Mater Art Community (MAC) is a Barcelona-based space for inclusive artistic residencies and a research hub exploring sustainable creative models from the perspective of artists with non-standard needs. Its most visible action, Mater Art, is a shared residency that combines professional artistic work with a child-friendly environment, including a dedicated early childhood co-care service.
Since 2021, Mater Art has turned Fabra i Coats – Fàbrica de Creació in Barcelona into a pioneering space where artistic practice, care, and community grow together.
Inspired by initiatives like Mother House Studios (London), it promotes new ways of creating that integrate childhood, mutual support, and real work–life balance.
Led by the cooperative Base O and the DUAE collective, the programme is co-produced with Fabra i Coats (ICUB) and supported by the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
For its fifth edition (2025), the programme consolidated an artist residency with childcare, allowing artists, curators, and researchers who mother to develop their work without separating creation from life. Here, artistic processes unfold alongside caregiving, acknowledging that both belong to the same ecosystem.
Invited by the Base O cooperative and the DUAE collective, Prohibit No Tocar designed and activated the Childhood Space in every edition: a place for play, exploration, and creativity that is deeply connected to the residents’ research and artistic processes.
Across its editions, the Childhood Space has become a living ecosystem where:
- children explore, play, and experiment with open-ended materials that encourage autonomy, creativity, learning, and free movement;
- artists work close to their children, normalising the presence of childhood within contemporary artistic practice;
- residents share care, concerns, and creative processes, generating support networks and collaborations, as artists and as mothers.
The space evolves year after year, integrating learning, real needs, and new forms of play, dialogue, and interaction.
From this daily exchange, a shared vision emerges:
a more inclusive, more human, and more sustainable model of creation, where motherhood is not an obstacle, but a strength that feeds the artistic work.
- We designed and activated a play space that fosters exploration, freedom, and creativity for children.
- We created conditions for residents to work in emotional and physical proximity to their children.
- We introduced open-ended materials and play narratives connected to contemporary artistic processes.
- We facilitated a context where mothers, fathers, and artists could share care and build a community network.
- We reflected on the experience through pedagogical observation and a visual record of daily life in the space.
Mater Art reminded us that creation becomes stronger when it is cared for and shared.
We witnessed how the presence of childhood transforms rhythms, opens new perspectives, and fosters more attentive and supportive communities.
We learned that designing spaces where one can play while creating is also a form of advocacy for slower, more conscious, and deeply human ways of producing art.
And we reaffirmed something essential:
when childhood has a place, creativity at every age expands.
What they say
Mater Art Community is a necessary space for those of us who mother and are artists, so that we can continue our practices in conditions that also take our daughters into account.
For me, Mater Art Community has been an incredible experience where being a mother and an artist has felt natural and organic.
Mater Art Community is a utopia made real