This is what the Reimagining evaluation day was like. 

A session to share doubts and learnings about the evaluation.

On 12 February, Infinito Delicias hosted the conference Re-imagining evaluation, organised by Concomitentes, which sought to open a space for collective debate to improve the ways of measuring the impacts of culture. This initiative is part of a broader process aimed at systematising the evaluation of the organisation's impacts. This conference served, therefore, to open the debate and set out the main lines of work on which the Concomitentes Evaluation Plan is based.

The meeting was presented by Javier Martín-Jiménez, director of Infinito Delicias, and Fran Quiroga, director of Concomitentes, who contextualised the work framework. They talked about how, for Concomitentes, evaluation is a fundamental strategy that helps to understand and explain what we do, within the complexity and richness of participatory processes. From Concomitentes, we claim the impact of the artistic works resulting from the two years that the concomitances usually last. The emotion that is experienced at the inaugurations is a living example of how these processes are crossed by collective issues. Therefore, evaluation, far from the idea of control, must serve to count and do better.

Fran then spoke with Íñigo Eguia, head of Accompaniment and Impact Mediation at the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation. Íñigo explained how the foundation understands evaluation processes as a tool that allows us to stop and think about the work we are doing: a compass for decision-making. In this conversation, it was discussed how the work of evaluation reaches the field of culture from other sectors, such as the economic sector, and consequently, the need to adapt its logics and give value to cultural work, without simplifying it, was underlined. Eguia also defined evaluation as a meeting point between the funding entity and the project in order to generate more horizontal relations and to be able to move away from bureaucratic dynamics and data extractivism.

It was the turn of Alicia Ruiz, Programme Manager at Concomitentes, and Sendy Ghirardi, from Culturalink, who shared the Evaluation System for Concomitentes. Alicia showed how the evaluation work is framed within the line of transparency and communication, constituting a fundamental part of the entity's management model. Ruiz detailed the path towards evaluation that Concomitantes has been taking over the last few years: the association began to evaluate the programmes in 2022, gathering qualitative and quantitative data from the conferences organised that have helped us to understand what works best and what the participants' wishes are. In 2025, Concomitentes set out to evaluate the concomitances themselves with the aim of understanding their social, cultural and aesthetic impacts in order to find out what changes in the territories thanks to our practice. Sendy then presented the evaluation model that Culturalink is developing. ad hoc for Concomitant. This model works on three scales, from administrative structure to partnerships, and social impact is defined on the basis of three dimensions: experiential, systemic and democratic.

Following this introduction to the model, Chema Segovia, Estelle Jullian and Juanita Álvarez from Culturalink led the workshop “Who's afraid of fierce evaluation?”, which addressed the myths and possibilities of evaluation. Here you can find the contents of the workshop and the data collected during the workshop.. During the debate that followed, it was highlighted how the cultural sector has a great potential to rethink the logics of evaluation and how this innovation can affect other sectors where it is necessary, as in the case of education. It was noted that there is a dominant model, but also many initiatives and forces that seek to rethink it.

The day closed with interventions by Lucía Casani, General Director for Spain of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, and Jazmín Beirak, General Director of Cultural Rights of the Ministry of Culture. Lucía pointed out the importance of understanding impacts as a systemic issue and a way of linking, not as isolated elements that affect a single entity, but many territories and actors. Jazmín shared the work being done by the Ministry, where the evaluation is aimed at learning about the work carried out and correcting the shortcomings of its results with respect to the objectives. She pointed out, based on a specific case related to the study of the scope of the youth cultural voucher, that it is currently essential to change the questions, to understand which are the ones we want to answer: those that address a social and educational dimension, as opposed to the dynamics of consumption.

With this conference, which has been supported by the Ministry of Culture's Grants for cultural projects with special social impact, we confirm the importance of reimagining the forms of evaluation in culture in order to achieve objectifiable, comparable and valuable results, which support the internal work of constant improvement, as well as to generate languages that allow us to understand the complex processes of participatory artistic practices.