Friday, March 29

CaixaForum+ is born, a free online platform to facilitate access to culture


Today is a good day for the world of culture: the “la Caixa” Foundation has launched this Tuesday CaixaForum+, a platform for broadcasting video and audio content that aims to “fill a gap in the country’s audiovisual offer” with an offer Initial collection of more than 300 titles and more than 1,000 video and audio pieces, among which you can find series, films, podcasts, documentaries, digital art, interviews, concerts, operas, and cultural outreach programs. The subscription is free and is already available from the download applications or from its web version.

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The peculiar roofs of the porch of the CaixaForum in Madrid have sheltered dozens of attendees from the rain this morning who have attended the inauguration of the platform, an act presented by the actress Cayetana Guillén Cuervo in the institution’s auditorium. With hardly any free spaces between the public seats, the actress has invited the deputy director of the “la Caixa” Foundation, Elisa Durán, to the stage, who has given the first clues about the project: “The consumer will be able to see a list of nine themes —cinema, visual and plastic arts, performing arts, literature, thought and history, life sciences, physical sciences, architecture and design and music—, and you can also choose the content according to a variability of time, from two-minute content up to ten-hour interviews”, he said.

Given the evident presence of streaming and digital resources in the public —especially the young—, the idea of ​​the platform is “so that anyone can access culture,” said Durán, “from the most specialist public to the most generalist” . When developing the project, the geographical situation was also considered: “It is an opportunity to consume culture for those who are far away.” The director has highlighted three important elements to define the project: the quality of the platform, the content and the proximity to the user: “Knowing the user we can suggest and prescribe each week and whenever they want new content.”

With Carlos Saura, Fernando Trueba, Rossy de Palma or Blanca Portillo

Half of the content on the new digital platform are “original productions from ‘la Caixa’ Foundation”, while the other half is completed by “collaborations with other national and international cultural institutions” as well as “purchases of pre-existing content rights ”, explains the foundation. On the large screen in the auditorium has been projected a presentation video to offer a preview of the content that can be seen online, where the faces of some figures that CaixaForum+ has counted on for interviews, documentaries, podcasts and programs have also been seen: Fernando Trueba, Isabel Coixet, Carlos Saura, Rossy de Palma , Blanca Portillo, Julio Manrique, Carolina Iglesias and Victoria Martín, Jorge Drexler or Antonio Muñoz Molina are some of the participants, among a hundred more.

The contents contain an infinite number of topics that are also committed to new proposals for contemporary culture and to the youngest voices on the current scene. Among the publications are Of the urban and the rural, a journey through the literary corners of the country with writers such as María Sánchez, Miqui Otero, Marta Sanz, Santiago Lorenzo or Bernardo Atxaga, among a dozen others; also In company, a documentary series that follows the creation process of various plays and their companies —La Calòrica or La Perla 29, among them—, by the hand of playwrights Alberto San Juan, Pablo Messiez, Oriol Broggi, Oskaras Koršunovas, Oriol Vila or Irene Escolar, among many more.

José Luis Guerín, winner of the Goya for Best Documentary Film in 2001 for In construction, reflects through his own choice of five films on the filmic treatment of the landscape and the filmmakers’ resources when it comes to locating themselves in the filmed place, a technique shared with photographers and painters. The piece is called The film landscape and can already be seen on the platform.



Leticia Dolera, in the presentation

Another of the protagonists of the opening ceremony has been Leticia Dolera, who has taken the stage to share the excitement of launching a powerful cultural project in which, in addition, she also participates. Dolera has revealed that in the piece in which he appears he will travel to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, where an art curator will accompany him on a tour of three works “explaining the cultural, social and political context, which I think is of great value and that can help to understand why everything that happens happens ”, revealed Dolera.

The actress and director of the end of love and of Perfect life He has criticized the insistent presence of “the culture of algorithms” among the country’s cultural offer, and has emphasized how “grateful” many professionals feel for the innovation of platforms that are committed “to the other culture”: “Great works Masters of cinema, theater or literature did not fit into the culture of the algorithm and now, thanks to those who risked for a different, innovative vision, they can be carried out”.

