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First of all, we would like to thank the directors of the Festival 10 Sentidos, Meritxell Barberá and Inma García. Last year they invited us to participate in this emblematic festival that has been held in Valencia for thirteen years.

A year ago we started this collaboration with an interactive installation at LABA Valencia’s own headquarters, where visitors could experiment, interacting with the Improvisa app, to create visual and sound improvisations. The installation was open during April and May 2023, after several months of work in which students from both BAH Graphic Design & Digital Media and Photography & Video, of different levels and knowledge, turned to creating their own compositions with Improvisa, with the idea of supporting the public. Many of the students were confronted for the first time with visual and sound improvisation, abstract, non-linear, not necessarily melodic. During the closing ceremony of the 12th edition of the Festival 10 Sentidos, at the Teatre el Musical – TEM, a session of visual and sound concerts was held by the students themselves, the authors of the compositions. It was a magical moment, very special for everyone, full of excitement and creativity.

In October 2023, the directors of the festival invited us once again to participate with an exhibition at the Las Naves centre. I then decided to form a group around the students from the previous year; this time I proposed to them to be the curators, under my direction, of the exhibition. The previous year, in addition to their desire to explore and learn, they had shown responsibility and perseverance, something essential for carrying out a project of this kind, especially at an age when many things are being done for the first time. Since then, we have travelled a path of work, emotions, discoveries, commitments and a lot of creativity, in which the initial core of curators has been logically reduced and at the same time a large number of LABA Valencia students from different degrees and masters have become involved with their works, through a call for entries, in an exhibition that brings together photography, video, animation, creative coding, AI, graphic creation, sound art and words. I could say that the word, which was there in our desires from the first moment, has permeabilised the project, has helped us to discover the intimacies, to get to know each other, to perceive the proposals in greater depth.

The exhibition consists of eight photographic series, fifteen pieces of video art and nine graphic proposals. Intimate glances and journeys around the city, a selection that brings together the best works of LABA Valencia students from nine different countries.

Cristina Casanova Seuma
Director of LABA Valencia. School of Art, Design & New Media