The House of Arts

The Girona Est Foundation presented the House of Arts as a new facility for the city. Bonart Cultural collaborates in this project, which opens in the city and the neighborhood with the intention of being a point for artist residencies and the creation of audiovisual productions.

Since last autumn, the city of Girona has had a new cultural facility, the Casa de les Arts. In this space, managed by the Fundació Girona Est, the neighborhood's memory, the intensity of the moment and confidence in the future come together.

The House of the Arts is the former manor house of the Poch family, which has ceded it to the foundation to build a space for the neighborhood and for the neighborhood, for the children and for the city of Girona . The house awakens the memories of the neighbors and is part of the collective memory of those who, as children, went there to play in the garden.

Est Girona Foundation

In the short term, the Casa de les Arts is the headquarters of the Girona Est Foundation. This project, with a human perspective, concentrates the energy of 56 members, most of them Girona companies, in addition to many other collaborations, to offer educational, sports and cultural opportunities to the children of Girona East. Thirty years on, the foundation works in a network to accompany the boys and girls in the neighborhood, offering them the same extracurricular activities as the rest of the city's children.

In the long term, the idea is for the Casa de les Arts to be a point of reference for the residents of Girona Est and to become an open facility, with open rooms, cozy rooms and a garden that can be the setting for presentations, concerts or leisure activities. The project also proposes an artistic residency space. Among the activities that are planned for this year, there is the possibility of organizing a concert by the Black Music Big Band Junior, an organization that collaborates with the project, or that it be a place to visit Temps de Flors. So, the House of the Arts is offered to the city as an artistic and cultural facility to build community.

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The look of Aleix Font

The building, from the seventies, consists of a detailed construction that reveals the sensitivity of the Poch family: the ceramics, the wooden beams and the finishes. The exterior facade has been the second action of the La Ciutat Policromada project, of the Girona Est Foundation, a proposal that offers art, urban planning and architecture as transformative tools. The project highlights the importance of rebuilding the physical environment of the inhabitants of Girona Est for collective growth. Just like the Escola de Vila-roja last June, the Casa de les Arts has surrendered itself to the gaze of the artist Aleix Font to recompose itself in an abstract creation of past and present, of nature and cement, of 'honor for history and courage for the future.

Aleix Font's piece, which develops through layers, plays with symbolic elements to explore concepts such as balance, chaos, nature or the periphery. The artist immerses himself in the architectural elements of the house and in the idea of swarm to embody the network work of the foundation. The building includes a back part, a "Picture", as the artist calls it, within the general work. In this part of the counter-facade, Font venerates the ivy that occupies the walls of the facade and intertwines with the ceramics to materialize the balance between nature and the hand of the human being.

Transforming reality

The house is part of the reality of the Mas Ramada neighborhood, but Girona Est is the sum of the neighborhoods of Vila-roja, la Creueta, la Font de la Pólvora and Sant Daniel, in addition to Mas Ramada. Girona Est, as a whole, is a neighborhood of families, neighbors on the street, children with scooters, full squares and balconies with clothes spread out. It is also a neighborhood that for decades has felt excluded from a Girona that dazzles with gastronomy, sport and tradition. Carrer del Carme is long and disconnected, to disconnect the neighborhood from the city and the city from the neighborhood. The Girona Est Foundation has been working for five years to offer tools to the boys and girls of the neighborhood, to have a direct impact on the children's realities and indirectly, on the families' perspective.

Community creation

The foundation wants to transform the present of this child to improve their future in the personal and professional sphere. Therefore, the Girona Est Foundation offers the Casa de les Arts to the neighborhood and the city, and opens its doors to boys and girls, to art and culture, to education, leisure and sport, in the city and the residents of Girona, with the intention of being a space of community creation, to share views and forge bonds. The House of Arts is the materialization of culture as a tool and space for transformation, reflection and construction.