The actress has also spoken about the advantage of interviews and dialogues with the participants who support and accompany the content: “It is a way of educating the viewer.” Equally valuable is the opportunity to give a voice to the entire professional team behind any cultural creation: “This brings not only the artists closer, but also the entire technical team: telling how a film is made, how a series is made or how sound is produced are very interesting things, and this platform has been able to develop them”.

Great masterpieces of cinema, theater or literature did not fit into the culture of the algorithm and now, thanks to those who risked for a different vision, they can be carried out

Leticia Dolera
Actress, director and screenwriter

A project increased by the pandemic

The artistic director of the Thyssen Museum, Guillermo Solana, and that of the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Víctor García de Gomar, also took part in the event to talk about the origins and prospects of the foundation’s new initiative. “Institutions have a duty to point out what has quality and what does not,” said García de Gomar. The museum directors have explained that the project began in 2019 when they observed that “the consumption of culture through screens was greater”, but it was in full confinement when “the worst times of isolation intensified it”, they explain. What came next was the need to make a firm commitment to, as Solana recounts, “get out as soon as possible and be able to respond to consumers wherever they are”: “Above all, to promote cultural habits.”

For Solana and García de Gomar, reaching an agreement between institutions for a project like this “is very difficult” and that is why CaixaForum+ “is a milestone”: “We are talking about the Prado Museum, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Gran Teatre del Liceu or the Teatro Real, to name a few. It is a revolutionary platform in this sense”, they have revealed. “When it came to collaborating with institutions, the response was charming. There was widespread enthusiasm, and that is why half of the content is from collaborating entities both nationally and internationally”.

The speakers have also made it clear that “CaixaForum+ is born today, but it will continue to grow”, both territorially and in content. “We are already working to launch the platform in Portugal, and we will have more news next year,” they said. It is expected that from February 2023 new content will be released on a weekly basis with the aim of reaching 400 titles in its first year.


María Arnal and a Gregorian chant from the Mediterranean

The Catalan artist María Arnal has also been on the stage of the CaixaForum this Tuesday. With his a cappella performance of the Gregorian chant Song of the Sibil la, a liturgical drama that was lost in the mid-16th century because it was considered pagan but which survived in Barcelona and Mallorca, has managed to create an overwhelming silence in space. The singer incorporates it in her latest album Clamor, with the collaboration of the poet Eduard Escoffet and Holly Herdon, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence music. The song is “one of the oldest on the planet,” Arnal explained, “and it focuses on the Sibyl, a woman who has the power to see the future. It is very rare because there are few female characters who do not depend on male characters in the narratives and she, however, has the power. The song spread throughout the Mediterranean but the Council of Trent considered Sibila as a pagan character and that was when she stopped being heard, but she survived due to her strong roots in Barcelona and Mallorca. “What interested me was taking this traditional music and making it contemporary, so I arranged it less darkly and worked with synthetic voices generated by artificial intelligence with Herdon, a cutting-edge publisher that is revolutionizing the world of music.”

Arnal is another of the visible faces of the platform, which appears on the physical sciences podcast echoes, a series of episodes narrated by Jorge Carrión and with editing and music by Andreu Quesada produced by Podium Podcast that puts the issue of listening as learning on the table. Along with Arnal, María Negroni, Begoña Ugalde, Berta García Faet or Francisco Garamona, among others, also participate.

Science, a culture to vindicate

The scientists Bartolo Luque and Rubén Duro have also intervened in the inauguration to represent the scientific content of the platform. The two have stated that currently “there are two cultures: that of letters and that of science” and that is why it is important to create a link and claim science as culture. “That is why the CaixaForum+ interested me so much”, said Luque, “because what it does is erase the gap that exists between these two cultures”.

Life sciences and physical sciences will be two of the content sections available on the online platform, which will address topics related to nature, scientific history or sound. The scientists have given clues about one of the projects, which will be based on an in-depth analysis of how the photo of the first man on the Moon was taken or what Albert Einstein was thinking in the pose of his portrait, among the study of other the many most emblematic science photographs in history.

It is expected that the commitment to diversity, the high role of the user and the outstanding variety of content are the strengths of the CaixaForum+ project, whose free access revolutionizes the panorama of today’s online content platforms.



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