OVQ

Spain

OBSERVATORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE (OVQ) is an autonomous space for Social Life Dynamics research The Observatory of Everyday Life (OVQ) was born in Barcelona during August 1999. It is an assembly-led multidisciplinary organisation working in research and content creation around social life dynamics. OVQÕs vertebrating core is the website www.ovq.cat The team behind the Observatory is formed by anthropologists, historians, audiovisual professionals, graphic design experts and artists. The main aim behind the variety of disciplines is the availability of multiple points of view and formal approaches in order to get closer to daily life from several fronts. We aim to analyse the swaying of modernity, to explain the reasons behind certain public manifestations and to follow the unspoken uses of public urban spaces. All this is done by paying attention to events and practices that allow us to approach the whole precisely because of their exceptional and particular nature. Popular gatherings, mass tourism, sports events, power representations, tumultuous occupations of public spaces, the scope of the sacred in modern societies and migration phenomena are our main lines of research. OVQ activities are very diverse. On the one hand, the collective has specialised in the creation of editorial, exhibiting, graphic, video and web content, as well as the elaboration of monographic reports, thematic dossiers, current affair news, museum exhibitions and documentaries for television. On the other hand, it has produced many research papers and documentation about the above mentioned topics.