The Super3 opens 'Fantàstix': a new immersive experience for children and families

Barcelona3Cat's Super3, with funding from Grup Transversal, has this week opened the doors of Fantàstix, a new cultural, family, and immersive experience focused on the power of stories, imagination, and the active participation of children. Located in the Sagrada Família neighborhood, the space, which was an old 2,000 square meter parking lot, has been transformed into a "factory of imagination", where the narrative focuses on the premise of recovering the power of storytelling, which has disappeared from the world. The intention of the project is to become a new meeting point for families, the educational world, and Catalan children's and youth culture.

As communicated at the press conference by the president of 3Cat, Rosa Romà, Fantàstix is born with a clear cultural vocation: to reclaim the value of stories, oral tradition, and shared imagination as tools for growth, creativity, and intergenerational family connection. The experience is inspired by tales, classic stories, and universal narratives, with a perspective rooted in Catalan culture and tradition with the presence of Super3's imaginary. The executive advocated for a focus on in-person presence, the value of creation, and taking a pause, in an environment digitally marked by immediacy and overstimulation: "It will be an initiative that will bring us even closer to families, within the framework of a strategic project of great social impact, the result of the alliance between 3Cat and Grup Transversal".

L'ARA had the opportunity to have the full experience and "recover imagination". A central narrative is presented that places the audience inside the Super3 imagination factory, when a kind of worldwide virus causes an unprecedented creative blackout that causes the imagination for creating stories, music, and tales to be lost. These are the Avorribots, the antagonists of the story, digital insects that with the help of the Imaginets, the brigade of characters who keep the factory alive, must be defeated to thus recover fantasy. The universe is built from the corpus of tales and stories and is recreated as a big crazy factory, a space where characters, settings, and narratives coexist. Faced with the chaos caused by the Avorribots, the resolution of the conflict is collaborative, in an experience lasting more than an hour.

The route takes place in different scenarios of the world of stories that they will discover as the challenge progresses, which ends with a 4D experience. Visitors will pass through story settings such as a forest, a castle, a city square or the cauldron of imagination. Participants must help the characters decide what to do in their stories: they can fill the bull's belly, climb an interactive beanstalk, find the magical path of the forest to advance in the adventure or have the opportunity to ask questions to a magic mirror, among others. The public travels through the world of stories, always with the aim of collaborating with the Super3 characters to resolve the creative crisis.

Fantàstix will also have a theatre with a capacity of 200 people, where a parallel cultural offering is expected, which is scheduled to begin around the end of October this year with family shows, proposals linked to the world of stories and frequent participations of Super3 characters. On the upper floor will be the themed cafeteria, which will be available to book for birthday parties, as well as a shop for objects and accessories.

However, not everyone is happy with the launch of this facility. Signs have appeared in the neighbourhood saying: "No to Fantàstix. 200,000 more visitors a year in the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood is for living".