Art and Us - How Art Can Transform Children, Communities, and Cultural Policy

TOPIC

What happens when a museum stops being a place where people quietly observe… and becomes a place where people touch, play, question, create, and belong?

Can artistic experiences genuinely change the way children see themselves and the world around them? And if they can — how do we prove it in a society increasingly obsessed with measurable impact?

In this talk, Mar Gaitán takes us inside TOWCHED, a European project that transformed museums into living environments for collective exploration. From contemporary art museums to ethnographic collections and natural history spaces, the project brought together children, families, educators, artists, elderly communities, and public institutions to rethink what cultural participation can actually mean.

Through colour, gesture, experimentation and play, museums became spaces not only for learning, but for building relationships, civic belonging, and new forms of cultural citizenship — even before language itself fully develops.

Starting from one provocative question — “Raise your hand if you believe art can change a child. Now prove it to a Ministry.” — the talk explores the growing tension between human experience and evidence-based cultural policy, asking how we can measure the invisible impact of art without losing what makes it deeply human in the first place.

What we'll cover

• How TOWCHED reimagined museums as spaces for participation, exploration and shared cultural experience rather than passive observation
• Why artistic play, touch and open-ended experimentation can radically change the way children and young people engage with culture
• The collaborative ecosystem behind the project — connecting museums, families, schools, artists, elderly communities, vocational students and public institutions
• The challenge of measuring the social impact of art and cultural participation in meaningful ways
• How the project combines co-creation, human-rights approaches and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to rethink cultural policy
• Why museums may play a fundamental role in building cultural citizenship from the earliest stages of life

SPEAKER

Mar Gaitán is an art historian, cultural researcher and storyteller whose work explores the intersections between art, memory, science and visual culture. Through an interdisciplinary approach, she creates engaging conversations that connect historical thought with contemporary questions, inviting audiences to observe the world with both curiosity and critical imagination.

With a background that bridges humanities, public engagement and cultural research, Mar specialises in transforming complex ideas into accessible and deeply human experiences. Her work focuses on participation, collective memory and the social role of culture — creating spaces for dialogue, reflection and discovery that connect artistic practice with wider civic and societal questions.