The German Government has set its sights on the Tabakalera center in Donostia/San Sebastián, which will become part of the Creative Impact Research Center (CIRCE) project. In this way, it will form part of a European reflection group aimed at “addressing support for cultural and creative industries, as well as reinforcing their impact in Europe”. He will be joined by the u-Institut in Berlin, the City University of London, Garage48 in Tallinn and the Center for Creative Economies (ZCCE) in Zurich.
The San Sebastian International Center for Contemporary Culture will receive 300,000 euros to develop four projects throughout 2023 that propose a collaborative methodology between artists and non-cultural organizations through artistic practice.
The Creative Impact Research Center Europe (CIRCE), funded by the German Government and the European Commission, is an interdisciplinary and international think tank dedicated to analyzing how policy can support creative economies and their impact in Europe. Based in Berlin and with research labs in London, San Sebastian, Tallinn and Zurich, CIRCE “joins forces with a highly select network of academics and practitioners from across Europe to strengthen the continent’s creative economies and harness their potential to respond to crises. current and future”.
Tabakalera began its journey in the field of Art, Science, Technology and Society in 2020, coinciding with the opening of Medialab, the open space for citizen creation, with the aim of developing artistic creation projects together with experts from the scientific and technological.
Beyond its participation in the CIRCE project, in 2023 Tabakalera will promote its positioning as a European reference center in the field of Art, Science, Technology and Society, hand in hand with new institutional and business partners in the scientific and technological field, such as the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), Basque Culinary Center Innovation (BCC Innovation) and the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), which join Tabakalera’s current collaborators in this line of work, the DIPC and Techniker.
In addition, Tabakalera will carry out in 2023 various projects that link artists and organizations and that aim to generate an innovation impact in the organizations with which it collaborates, as well as to provide new forms of development for artists. It will do so thanks to its participation in the RED-ACTS, promoted by the Open University of Catalonia, Hac Te and the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, made up of four nodes: Hangar and CCCB (Barcelona), Medialab-Matadero (Madrid), CCCC (Valencia), UPV/EHU and Tabakalera (San Sebastián).
Among other notable projects, throughout this year Tabakalera will promote the Future Storage project together with the DIPC, which investigates the future of digital storage and its ecosocial and territorial implications. The architect Marina Otero, in collaboration with Harvard University, NASA engineer Eduardo Bendek, and the Donostia International Physics Center, proposes experimental models that redesign our relationship with data, its production, consumption, and preservation, taking into account the diversity of the information and the externalities resulting from its storage.
In collaboration with Tekniker, it will analyze interaction between humans and robots. The objective of the project, developed by the artist Amaia Vicente and the Tekniker researchers, proposes a multisensory interface that allows improving the interaction between these robots and their users.
Finally, the collaboration with BCC Innovation, the Basque Culinary Center gastronomy technology center, will promote Food Fictions, an initiative that will involve different creatives from the art world who, together with the chefs of the technology center, will imagine the food of the future, as well as its cultural, environmental and social implications. The project “will focus on the sensory world, on investigating how the stimulation of the different senses can influence how we perceive what we eat.”
