All of Barcelona's Culture from Your Home: Culture Keeps you Company

 In the coming days, the digital platform www.cultura.barcelona will be used to disseminate all the initiatives that have cropped up, to keep the spirits of the city’s public and private facilities, as well as individual cultural initiatives, alive, promoting them and offering a full set of activities to preserve the city’s cultural fabric. 

You will be able to follow every activity minute by minute on Barcelona Cultura’s social media networks, under the umbrella of #LaCulturaTAcompanya, and through the weekly newsletter sent to the channel’s subscribers. Thanks to the networks and websites of the various municipal programmes and facilities, you will also be able to enjoy exclusive content and experience initiatives through the Internet to ensure culture isn’t put on hold while you’re staying full-time in your home.

In addition, the City Council is using its citizen participation platform decidim.barcelona to put a mutual support and care space at the disposal of city residents for as long as the exceptional period and isolation measures last. Here, in the cultural initiatives area, you will be able to find community and collective knowledge activities that can help to relieve the anxiety, loneliness and emotional stress you may experience during this period.

Municipal museums and art centres are opening their virtual doors to the public

Having the opportunity to visit museum exhibitions and rooms from our homes allows us to delve deeply into the collections housed in some of the city’s facilities. What's more, you’ll find cultural offerings from these various spaces that will encourage you to learn more about, and enjoy a better understanding of, their content. 

The Museu del Disseny is offering a virtual tour of its permanent exhibitions as well as a virtual tour of "El cos vestit” [The Dressed Body], which shows how clothes have changed the appearance of the body through actions that compress it or liberate it, from the 16th century to today. The museum’s website will also let you retrieve archived materials (recordings of talks and interviews, photos from collections, podcasts, etc.) and digitalised old books from its Documents Centre.

El Born CCM has created a specific webpage on its website that will distribute all its available online resources, including podcasts of talks from the Fake Fiction(s) cycle, video reports on past and present exhibitions at the El Born CCM and publications in PDF on archaeology exhibitions, conferences and so on. In addition, it will also be disseminating and revitalising content and images from the exhibition on cartoonists, under the hashtag #Perichacasa, during its closure.

The Museu Frederic Marès is also offering the option of a virtual tour of the museum's Sculpture and Collector's Cabinet showcase, as well as a tour of its online collections. A third online resource from that museum is a microsite dedicated to explaining, using examples from the collection’s sculptures, how a sculpture reaches the museum: how it travels from its place of origin and goes through different collections until it is purchased by the Museu Frederic Marès and put on display in one of the museum’s rooms. Finally, now is a good time to retrieve the museum's catalogues raisonnés, all of which are in digital format (PDF), especially the two Furniture catalogues, as they were published specifically to be read online.

The Royal Monastery of Santa Maria de Pedralbes invites you to explore its interactive website entitled "Rere els murs del monestir" [Behind the monastery’s walls], which officially opened last November and contains unique information on the monastery's history and building stages. It's like taking a virtual tour of the monastery’s entire building process. The exhibition also contains an educational game that lets you carry out a series of activities for the medieval monastery: preparing a kitchen recipe, concocting a medicinal remedy for a sick nun and helping to paint the walls of the Sant Miquel chapel. The monastery's Vimeo channel lets you consult past editions of the "Diàlegs de Pedralbes", a whole series of talks on distinct topics and current issues.

The Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món has created a section on its website with three pages providing recreational content and information on the museum.  What’s more, thanks to the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món’s social networks, every day you will be able to do crossword puzzles , animated puzzle gifs, word searches and other activities, as well as enjoy videos of past exhibition series and other interactive contents such as 3D puzzles.

You can take a virtual tour of the Photographic Archives’ facilities as well as its online catalogue showing archived photos from its collection and that of other municipal archives, plus its latest exhibition on Anarchist Graphics. Now is also a good time to discover what Barcelona used to be like, through old photos of the city’s buildings and streets, using the Bcn Visual App. 

