match
(mediterranean as the climate hotspot)
MATCH (the Mediterranean as a climate hotspot) is an international cultural cooperation project that fosters social engagement through artistic practices in community gardens, promoting alternatives for climate mitigation, values of solidarity and self-sufficiency, and knowledge about climate adaptation in the Mediterranean.
The project features an in-house capacity-building programme for cultural practitioners, offering opportunities for shared learning on community-based artistic initiatives that proactively address the climate emergency. It also focuses on the development of new works of art and cultural initiatives to strengthen community action against climate change, through transnational artist residencies involving artists and creative professionals.
During 2025 and 2026, MATCH will take place in Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Spain and Turkey, but will benefit the entire Mediterranean region, laying the foundations for a transnational network of artists and cultural and creative professionals who reflect on the relationships between climate change, culture and the arts.
Visit the project website here.
Capacity Building Workshop
During March, La Escocesa hosted a three-day event entitled ‘Shifting Shores: Climate Justice and Restorative Practices in the Mediterranean’. The event brought together artists, cultural professionals, researchers and community initiatives to explore how art and collective action can address the intertwined realities of the climate crisis, migration and social justice.
Programme
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The potential of urban agriculture for climate justice: local communities, social inclusion and reconciliation. Discussion and group activity led by Júlia Soler (colectivo Cityplot) and Kait Hutchinson (L’Hort del Clot).
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Visit to L’Hort del Clot and discussion with participants from Urban Brots, a community agroecological garden initiative bringing together various associations and groups of people, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa.
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Visit to the MACBA’s Jardí Ambulant and conversation with Metzineres and CAP Raval, collectives forming part of the project.
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Intertwined Seas: From Top Manta to Drassanes. This tour of Las Ramblas —guided by Claudia Delso and Mafe Moscoso— invites us to question what relationships or connections we can or wish to imagine or weave with, or in the company of, the Mediterranean Sea, from an anti-colonial and restorative perspective.
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Artists in residence at La Escocesa present the ECO Department: experiences in art, sustainability and community.
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Round Table: Beyond Borders. Situated knowledge in times of climate collapse, with Rae Teitelbaum, Josep Perelló and Panagiota Kotsila.
Artistic residencies
Hannah Taylor and Nafsika Hadjichristou are the artists selected to take part in an international research and production residency at La Escocesa during March 2026, as part of the MATCH project.
Nafsika Hadjichristou has been exploring how we can imagine collective futures beyond climate collapse through exercises of collective imagination, alongside engagement with living practices in the city of Barcelona. Moving between workshops and research, she has connected with social spaces and community gardens that experiment with alternative ways of living, creating, and repairing relationships with the world around us, in community.
Through a series of workshops, she invited participants to reflect on their relationship with deep time and the earth, exploring different methods to activate collective imagination. The residency concluded with an experimental creative laboratory for stop-motion collage animation, bringing together participants from diverse backgrounds to collectively imagine and materialise possible futures. She is now working towards an audiovisual collage that weaves together imaginations and lived realities emerging from these shared experiences and conversations.
Hannah Taylor has focused on learning through direct engagement with the landscapes and materials found in Barcelona and the wider region. Through walks and informal gatherings she collected overlooked materials from marginal spaces or “Third Landscapes”, ecologically and culturally significant neglected spaces where many of the plants she works with grow.
During the second part of the residency she volunteered with syntropic agriculture projects in the mountains and spent time at an urban garden run by intercultural growers. These encounters offered different perspectives on cultivation, ecological knowledge, and the ways communities adapt to changing environmental conditions, while also highlighting how shared practices of growing and tending can become forms of collective care.
Another strand of the research involved exploring urban systems of reuse through contact with chatarreros, whose work recovering discarded metals and objects reveals a deep familiarity with the material flows of the city. Their activities suggest a form of urban foraging that operates within the infrastructures of waste and circulation, challenging dominant ideas about value and disposal.
Related activities
MATCH (Mediterranean as the Climate Hotspot), is a project co-funded by the European Union under the Creative Europe programme. It brings together five cultural organisations based in the Mediterranean: Mapa das Ideas (PT), D6:EU (CY), La Friche la Belle de Mai (FR), BJCEM (BE) and the National Technical University of Athens (GR), each of which works with local partners in the arts sector and community gardens.