products known using interactive devices. The interactive loom of the workshop Tejiendo Memorias (Weaving Memories) and the interactive record player for the festival Manrique Siempre es Tango (Manrique is always Tango) stand out in particular.
• A First Aid Kit in your Garden: Those participating in the sowing and gardening processes of this project go to other territories to exchange knowledge and experiences.
• School of Co-Creative Thinking: A meeting space for mediators (workshop leaders, trainers, coordinators, managers and advocates) who seek to rethink the pedagogical directions taken by the Network.
• Sound Production Laboratories: Experimental spaces for training and the production of different musical, audiovisual and artistic sound movements in the city.

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of people participating in the training processes carried out in the network’s facilities. The importance of the project lies in the collective creation of meaning and the strengthening of the capacities to transform the environment, through multiple processes of artistic creation. At the same time, joint reflection is encouraged to provide feedback on the proposals, so that the project can be permanently evaluated and rethought from a horizontal perspective. Since 2016, processes that transcend the local sphere have been generated and consolidated as cultural proposals of the city, such as the Festival Hablemos Hip Hop (Let’s Talk Hip Hop), Pedregal es Salsa (Pedregal is Salsa), Caminata Punk (Punk Walk), Manrique es Tango (Manrique is Tango) and the Foro Cocina como Acción Social (Kitchen Forum as Social Action).

Presented by: Medellín City Council. Secretariat of Citizen Culture
Contacto: Herman Ferney Montoya Gil
E-mail:  herman.montoya@medellin.gov.co

More information at the IAEC Bank of Experiences.