Centex

Associativity & Community

The Associativity & Community division works with the community to nurture Centex´s programming and content for each thematic cycle. The community-based organizations can use Centex´s facilities to develop artistic and cultural projects in a variety of disciplines, as well as workshops, conferences, meetings and discussions. All the activities should be completely free for organizations and visitors.

Therefore, Centex through the Associativity & Community division is presented as a Cultural Community Center that provides to the community a series of activities, workshops and spaces for their enjoyment. As a result, art education and development of audiences are expressed through the access and participation of social groups, without any educational strategy in particular, but rather to strengthen from Centex the idea of equal access and community participation. The community-based organizations, in general propose complementary activities to the field of art, as necessary as the work itself expressions, but more focused in social change, civic engagement and cultural development.

As defined by Arlene Goldbard in her text "Looking Before You Leap: Community Arts in Context" the main goal of this kind of community based practice is to reinforce Community Cultural Development (CCD). This “refers to those activities undertaken by artist-organizers in collaboration with community members, employing social imagination and collective creation in the arts to express identity, concerns, hopes, and fears.” (Goldbard, 2005, p.1). This scenario exists where the artistic practices play a secondary role because the most important is not developing the artistic products such as workshops, murals, or concerts, but ra...

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...st like Centex, where some discursive thematic are installed through a special programming with a variety of artistic practices such as music, dance, dedicated, cinema, among others. In the logic to bring and to attract the audiences, not making them participate in direct decisions, but making them feel important and that the institution is a reference, a space where they can be found and be recognized.

Both realities are comparable and replicable with prudence, because they share the priority to develop more and better audiences. Perhaps the differences are in the forms, mechanisms. Here the strategies are systematized: multiple programs, teamwork, studies of public, etc. In spite of its lack of theorizing, diversification of programs, and resources Centex has been able to take forward with successful practices that seek to bring in a better way to its audiences.