The AlimentAR-T project, which aims to promote art as a way of improving people’s eating habits. Part of this project is developed entirely inside the MORERA with adults with chronic pathology, with unhealthy eating behaviors and at risk of social exclusion

The Councilor for Culture of the Lleida City Council, Pilar Bosch, together with the deputy director of the Primary and Community Care Management of Lleida, Marisa Regany, the director of MORERA. Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Lleida, Jesús Navarro, the community health representative of the Rambla Ferran Primary Care Team, Alícia Màrquez, and the head of education and public, Txell Bosch, presented the AlimentAR project today -T , which aims to promote art as a way of improving people’s eating habits. Part of this project is developed entirely inside MORERA with adults with chronic disease, unhealthy eating habits and at risk of social exclusion. There will be group work based on a series of works of art, which will allow reflection on aspects related to food, what influences the act of eating to improve the habit and adherence to the dietary indications for each patient. To do this, 10 works from the MORERA collection have been selected to work on them in the different scheduled sessions. The intervention starts from the Visual Thinking Strategies, in which the participants must answer different observation questions. The sessions will be led and accompanied by MORERA technicians, and by different professionals from CAP Rambla Ferran. The museum’s technicians, Txell Bosch, responsible for education and audiences, and Francesc Gabarrell, coordinator of public programs, will act as facilitators of exploration, dialogue, debate and the creation of group stories that will relate to the contents that Primary Care professionals will work on in each session. The works that will serve as the guiding thread of the project are: Session 1: Still Life by Anselmo Rivas Session 2 Metge Moro by Miquel Viladrich Session 3: Morphology by Leandre Cristòfol Session 4: Palettes by Jordi V. Pou Session 5: Without title by Joaquim Mir Session 6: Oranges by Jordi V Pou Session 7: Without title (Monstruas) by Marina Núñez Session 8: Feinejant by Leandre Cristòfol Session 9: Beggar by Leandre Cristòfol Session 10: Western Periphery by Santi Iglesias These works belong to different artistic periods and present a diversity of formats: painting, photography and sculpture. All of them come from the museum’s collection, except for the piece “Morfologia”, by Leandre Cristòfol, which belongs to the National Art Museum of Catalonia. Alicia Màrquez explained that AlimentAR-T is a project that the EAP Rambla Ferran presented in 2023 to the call for grants for community health projects from the Department of Health, and which has been awarded a financial grant of 3,000 euros. “This is a multidisciplinary hybrid project, which aims to work on food in its wider framework and, not only in the nutritional dimension, through art”. The project is aligned with the proposal of the Arts in Health International Foundation (AiHIF), which aims to highlight the potential of the arts in improving the health of people and societies.

For his part, the director of the Museum, Jesús Navarro, commented that “a project like Alimentar-T allows us to reinforce the community and pedagogical vocation that the Museum has maintained over time and that now, in this new location, we can develop with greater intensity and with a direct connection with the social fabric of the neighborhood, where other programs are being developed, such as an educational residency project with the Escola Príncep de Viana.” The councilor for Culture, Pilar Bosch, closed the presentation by thanking those responsible for the ICS for the collaboration proposal with MORERA: “I hope it will be an enriching experience for the participants and an opportunity for future collaborations between the CAP de Rambla Ferran or the ICS and Paeria, we will surely find new projects to do together and strengthen the necessary relationship between art, culture and health.” He also highlighted that “cultural spaces should serve to enjoy art and culture and also generate bonds, in addition to bringing exhibition spaces closer to vulnerable people.” A total of 10 group sessions will be held between November 2024 and March 2025.