Fabrics and papers with a past, revived as ornamental elements. Pulp kneaded and dyed in bold colors. Young hands working together to extract new forms from old discarded materials… This is the proposal that renowned artist Lucía Bayón brings to the students of Norte Joven in the workshop she has been leading since November 2024, aimed at encouraging their expressiveness and creativity within the framework of the “Horizons of Learning” project.
Lucía Bayón is the fourth artist to join the Horizons of Learning project, an initiative by Norte Joven supported by the Nemesio Diez Foundation, which seeks to integrate creativity into the professional and personal training of the organization’s students. In previous editions, the project featured collaborations with Iván Argote, Cristina Lucas, and Diego Delas, who, together with the students, created artworks and installations that are now part of the Norte Joven centers in Fuencarral, Villa de Vallecas, and Alcobendas.
Lucía Bayón’s creative proposal, which opens the Horizons of Learning workshops for the 2024–25 academic year at Norte Joven, delves into the core of her own artistic practice: textiles subjected to processes of disarticulation and subsequent reuse, the generation of circuits where transformation and reinvention are interwoven, and what emerges from these materials and processes.
Since the workshop began in early November, the successive sessions with Norte Joven students have charted a path from discarded materials to works of art. They have turned old papers and fabrics into pulp—the raw material for the artworks—treated it with starch to give it strength and solidity, dyed the mass, and worked it with their hands to incorporate it—using metal mesh structures—into the molds, presses, and frames designed by the artist specifically for the project.
To conclude, the pieces were left to dry patiently, until reaching their final destination: becoming ornamental elements at the Norte Joven Training Center in Fuencarral. The various decorative pieces—columns, vases, hanging objects—created jointly by Lucía Bayón and the students of Norte Joven will become part of the association’s facilities.
In this way, the Horizons of Learning collection will be enriched by a new artwork resulting from the collaboration between renowned socially committed artists and young people at risk of social exclusion who explore new paths of expression as part of their intellectual and personal development.
The creation by the students of Norte Joven and Lucía Bayón will join the artistic pieces produced in previous workshops: the cement and wood benches designed by Colombian artist Iván Argote, installed in the lobby of Norte Joven Fuencarral; the decorated bamboo curtain, a concept by Cristina Lucas, displayed in the restaurant of Norte Joven Villa de Vallecas; and the murals surrounding the sports courts of Norte Joven Alcobendas and Vallecas, painted by the students under the direction of Diego Delas.
