Scientific culture
Communication and dissemination are the key to involving the public in the knowledge generated by research and bringing them closer to science.
For this reason, Barcelona Science and Innovation promotes various initiatives in collaboration with all kinds of institutions and organisations to strengthen the link between science and society. Examples include major events such as the City and Science Biennial and the Science Festival.
Barcelona with Mathematics
March 14 is celebrated as International Day of Mathematics, and Barcelona adheres with a campaign aimed at all citizens to promote mathematics, committed gender equality and social equity.
In 2025, an institutional event has been held at the Saló de Cent in Barcelona with the talk “Why do we need to celebrate mathematics?”, delivered by the Swiss mathematician Meike Akveld, president of the Association Kangourou Sans Frontières (AKSF), on the occasion of the 30th edition of the Kangaroo test. The educational and cultural offer, with activities for all ages, has been extended throughout March in various cultural and educational entities of the city.
Barcelona with mathematics website
Science Festival
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The Festival is the result of the joint work of universities, research centres, various scientific institutions, companies, and professionals in the field of popularisation. With their proposals, a programme is put together that each year brings together more than a hundred scientific activities for all audiences.
Workshops, demonstrations, itineraries, micro-talks, guided tours and shows for children, young people and adults are some usual formats of a host of activities organised with the aim of bringing science closer to the public. Practically all the topics that make up scientific knowledge pass through the Festival. An annual spring event that in recent years has travelled around the different neighbourhoods of Barcelona. The 2024 edition took place in the Born Centre of Culture and Memory and in the Plaça Comercial on 7, 8 and 9 June.
City and Science Biennial
The City and Science Biennial brings citizens a week full of proposals to reflect on knowledge and its impact from all its dimensions. This meeting, to debate the great challenges that we must address as a society and in which science gains special relevance, had its first edition in 2019 and is already becoming an essential date in the city's calendar.
The climate emergency, the right to health and food, dignified ageing, equality, conscience and our place in the universe... The 21st century is full of questions and, increasingly, we need to incorporate science into the citizen debate on how to face this change of era we are living through. The Biennial focuses on different current issues, seeking a collective reflection on the paths that scientific research should take.
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Collide Award
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Barcelona City Council and the Institute of Culture made a partnership with CERN, the European Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics, to collaborate in the Collide program of Arts at CERN in the 2019 , 2020 and 2021 Prize calls.
For three years, the Collide Award convened by Arts at CERN fostered the combined artistic residency at CERN itself and at a reference creation factory in Barcelona, which the first year was the Fabra i Coats and the last two Hangar, Center for Artistic Production and Research. The winning artists were Rosa Menkman (2019), Black Quantum Futurism (2020), and Dorota Gawęda and Eglé Kulbokaité (2021).
Workshops on art and science
In winter 2022, in the framework of the Collide award, Barcelona Science and Innovation organized at MACBA a workshop on the intersections between art, science and technology with the participation of scientific, artistic and cultural agents of Barcelona.
Throughout the morning, a working session was held to discuss with the main agents on the ways of working in Art and Science. The conclusions of this day were collected in the document Art-science collisions: notes of a choral dialogue in Barcelona. In the afternoon, the artists in residence in Barcelona thanks to the Collide award, Black Quantum Futurism, presented their project.
