SPRINTS x
TEDxTarragona
Use these awesome visuals.
Act for climate now.
About SPRINTS
Countdown, TED’s initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis, and Fine Acts – a global creative studio for social impact, joined forces to kick off a series of SPRINTS creative bootcamps on climate change around the world. The goal: to engage artists to envision what a better climate future looks like. Today, this has grown into an extraordinary global collaboration with 20 TEDx events, collectively hosting 22 SPRINTS.
SPRINTS is an original format, developed by Fine Acts – a creative bootcamp where visual artists are briefed on a topic by experts, and then have 48 hours to produce an artwork on that specific issue. Throughout the process, artists are supported by a pool of mentors. Each edition of SPRINTS also ends with a public pop-up exhibition.
Furthermore, all visuals are published under an open license, so that activists, nonprofits, movements and educators globally can use and adapt them in their work towards climate action.
In 2023/2024, we collaborated with 13 events, hand picked by the TEDx Program. We supported the amazing TEDx teams to select awesome local visual artists, organize effective creative bootcamps and inspiring public exhibitions, and curate a host of brilliant illustration collections.
As a result, hundreds of new artworks joined our unique Artists for Climate vault with open-licensed visuals on climate change. Selected works were also featured on Fine Acts’ global platform for free socially-engaged art – TheGreats.co, where they joined The Climate Collection, an invaluable public resource with a distinct focus on hope & solutions.
Our event in Spain
In 2023, we once again partnered with TEDxTarragona – one of the most prominent TEDx events in Spain. The amazing team of TEDxTarragona hand-picked a powerful group of 7 local visual artists, organized a creative bootcamp and a public exhibition, and curated and produced the brilliant collection below.
The SPRINTS bootcamp happened in the city’s Central Market. Additionally, the bootcamp also featured an interactive piece, ‘taking the temperature’ on public perceptions: "Participate. We want to know your opinion. What would you do to reduce the effects of climate change?”
“People saw us there and were curious. Having the interactive piece helped us to really connect with them and engage them, instead of just giving them a flyer, because that’s so boring. It was more like – do you have a couple of minutes? You just need to play, and answer these easy questions”, says Agustí López, TEDxTarragona’s organizer. He sees art as a tool to generate important conversations.
The pop-up exhibition featured a huge canvas (6 meters wide), installed in the center of the Market where the artists were working the previous weekend. The exhibition has been up for a month. The works will be showcased once again during TEDxTarragona’s annual event in May.
Meet the awesome artists (from left to right): Alba Da Virgi, Alba Domingo, Dani Pena, Mima Tosic, Namibia Coronado, Pepe Serra, Manuel Moranta
The Bootcamp & Exhibition
Reflections
“The artists were so proud that we were invited again. It was a surprise. And, they enjoyed the process a lot. In fact, I was a little bit nervous because when they started, they didn’t produce anything for a while. They spent like an hour, an hour and a half just exchanging ideas. They really appreciated creating together. And, the results were amazing. I’m very happy.”
“I don’t know if these artworks will be used, or not. We’ll see what happens. But the most important benefit I see is to create a conversation. And we were already successful in this – by being in the market, having the artists create there, and engaging with the local community during that time.”
“I think one of the most important effects of SPRINTS is that now the local community associates our TEDx, which in principle is an annual event for talks, with something different. They see us as an actor, that can create interesting conversations, about, in this case, climate change, but in the future – maybe about democracy, or some other issue. This opens a huge door for us.”
