Levadura (Yeast) is a programme of residencies for creators/educators in nursery and primary schools. Its objective is to introduce contemporary creation concepts and methods into classrooms. To this end, the artist and the school work together to develop an artistic project whose processbased nature facilitates the participation and empowerment of students and teachers.

Since 2014, CentroCentro has participated in this programme along with Matadero, Medialab-Prado and Conde Duque Cultural Centre. Via an open call for local creators, an artist is sought who is interested in opening their artistic practice to the educational environment and who understands their creative work as a vehicle for learning.

In the present edition CentroCentro sponsors a residency for a creator in the sphere of practices linked to the construction and transmission of narratives (and imaginaries) through orality. Through this theme and the practices deriving from it, we aim to contribute towards redefining the student –who is responsible and critical at each stage of the process– as an agent with an active role in their own education.

The selected project, Creocuántos. Jugando con los límites del lenguaje, by Amaia Bono and Damián Montesdeoca, will be developed with the school CEIP Carlos Sainz de los Terreros, from Vallecas, from 22 April to 19 May 2019.

"The project Creocuantos was inspired by our enthusiasm for sharing with the adults of the future a number of tools that we have developed in our recent creative processes. These tools revolve around words as an element of the act of communication, as it applies to a contemporary performing arts language, focusing on the “formal” aspect of enunciation. 

Under the umbrella of the research project “Cuando las cobras cosan sentido” (When sings take sense), we have been developing several lines of work focusing on ways to turn various intrinsic properties of language into performance action. Our experimentation has been grounded in developing a number of practices enabling us to play with language, to unveil the possibilities offered by words, both oral and written, and to find ways to generate thinking that enable us to access a third space in the audience’s mind, where a set of possible messages can be projected/generated/imagined.

In the project Creocuantos, students build a narrative/story/tale by playing around with the various formulas that the lexicon offers, focusing on two aspects. The literalism of language, construed as the shortest path between signifier and signified, appealing to concrete thinking and promoting divergent thinking. The boundaries of semiotics expand, in a search for second interpretations. The
content of the concepts in themselves, however, can encompass various realities. The materiality of words, adressing sound, phonetics (understood as the ethics of sound), focusing on the formal aspects of words rather than their content and on semantics (polysemy, uses of language, double meanings, word play, etc.) The project aims to open up the possibility of working with language based on perspectives that are unconnected to the usual forms of standard communication, to incentivise
imagination and creativity based on the formulas offered by words".

Amaia Bono and Damián Montesdeoca