The Paul Bardwell contemporary art gallery of Medellin and the Catalan organisation of specialists in cultural management Trànsit Projectes have maintained a relationship of ongoing cooperation since the year 2004. The result of this collaboration is Desearte Paz, a platform dedicated to promoting the creation and dissemination of contemporary art, through which the artists analyse and become involved in the city’s social, academic, institutional and artistic structures that work towards a culture of peace. In this way, the artists become true socio-educational agents who promote the social inclusion of communities with a high risk of exclusion, and provide them with spaces that allow them to embark on a journey of self-knowledge, to liberate their creativity and to boost their identity and projection. In Medellin the project is being developed shoulder to shoulder with 8 primary and secondary schools, the Faculty of Arts of the University of Antioquia, over 15 NGOs that are active in the city and Secretaries’ Offices of the City Hall of Medellin, which enable the project’s true impact on and articulation with the territory.

The «Social Labs», or «socio-artistic laboratories», are participation spaces where artists, students, communities and professionals from the fields of culture and social development produce teaching programmes, artistic production processes and academic seminars revolving around the different social problems. The Social Labs have dealt with, among other issues, physical disabilities, forced displacements, inclusion of young people in the construction of the community, violence against women or human rights in penitentiaries. These socio-artistic labs have served to generate artistic creation processes that have given rise to exhibitions in both Medellin and in other cities in Colombia and the rest of the world (Barcelona, Cork and Washington).

Between the years 2005 and 2008, the project’s activities have facilitated over 80 international trips for artists and professionals from the fields of culture and social development, over 150 conferences to strengthen the processes of students and social organisations, the production of 20 exhibitions with a powerful political and social charge, sixteen documentaries, a book and 22 workshops headed by artists and social organisations. Over 5000 people between school and university students, artists and at-risk communities have participated in the different processes of artistic and educational production that the project generates.

Today Desearte Paz, which started life as a pilot project under the motto of Redesearte Paz (Rewishing you Peace), serves as a model for cultural organisations such as Base 7 of Sao Paulo, Matucana Cien of Santiago de Chile, Funarte of Estelí-Nicaragua and Can Xalant of Mataró. In the future, the project plans to internationally strengthen a network of cultural agents that, through contemporary art, will promote processes, projects and interventions to reinforce the processes of citizens’ participation, raising awareness of and giving access to the cultural capital of people and collectives in situations
of disadvantage.

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The Ideodiseño project is the continuation of the investigation called «The design of need», carried out by Juan David Uribe Saavedra. Uribe’s research consisted of compiling and filing images of what was happening in the streets of Medellin, a city with over 2 million inhabitants and an unemployment and informal worker rate of 51.5%. In this scenario, over 4.000 people devote themselves to separating the tons of waste produced in Medellin, to then supply the more than 1.800 collection centres for recycled material spread around
the city.

Based on the data obtained by Juan David Uribe on which classes of materials are dumped and why, Ideodiseño is engaged in community work that produces functional, culturally defined and socially responsible objects. Within the framework of this initiative, design becomes a socialising element and a valuable generator of collective knowledge, always acquired through and for the community. Beyond the products themselves, the goal of the project is to transmit the kind of knowledge in the field of design that will be functionally useful to the community and will meet its everyday needs.

Ideodiseño is based on Serge Latouche’s theory of the 8 Rs. This French economist promotes and explores so-called Degrowth, a political and economic current of thought that is in favour of the regular downscaling of economic production with the purpose of addressing the environmental problems that humanity faces. Its principles are: Revaluing the values; Recontextualising the ways we understand reality, raising awareness of the social constructs of poverty; Restructuring the economy and introducing changes in the forms of production; Relocating production and consumption on a local scale;

Redistributing access to natural resources and to richness; Reducing consumption to a level that the biosphere can withstand; Reusing consumer goods and committing to the production of durable articles and to repairing and conserving them, and Recycling in all activities.

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In the year 1999 fifty people headed by Sergio Fajardo organised themselves under the motto of Citizens’ Commitment and created an independent civic movement in order to actively participate in the politics of the city of Medellin. The group finally won the city hall and began their mandate on 1 January 2004. Under the slogan «Medellín la més educada», the movement combated social inequality and violence, guaranteeing quality education for all the citizenry. These advances took place in parallel to an ambitious master plan of infrastructures and to the drawing up of programmes connected with entrepreneurial culture, participative budgets and social urban planning.

The new Medellin cable car and metro, the reform of thoroughfares such as the Carabobo road and the construction of new bridges and squares have improved urban mobility and re-established links between the different parts of the city that were previously separated and antagonised. In addition, the so-called parks-libraries, a series of cutting-edge buildings equipped with computer rooms with internet connection, libraries, auditoriums and exhibition spaces have encouraged reading, contact with painting, literature, science and technology, benefiting over 1 million people in under a year.

Thanks to the various initiatives undertaken in the field of education between 2004 and 2007, Medellin has become the first city in Colombia to offer schooling with integral care in health, education, nutrition and recreation to boys and girls of pre-school age. Children’s education has also seen an increase of over nine percent in the same time period. The general improvement in the field of education has led to an increase in the number of young people in the system, expanding their opportunities for training and facilitating their access to the labour market.

Medellin has also experienced a decrease in violence, one of the major problems afflicting the Colombian city. Proof of this is the fact that the years of application of the plan have seen the lowest homicide rates of the past 28 years, situating Medellin below the average of the nation and of the principal Latin American cities. A symptom of this change has been the reduction in the index of repeat offenders in the Medellin penitentiaries, which has gone from 33% in the year 2003 to the current 13%.

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