About us

CROMÁTICA HUMANA was founded in Zurich and works internationally. We document, give visibility to and connect projects that grow out of community, culture, education, art and social responsibility — projects that achieve a great deal but often need more visibility and better access to networks of support.

We work from one conviction: before we support a project, we want to understand it. Before we talk about impact, we listen to the people. Before we build alliances, we build trust.

The Name

«Cromática» points to colour, variety and nuance — the chromatic does not flatten, it lets differences and intensities show. «Humana» puts people at the centre: their stories, their creativity, their dignity.

CROMÁTICA HUMANA means looking at reality as a living composition — and making the human colours visible: the colour of a school, of a workshop, of a cultural space, of an idea that still needs support to grow.

The Founder

CROMÁTICA HUMANA was founded by Virna Talarico, who serves as its president. She teaches at a primary school in Zurich, speaks six languages at native level and has worked for years as an interpreter — a path between languages, cultures, education, art and mediation. Her connection to Cuba goes back to the year 1999: since then she has travelled to the country every year and has lived there for several years.

In Zurich she ran her own school for Cuban dance and organised cultural events and cultural trips to Cuba over many years. In Havana she led a socio-cultural children's project in the Juanelo neighbourhood of San Miguel del Padrón, which gave children and young people a protected space through Afro-Cuban dance and music — and made the documentary «La Rumba no va a morir» about it (2007, Attic Independent Production).

What grew out of it are relationships on equal footing — formed over years, not manufactured for a project. That is what CROMÁTICA HUMANA rests on: the ability to listen in one context, to understand in another and to create trust between the two.

The Board

CROMÁTICA HUMANA is run by a board of three. What connects them is not a shared profession but a shared experience: that support works where you know the people it is meant for.

Madeleine Aeschbacher, vice-president and secretary, is a dancer, choreographer and dance teacher, trained in contemporary stage dance at the Zürich Tanz Theaterschule. Her passion for Latin American folk dance took her to Peru, where she danced for years in a professional folklore ensemble and deepened various techniques with renowned teachers. In 2002 she founded the company América Baila, which she has directed since 2012 — responsible for teaching, choreography and the staging of its dance-theatre productions.

Carola Badzong, treasurer and responsible for finances, has taught at a secondary school in the canton of Zurich since 2015. There she saw again and again that committed young people are stopped by costs no one covers: one student gave up her Cambridge English exam after a year of preparation because the exam fee could not be paid. Out of that experience she founded an association of her own to remove such obstacles without bureaucracy — and she brings both to CROMÁTICA HUMANA: the practice of running an association, and the conviction that support should reach people directly.

What we're not

Trust also comes from being clear about what we are not:

  • not an advertising agency that uses human stories for its own image;
  • not an organisation that appropriates other people's work or imposes outside agendas;
  • not an immediate promise of money;
  • not a charity structure that reduces people to what they lack.
  • Our role is to accompany, to document, to translate and to connect — not to replace or decide from the outside.