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“Bringing culture and the arts in all their forms within everyone’s reach” Back

“Bringing culture and the arts in all their forms within everyone’s reach”

15 Feb 2021

Giulia Avataneo of Hypercritic – a third round Culture of Solidarity Fund grantee – presents an overview of Hypercritic dreams and plans.

“We are a growing group of 50 young people from Europe, the United States, and Latin America, passionate about culture in its most diverse forms and eager to give life, in the digital world, to a project that makes the arts talk to each other.

The heart of Hypercritic is in Turin, Italy. Here, at Scuola Holden, many among Hypercritic’s authors have perfectioned their training. However, the most exciting aspect of this experience is that our family is expanding by word of mouth, including young experts in the most specific cultural fields: from poetry to videogames, from performing arts to cinema, from fashion to art, to the cultural heritage.

The dream of a shared space where all cultural worlds could interact with each other is something that Hypercritic’s founder Alessandro Avataneo has cultivated for almost ten years. The project took shape in the summer of 2020, when an international group of authors shared this initiative’s spirit. The web lacked a platform capable of intertwining fine arts with pop culture and cultural heritage with contemporary humanities. These bridges between different disciplines create endless paths of knowledge for our readers. With Hypercritic, readers can develop their taste, understand reality, and become advocates for change.

The pandemic made us realize how urgent this need was. Half of the planet’s population was confined home while schools, theatres, libraries, and museums were inaccessible. On the one hand, we realized how essential it was to continue to produce new culture and keep it alive in the digital space. On the other, we wanted to find new ways to give everyone free access to all types of cultural experience, including people who, after the pandemic, will continue to lack the means to travel.”

“With Hypercritic, we want to provide innovative tools, useful to everyone, from people looking for the best way to spend their free time to teachers looking for inspiration for their lessons to cultural institutions looking for new ways of engaging their audience. We can improve distance education, creating curated learning paths on our pages to empower our readers by turning their opinion into structured knowledge.

Besides, Hypercritic is available to artists, curators, and museum institutions worldwide to organise “impossible exhibitions.” Imagine a place where it is possible to create thematic or aesthetic connections between a Japanese video game, a Renaissance painting, and a Hollywood musical from the 1930s: Hypercritic can offer thousands of such original and unforeseen experiences to everybody, based on personal taste and will to explore.

Finally, a key parameter of Hypercritic is environmental sustainability, thanks to its digital and zero-emission organisation and the promotion of sustainability and social impact causes, through its future “Change” section and the one dedicated to Unesco heritage. We believe that environmental protection and impact for change towards equality and a more just world will be necessary for any organisation in the post-Covid era.

Our natural environment is the digital space. We have chosen to kick off Hypercritic in English, but we plan to develop our website in other languages to make it the most inclusive as possible. Our team is growing day by day, involving collaborators from various parts of Europe and outside the continent.  We work to create collaborations with cultural institutions worldwide to provide a shared space of expression, exchange, and creativity to reach a wider audience.

We aim to bring out European art heritage and the diversity of European national and regional traditions and identities, enhancing different languages through our international team of writers and editors. We will promote a melting pot of cultures where everyone will find something familiar, yet discovering new cultural objects, compare them, and find common ground.

In this sense, we understand Europe as a united continent to travel, explore, learn, wander around, start again on new and unexpected paths, and make surprising encounters with its people and incredibly vast heritage. The culture and the arts in all their forms will be within everyone’s reach. Everyone will build their way of navigating and immersing themselves in the beauty created by artists of all times.”

Granted: 25.000 euros.
Funded in collaboration with Fondazione CRT

Website by HOAX Amsterdam