What is KRTU?

The KRTU (Culture, Research, Technology, Universals) is a centre for new cultural tendencies with a multidisciplinary vocation, created in 1990 on the basis of a proposal from the Comissió Assessora per a la Modernització de la Cultura (1988-1989), with the purpose of acting as an observatory monitoring emergent forms of culture and stimulating creation and research into new cultural trends.

What does KRTU mean?

KRTU is the title of a book published in 1932 by J.V. Foix, innovative poet, a key figure in modern and avant-garde Catalan culture, a friend and contemporary of painters such as Miró and Dalí. Many of Foix’s ideas—tradition and modernity, permanence and revolution, individuality and anonymity, interdisciplinarity —coincide with the aesthetic ideas of this centre, which has adopted the name of his book as embodying its own poetics:

K for Creation and Culture

Humanism, rationality, science and freedom

The centre is constituted of actual cultural creators, to whom it offers the means for reflection, contrast, exchange and the production of culture. The uniqueness of the centre in the European cultural context is ensured by its Catalan roots and the plurality of dialogues resulting from the constant interchanges between cultures.

R for Research

A country without original research is condemned to live by copies and borrowings, incapable of defining its own personality with real insight and precision. The centre exists to propose programmes that will foster and support interdisciplinary research with no predetermined boundaries.

T for Technique, Technology

Humanism and science share a common evolution with technology, and it is essential to keep the future of technoculture very much present in adapting Catalan culture to the new means of cultural production. One of the centre’s priorities is to analyse the transformation of everyday life and the excess of information generated by telematics.

U for Universals

The universal constitutes the very essence of science and humanism, which manifest themselves in the particular. Any culture that rejects the universal also renounces origins, ethnicity, the subject and style of the experimenters. Any culture that does not transcend the atomization of its specialists into coteries and technical elites will broken down into closed compartments and smothered by the monolingualism of the global culture industry. Universalism is the nucleus of the singular.

KRTU

2003 marked the start of a new stage in the life of the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, with a schedule based on twenty new self-produced exhibitions each year, articulated in four blocks, and a wide-ranging programme of activities. The main lines of this programme have been a strong transgenerational impetus, a mix of local and international artists and, fundamentally, working on research in art and using contemporary art as a generator of discourse.

 

The Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, on the lower stretch of the Rambla, a stone’s throw from the sea, puts on twenty shows a year, mainly new in-house productions of exhibitions of Catalan, Spanish and international artists. The centre is housed in the 17th-century convent of Santa Mònica, remodelled by architects Helio Piñon and Albert Viaplana. The CASM’s brief was the study, interpretation, production and exhibition of contemporary art, with a special emphasis on the production of new Catalan art and its positioning in the international context. The CASM launched the Arxiu_Dossiers, an archive project that brings together documentation on different generations of artists who live(d) and/or work(ed) in Catalonia, making this available for consultation by researchers and anyone else interested in the current Catalan art context — a tool for professional curators, critics, galley owners and others. The CASM also offers a diverse menu of cultural activities, and an education service which works with high-school students, specialist art students and adult groups. The building also has an arts and culture information point.

Centre d’Art Santa Mònica