08/02/2017

Two Master's in Cultural Management graduates win a prize to accelerate and mentor their project at the ThinkUp Culture event

On 25 January Vanessa Ortiz and Sofia Williamson won a project competition at the ThinkUp Culture event organised by Balears Balears.t Cluster d'Innovació Tecnològica en Turisme dels Illes Balears and Power House Hub. The prize is to accelerate and mentor their project, called PopUp Art, which they presented along with another classmate.

The aim behind the ThinkUp Culture project is to support projects or ideas for projects that promote innovation, culture, creativity and entrepreneurship. The project is co-funded by the Spanish Ministry for Education, Culture and Sports through the subsidy programme for Action and Cultural Promotion 2016.  

The project created by these three graduates is based on a project they created in a Master Class on Big Data at UIC Barcelona. At the end of the session, students had to generate ideas for startup projects in groups. This is where the idea for their project, PopUp Art., came from. 

In May, thanks to their Master’s degree, they participated in the BizBarcelona Entrepreneurship Fair, with help from Fundación Catalunya Cultura. At that time they won some funding for their networking activity proposal and they were assigned Sonia Mulero as a tutor. Ms Mulero is the Director of the Banco Sabadell Foundation, and they were able to talk to her about the project, ask questions and receive some general guidance, this experience was certainly enriching for PopUp Art. 

The graduates said “through PopUp Art.we would like to set up real meetings and create a network of spaces, artists and artseekers who can mutually benefit each other. The competitive advantage of PopUp Art is that we are going out onto the market with a stock of spaces of different types, including museums and heritage spaces, we also focus on emerging and multidisciplinary artists. We include training activities such as workshops and we provide guidance to artists in terms of conceptualising their work.  We are a cooperative economy platform which also encourages the concept of the construction of a strong community which shares, disseminates and promotes a connection between the offline and online worlds through intimate meetings with art. 

Vanessa Ortiz Severino is a community and artseeker manager. Sofia Williamson is a journalist and cultural manager with experience in coordinating and undertaking cultural projects in the area of communication, marketing and artistic production.   

Read the full interview here: http://mastergestioncultural.uic.es/