Canal Malaia

Canal Malaia is a non-profit association managed by a group of young people who run it by investing many hours of their free time. The project was set up to create audiovisual references of self-produced aesthetics in Catalan for young people, hence the name Associació Audiovisual Jove Malaia (Malaia Youth Audiovisual Association). Its website can be found at: malaia.cat

By making use of new audiovisual formats distributed on the most popular social media networks in the youth age group, it aims to reach all young people with content that interests and invites them to a referential world rooted in local neighbourhoods and settings. And it does so in Catalan because hegemonic languages have unfortunately overwhelmed the mobile phones of today’s young people, posing an obvious danger to multiculturalism. It also wants its experience to serve as a reference for other non-hegemonic languages in order to seek mechanisms and share strategies to confront market algorithms that reward only short-term profits. In other words, it aims to be a pilot test exportable to other cultures to create an alternative model to encourage – also financially – content creation in networks.

Malaia is especially careful to identify creative people to serve as role models for young people, particularly with a view to developing new strategies and methodologies so that educators have materials to talk to young people in a non-paternalistic manner. Its goal is educational and leisure, aiming to blur borders in order to reinforce the educational and referential function of the audiovisual. It is also attentive so that creative people use different variants of Catalan.

Its task consists of researching potential content creators, encouraging and accompanying them during the creative process, supporting them with the script, dialectic resources and editing of the video, and finally disseminating their videos with suitable marketing.