MediaLab

IDEALab (Inclusion, Design, Education and Art) is a project promoted by the MediaLab at the University of Oviedo that creates a space for experimentation, learning, and collaborative creation around inclusive art. It brings together students and emerging creators working in visual arts, design, illustration, performing arts, and other contemporary disciplines to explore how digital tools can expand the ways in which artistic works are created, shared, and experienced. Through 3D scanning, 3D printing, virtual reality, digital editing, sound, image, and sensory interaction, IDEA Lab seeks to establish new connections between contemporary artistic practice, cultural accessibility, and local communities.

The project's first line of work is developed in collaboration with MACEAS in Langreo, a contemporary art exhibition featuring works by secondary school and upper secondary school students. This phase focuses on reviewing, improving, and expanding the exhibition to make it more inclusive, ensuring that everyone, regardless of their abilities or ways of perceiving the world, can experience it in a meaningful way. Rather than simply adapting existing content, the project rethinks how an exhibition can be seen, heard, touched, explored, and understood.

The second line of work positions IDEA Lab as a creative laboratory. During this phase, participants develop their own artistic proposals based on a shared reflection on the body: what it can be, how it changes, the memories it holds, how it relates to other bodies, and what makes it feel included or excluded. Accessibility is incorporated from the very beginning of the creative process and guides the design of a future inclusive exhibition intended to travel throughout rural areas of Asturias.

At present, this second line of work is taking shape through several projects developed by the participants:

• Yeray-Bosco presents a project based on rural testimonies that focuses on the memories of older women living in Asturian villages. Through interviews, he collects stories about childhood, work, caregiving, the transformation of rural communities, the future, and the legacy these women wish to leave behind. The project places particular emphasis on hands as symbols of experience, craftsmanship, care, affection, and memory—hands that have cared, worked, supported others, and passed on knowledge. The installation consists of tactile sculptures containing sound devices, allowing visitors to activate them and listen to excerpts from these testimonies.
• Óscar Molero is developing an illustrated watercolor book featuring a snail travelling from the centre of its shell towards the outside world. The shell functions simultaneously as a body, a home, and a narrative structure inspired by a logarithmic spiral, whose divisions become proportionally sized rooms. Óscar is currently designing this shell-house digitally using Procreate while exploring different exhibition formats, ranging from a complete architectural plan of the shell's interior to a sequence of illustrations that follows the character's journey. His work offers a poetic interpretation of the body as a place to inhabit, a refuge, a shifting boundary, and a space of transformation.
• Sara Segura is developing a theatrical and multisensory adaptation of Waiting for Godot. Her project explores how a theatrical work can be understood and experienced beyond words and sight by incorporating smells, sounds, bodily interaction, and new relationships between performers and audiences. The proposal aims to ensure that every visitor can engage with the work through their own perceptual abilities rather than being limited to a single mode of experience.
• Sara Ardura is developing a project on artificial evolution through graphic design, combining ideas of natural evolution, technological adaptation, and empathy. Inspired by the concept of "Love to the Point of Invention", she understands tools such as the wheelchair not merely as technical solutions but as inventions born from care and from the desire to expand the possibilities of the human body.

The value of IDEA Lab lies in the coexistence of these different perspectives. Oral memories interact with sound installations; illustration expands into digital design; theatre becomes a multisensory experience; and graphic design reflects on technology as an extension of care.

From Asturias and for its rural communities, IDEALab proposes an accessible, inclusive form of contemporary artistic practice that is deeply connected to its territory, understanding art as a means of generating sensitive knowledge, strengthening communities, and exploring new forms of cultural participation.

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