The Diversorium closes and opens a new stage with dancing

La concomitancia was born in Barcelona in 2018 with the aim of generating inclusive spaces that promote collective encounters and celebrations.

The Diversorium was launched in 2018 by the activists of the Barcelona Independent Living Office, Antonio Centeno and María Oliver, and the mediator Veronica Valentini, to respond to thehe need to promote spaces that emphasise coexistence, encounter and celebration between all bodies, from the perspective of people who have some kind of functional diversity or form part of the different affective and invisible communities in the city.. As María Oliver, the project's commissioner, explains: “The beauty of the Diversorium is that it has been a joint project, based on listening and dialogue. 

A process built from this common desire that has explored in these four years the cultural and social meaning of difference through the development of new forms of cooperation, relationship and connection between all people.. A long road, not exempt from difficulties such as that of a global pandemic, and which at all times has been the result of active and constant communication between the mediator and her clients: “Our relationship was very horizontal, I did not move without having a prior conversation with my principals. It has always been a back and forth with all the voices that cohabited this project”, Veronica assures.

Change of dimension: Second Diversorium at the BAM Festival

After the celebration and accumulated learnings from the first Diversorium, which took place at the Sala Apolo in February 2020, the principals and the mediator defined the commission with which they approached Osias Yanov to be the artist who devised and developed the next great Diversorium, which was held on 23 September 2022, which changed its dimension by taking place in the public space within the framework of the Bam Festival of the Mercé festivities. of Barcelona. “We shared with Osías the intentions and motivation behind this project, and from there he contributed his own vision,” says Vero Valentini.

A rich dialogue, based on listening and collaboration, and above all easy, as Maria explains, since “Osias was an artist sensitive to the whole question of diversity”.”. A key to the Barcelona concomitance that Vero Valentini also seconds in her words: “The invitation to Osias was the most precise thing we could have done, I already knew his work and, as we moved forward, we saw that it was the right choice”.

This festival and celebration that proposes the collective enjoyment of people with and without disabilities was an underlined, pending and pressing need, in short, a long-awaited cause, as the client tells us: “Here we didn't knock on the door ourselves, but Bam did, which is a clear indication of how necessary and sexy universal leisure and cultural spaces are”.

Creative process in Buenos Aires and residency at Macba

The process of artistic creation for the September event began in the first half of this year in Buenos Aires, the city where Osias Yanov lives and works. In this initial phase, a sustained exchange between the artist, the mediator and the commissioners, based on knowledge, in order to “question the project better from what we say or what we feel”.”. In addition, a series of drawings were generated to visualise how this party was to take place, and a fanzine, where different forms of the festival were detailed.

Once in Barcelona, the The second phase of artistic creation and production which, as Osias says: “It was interesting to see how they moved from theory to practice, generating a very intense relationship between all the participants”.”. From a coordinating role, Osias led a residence at Macba, which opened up a space to promote movements connected to the sensibility of the festive and sensual from a queer-crip. 

“Osías carried out a great work with the small community that was constituted with the workshops and rehearsals at Macba, a work that went beyond the artistic and that was sustained by the people with the characteristics and sensibilities of each one of them. In this sense, he was dealing with all the human architecture that constituted this project and which consisted of many parts”, stresses Veronica Valentini.

In these workshops, which interrelated the sensitive, mobile and physical properties that emerged, the costumes and devices that were later used on the day of the celebration were generated.

“The costumes put a parenthesis in our humanity in order to take us to another state, and to see how we related with the excuse of these new skins. All this was put on stage, but it was also shared with the public, generating an exchange with this experience that we had begun with this residency”, Osias Yanov, artist of the Diversorium at the BAM Festival.

Some of these elements were the masks, which gave a sensation of animal mobility; the balloons or extenders that made the body retract and expand to other sides; the rococo costumes, a sort of celebration of interdependence in which some were threaded to the costumes of others, because they had the possibility of generating certain hooks; and the tongues or mermaid costumes, which gave the option of thinking from the depths and which became an extension of the body as if it were a single organ.

The Diversorium: Next steps and the future of the project

On 23 September, the Diversorium in the centre of Barcelona, and which, as Veronica explains, “generated a lot of expectation and uncertainty, but everything turned out magically well”. The journey and the process, as she goes on to explain, is rich and has been traversed by many things: “One is on an individual and intimate level, from my own relationship with the clients and then there is the whole network of collaborators who have participated, so the learning already explodes and is taken to another scale”.

And the journey has only just begun, after the experience of the Diversorium at the Escena Poble Nou festival in Can Felipa in October and at the Culturópolis event in Barcelona on cultural rights in November, as it is an initiative that is flexible to the context in which it is inserted.

“The most beautiful thing would be if there were small Diversoriums, not so much to understand it as a closed space but that each place or community adapts this idea to their needs, because it is intelligent, beautiful, sensual, whatever, because it is a party and that is what parties are,” María Oliver, a member of the Diversorium project.

Veronica Valentini claims “The Diversorium is something that many people want, not only my clients, it is an initiative with a lot of potential.”. A flexible format that Osias Yanov has also come to visualise: “With the Diversoriums that already existed, the experience that was generated must be evaluated and applied to existing contexts, so that new ones or ‘Diversorium moments’ can still exist in places that have already been created.

A journey of expansion that has only just begun.

—

See the photo gallery of the entire project here.