You can also get a closer look at the city’s history through the Archaeology Service's archaeological map (cartaarqueologica.bcn.cat), visit Bàrcino in 3D, and examine the graffiti left in Montjuïc Castle's prison cells.  

For its part, the Virreina Centre de la Imatge will be featuring the public programmes which have been recorded up to now: talks, chats, discussions, courses and so on, as well as its online exhibitions: Lluites de dones a la Barcelona precària [The Struggle of Women in Precarious Barcelona] and Mals Carrers [Mean Streets].

The MUHBA is offering city residents a variety of digital resources: exhibitions and online collections, one-off digital-format activities (dialogues and talks), publications and even the possibility of discovering the museum’s 15 heritage spaces. 

The Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona and Art Factory will be featuring its own multimedia activities materials and the documents it has produced, which will be uploaded daily onto its social media networks, especially Twitter. You can also find some of these on the multimedia section of the art centre’s website. For example, you will be able to retrieve the eight sessions of the seminar "Amor per a què? Canviar l'amor per canviar-ho tot?” [Love to what end? Changing love to change it all?], on the exhibition "Kao malo vode na dlanu (Like a bit of water in the palm of the hand), Mireia Sallarès’ project on love in Serbia", the recent winner of the City of Barcelona Prize and the Prize for best artistic project awarded by the Catalan Association of Art Critics (ACCA), in addition to the conversation between Isaki Lacuesta and Refree on their exhibition "Your Phone is a Cop", which offers a dialogue on censure and taboos in social networks, and a video of the show "10 Atlàntides", presented last summer at Vil·la Joana as part of the Grec Festival's "Creació & Museus" cycle, created by the band ZA!, The Good Good and other resident artists at the Factory. Based on all of these home-grown contents, it will be recommending other external ones that may have some connection with them (films, books, music, and so on).

A whole cultural world to explore 

The Institute of Culture's various programmes will be creating all kinds of content that will serve as a fountain of knowledge and collective enjoyment. Many of these can be found on the Internet openly and for free. 

This coming October will see the return of the Open City Thinking Biennale. If you were unable to attend the first biennale or you’d like to see some of its talks again, many can be found on the website. You can also go to the website of the City and Science Biennale and consult some of the most interesting talks from the first edition.

As for the Barcelona Novel·la Històrica [Historical Novel] and BCNegra [Crime Fiction] literary festivals, you can go to the festivals’ respective multimedia pages and retrieve videos and audio recordings of several talks. For example, the Barcelona Novel·la Històrica webpage features the "Building stories" conversation held between the journalist Òscar López and the writer Isabel Allende (2019 Barcino Prize), among other things. The BCNegra webpage offers the "Orfandat" [Orphanhood] conversation held between Dolores Redondo and Domingo Villar, the “Malasaña" conversation with the writer Juan Madrid (2020 Pepe Carvalho Prize) and the lecturer Javier Sánchez Zapatero, and the "Port" conversation between Yasmina Khadra and Petros Markaris.

The Barcelona Libraries Consortium offers you over 100,000 books in various formats and on various subjects, available in Catalan, Spanish, French, English and German, whose digital content can be taken out on loan from the eBiblioCat platform. All you need to access the content is a library card for any Catalan public library. The platform contains electronic books, magazines, films, audio-books, documentaries, music, encyclopaedias and language courses, among other things. What’s more, different recommendations for things to do at home will be featured every day on the Bibarna blog, the Barcelona libraries' recommendations blog. 

The Observatori de Dades Culturals de Barcelona [Barcelona Cultural Data Observatory] works to answer questions on culture in the city. For example, it published a survey a few days ago on inequalities in cultural participation and needs in Barcelona. Or you can also explore the city’s cultural facilities.

Last but not least, the Barcelona Film Commission will be making recommendations through social media networks on TV series and films that have been filmed in our city and will explain where you can see them. All the recommendations and related information can be found every week in the news section of the Film Commission's website.