This October, the Ensemble Network of Productive and Collaborative Spaces was born, an active community of people, organizations, groups and associations that collaborate to promote citizen training, digital inclusion and local production with traditional and emerging models. Last Thursday, October 16, at the digital manufacturing laboratory Fab Lab Barcelona, the official presentation of the initiative took place. Currently, the Ensemble Network is made up of more than twenty-five cultural and creative institutions from the Barcelona Metropolitan Area that work together to exchange ideas, resources and knowledge with the aim of promoting a manufacturing model that combines traditional techniques with the potential of new technologies. "About two and a half years ago, we met for the first time to understand and explore a more productive city. Maker spaces, creativity spaces and craft spaces are part of the Ensemble Network. "We meet regularly to share values, concepts and desires to turn Barcelona into a more creative, more inclusive and more productive city," says Milena Juárez from Fab Lab Barcelona.
Specifically, the Ensemble Network seeks to generate opportunities for innovation and collective action from various areas: creating physical and digital spaces to promote the exchange of ideas and knowledge; developing interdisciplinary projects; organizing events, talks, conferences and meetings; offering training in digital manufacturing and crafts, and providing support and mentoring for projects with social impact. "We jointly decide on the network's new actions. We also reaffirm our values at the meetings. In this sense, we initially drew up a collective manifesto for the network," points out Juárez. The challenge of the initiative is to bring the impact to other territories, bringing experience and commitment to other geographical areas, and fostering the collaboration of citizens and a variety of sectors: productive, educational, creative, business, scientific and technological and groups: migrants, women, the elderly and the LGBTIQ+ community.
The facilities of the digital fabrication laboratory Fab Lab Barcelona, which hosted the presentation event, are currently hosting an exhibition on the presentation of the Ensemble Network and the cultural and creative institutions of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area that make it up. "Last Saturday, October 18, World Repair Day was celebrated. Repair is a right. We cannot work from a point of view of planned obsolescence. Many of the members of the Ensemble Network have an eye on repair to keep objects that we have and objects that we use alive. For us, it is essential to be able to repair, to fix, to give a second life to objects that become obsolete," says Òscar Martínez of Maker Convent.