Case study
Designing a distributed cultural system
without an institution
This case documents the design of WeArt Festival as a distributed cultural system without institutional backing: lightweight governance, shared communication rules, and templates that coordinated venues, calls and documentation. The structure later became legible enough to earn institutional validation.
The work focused on the system itself: participation rules, editorial framing, and a repeatable structure that could hold discourse and continuity across editions.
The challenge
WeArt Festival was conceived as an independent, multidisciplinary contemporary art festival operating across multiple venues and disciplines in Barcelona. It had no central headquarters, no hosting institution and no predefined operational infrastructure.
The challenge was not visual, promotional or technical. It was structural: enabling collaboration, coherence and continuity in a system designed to operate without hierarchy or institutional backing.
Failure was not an option, because there was no buffer to absorb it.
Constraints as structure
The festival operated without a traditional budget.
There were no venue fees, no paid media, no salaries and no commercial sponsorship. Basic operational costs were covered through artists’ registration fees, while the system itself relied on collaboration, shared ownership and mutual value.
This constraint was not a limitation. It was the structure.
Designing the festival meant designing incentives, roles and relationships that made participation meaningful without financial transactions. Transparency, clarity and trust were essential for the system to sustain itself over time.
Designing the system
The work focused on designing the festival as a system rather than as a series of events.
This included defining an annual conceptual framework to align all disciplines, establishing shared curatorial and selection criteria, and designing a digital platform to support open calls, editorial content, communication and long-term memory.
Digital infrastructure was not a promotional layer. It was the backbone that allowed the festival to exist, scale and remain coherent across editions.
My role
I co-founded WeArt Festival and led its creative and digital direction.
My role combined conceptual direction, system design and digital architecture. I was responsible for defining how the festival operated, how decisions were made, how content was structured and how the project could evolve without losing coherence.
The work required constant alignment between vision, structure and execution.
The outcome
Over three consecutive editions, WeArt Festival became a recognised independent platform within Barcelona’s cultural landscape. It hosted international artists, collaborated with academic and cultural institutions, activated multiple venues across the city and built a consistent audience year after year.
In its final edition, the project received institutional support from the Ajuntament de Barcelona, including street-level visibility and promotion through official cultural channels.
This support did not define the project. It validated a structure that was already working.
More importantly, the festival demonstrated that a cultural initiative can operate independently first, and engage institutions later, when governance, clarity and intent are already in place.
Technical execution
Distributed component architecture
Designing for a distributed system required a resilient component library capable of operating across multiple independent platforms. I built a lightweight framework that prioritized load speed and interoperability.
Cross-platform consistency
The implementation ensured that even as the festival's digital footprint expanded across different domains, the visual logic and information hierarchy remained intact. This was achieved through a CSS architecture designed for longevity and easy deployment in decentralized environments.
This project shaped how I approach digital systems today: as structures that can emerge without institutions, and later sustain them without losing meaning.