NEWART Centre’s educational project was presented at Museu Tàpies in Barcelona during a gathering devoted to reflecting on the relationships between art, education, culture and social transformation.
On 4 and 5 September 2026, Museu Tàpies in Barcelona hosted the Second Symposium on the Social Turn of the Arts and Critical Cultural Education, organised by the Esbrina Research Group — Contemporary Subjectivities, Visualities and Educational Environments at the Universitat de Barcelona.
The symposium brought together professionals from education, research, the arts and culture to share projects and reflect on the potential of artistic practices to foster critical cultural education, challenge hegemonic narratives and generate new forms of knowledge and relationships with communities.
Raquel Torrecilla i Pallarés, head of Mediation and Education at NEWART Centre, took part in the communications round with the presentation “Developing an educational department in a digital art centre”.
The presentation introduced the conceptualisation and development of NEWART Centre’s educational project, addressing the challenges and opportunities of building an educational department from scratch in a centre dedicated to art, science and technology.
The talk approached mediation and education as structural elements of the centre’s project: not merely tools for facilitating access to artworks, but spaces for asking questions, experimenting, making connections with contemporary debates and building knowledge together.
One of NEWART Centre’s challenges is to explore how artistic practices involving contemporary technologies can reach educational communities and diverse audiences, fostering a critical view of the relationships between art, technology, culture and society.
Participation in the symposium also enabled the exchange of methodologies, experiences and questions with professionals from different contexts, bringing new perspectives to the development of NEWART Centre’s education, mediation and public programmes.
Through this participation, NEWART Centre continues to strengthen its commitment to education and mediation as fundamental pillars of its institutional project, as well as to building networks and spaces for shared knowledge with other professionals and organisations in education, culture and research.
Thank you to the Esbrina Research Group and Museu Tàpies for creating this space for meeting, reflection and conversation.
