Passeig Santa Eulàlia, 25
08017 Barcelona
Spain
T +34 932 03 09 23
info@eina.cat
Eina/Idea is a project initiated by Fundació EINA to bring art and design education beyond its known academic and commercial comfort zones. Eina/Idea is conceived as a critical supplement, a machine for aesthetic reflection in permanent exhibition drive, a programming platform, a cognitive accelerator.
In close collaboration with EINA University School of Design and Art and its partner the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, but also outside of academia, Eina/Idea operates through research cells called cabinets—conceptually unique workspaces with tactical objectives defined according to their guest agents. Directed by curator and writer Manuel Cirauqui, Eina/Idea’s inaugural semester program features both emerging and recognized figures such as Aimé Iglesias Lukin, Mériam Korichi, Prem Krishnamurthy, Asier Mendizabal, Sara Nadal-Melsió, Yasmil Raymond, Valentin Roma, Mónica de la Torre, and Ian Wallace. This season’s graphics are made by guest design studios Arauna and Gemma Villegas.
On a practical level, Eina/Idea proposes seminars, lectures, performances, and chamber exhibitions in which students and the general public can get involved. Using variable temporalities and typologies, Eina/Idea wants to be a vehicle for propagations of all kinds, from curatorial thinking to memes; from documentary practices to gaming; from experience design to applied critique. In short, Eina/Idea is a search and research intensifier, open to all.
Eina, in Catalan, is the instrument, and Eina/Idea is a two-sided object, an instru/mental, material and concept, poietic and poetic make-think as opposed to over-designed claustro-f*ck. Something sounding like eina, in Arabic, is the questioning for direction, where-wherever-wheresoever-no matter where. Every direction is two directions, every path is two-sided. Eima, in ancient Greek, is the garment, the fabric—an allegory taking us from textile to text and back, from collective to individual; or, the school as fabric of intensities. Eima/Eidos—an interlacing of mental threads so thick that they form a blanket. Eina as what, how, and where? In the traditional organization of space, there are four cardinal points plus above and below. The seventh direction is the other of these six, the ubiquitous oblique. All directions in between the six complete and exceed the whole. This impossible addition at the end of an associative chain could be instrumentalized as a model for speculative thinking, an eina/idea.
For extended information about Eina/Idea’s programs, visit eina.cat
