KNOWLEDGE
SHARING
PROGRAMS
CYBERWITCHES and Feminist Technologies
Co-coordinator with Carmen Lael Hines
Institute for Postnatural Studies
Cyberwitches and Feminist Technologies is a seminar series designed to place feminist theory in close dialogue with the complexities of cyber-space, technology, and the many philosophical formations that configure digital worlds. Approaching feminism as plurality and spatiality, we will discuss multiple iterations of feminist efforts on a global scale – and work through ways of engaging feminism in developing artistic practices, inside, outside, and between digital environments.
FULL PROGRAM
POSTNATURAL INDEPENDENT PROGRAM
Co-director and faculty
Institute for Postnatural Studies
The Postnatural Independent Program (PIP) explores the new implications of postnature as a framework for contemporary creation. In the form of an experimental educational platform, we collectively speculate and question not only contemporary ecologies but also new academic approaches and radical notions of learning together. Based on IPS’ ongoing initiatives, it offers an experimental platform for ecological thinking and cultural initiatives in an expanded virtual campus,.
FULL PROGRAM
MUTABILITY & MUTUALISM Vol. I and II
Coordinator and faculty
Institute for Postnatural Studies with
The Institute of Queer Ecology
Queer and ecology together make visible the interconnected, entangled conditions of life on earth and honor the strange, multispecies amalgamation we live in community with. To make sense of the broad constellation of practices that emerge from Queer Ecology, we examine at two scales: the individual and the collective. The speakers in this series considered the influence of mutability and mutualism on their work in the fields of visual art, evolutionary biology, biodiversity, environmental activism, synthetic biology, ecology, and queer theory.
FULL PROGRAM VOL.I and VOL.II
XENOXENOXENO
Producer & faculty
Institute for Postnatural Studies
This experimental seminar focused on new modes of overcoming the human/animal binomial by navigating within the postnatural framework. We explored how humans have interacted with animals in western culture and contrast it with different approaches to multi-species coexistence. Collectively we will also exercise different ways of embodying an expanded notion of the human-animal through vocal activations, writing, and roleplaying through hybrid bodies. We will play with the political potential of imagining new worlds through academic research and artistic proposals.
FULL PROGRAM
NEW ECOLOGIES
Guest faculty
Institute for Postnatural Studies
This seminar examines the glossaries that characterize new ecologies, analyzing inter-species articulations, cultural productions, ecological awareness, and the challenges of artistic, design, research, and curatorial practices in today’s climate crisis. From a broad approach to contemporary ecologies that defy rigid categorizations, it deepens in the genealogies of the Postnatural, as a thinking tool and political subject.
FULL PROGRAM
ECO? TRANS? TECHNO? CYBER? QUEER? BLACK? HYDRO? XENO? FEMINISMS
Co-coordinator
Institute for Postnatural Studies
The idea of the Earth as an "anonymous mother" (that some self-identified “eco-feminisms” uncritically maintain) is intrinsically linked to the conception of both nature and women as indefinitely exploitable sources of (re)production and wealth and has led us to collide with our planet’s real ecological limits. This seminar offers a space meant to be the beginning of an intellectual, embodied, collective, diffractive, emotional journey that brings us closer to the possibility of a world, or many worlds, where thinking together, unknowing, and building modes of affective affiliation become possible.
FULL PROGRAM
HYDRO FUTURES / MEMORY ECOLOGIES
Co-coordinator
Institute for Postnatural Studies with
Rhubaba Gallery & Studios
Water grounds our lives, from our beginnings in liquid, to our bodies as its containers. Hydro Futures / Memory Ecologies holds a space for research and investigation into our relationships with water through the frameworks of Afrofuturism and Black Geographies. The fields of Afrofuturism and Black Geographic critique both the erasure of Blackness within the whiteness and coloniality of geographical thought and analyse how the entanglements of race, class, gender, and sexuality determine patterns of habitation, denial, and resistance. In thinking with Afrofuturism as a lens to creatively and critically view water with, its ecological position is expanded upon to consider its role in the past, present, and possible future(s).
FULL PROGRAM
SOUND ECOLOGIES & WAYS OF LISTENING
Producer and faculty
Institute for Postnatural Studies
Earth's symphony extends far beyond the ozone layer, weaving its way into the very fabric of life and the cosmos. From the tiniest microorganisms to the vast expanse of matter, we are constantly transformed, both mentally and physically, by the sonic and cultural vibrations of our urban and natural environments. In this online seminar, we will explore multiple fields of acoustic research such as sonic technology, listening methodologies, field recording, and interspecies communication. We will collectively shift our perspective towards the Phonocene, a vision of the future that proposes sound and active listening in the center of an era.
FULL PROGRAM
WORKSHOPS,
MEDIATION &
HEALING PRACTICE
BERLINALE TALENTS THINK TANKS 2024
Mediator
Berlinale Talents
Berlinale Talents is a talent development programme that explores the how and why of movie making. Since 2003, it has grown to become a one-of-a-kind forum for film professionals and cinema lovers alike. This year's Berlinale Talents focused on language, film languages and a multifaceted exchange with and about film could not have been more timely. The 200 invited emerging filmmakers from 65 countries engaged in and enjoyed six days of moderated discussion panels, workshops, labs and think tanks.
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INTIMATE ASSEMBLAGES : #1 ECOLOGIES
Workshop facilitator
Kevin Space
This workshop aimed to delve into diverse organisms and conditions inherent in artistic production and presentation processes, exploring issues of assemblages, coexistence and relationalities. During the workshops, participants experiment with cognitive research methodologies that transcend traditional discourse. For instance, Yuri Tuma from the Institute for Postnatural Studies will focus on listening and compassion.
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DESIRABLE FUTURES, HYBRID BODIES
Collective joy facilitator
Rhubaba Gallery & Studios
Eco-speculation is a form of narrative creation that can be used through art as a tool to think about desirable futures. These narratives try to move us away from normative structures in order to imagine other worlds and other ways of relating to each other, of coexisting. How can we feel collective joy on an individual level? Through embodied performativity and meditation we inhabited other potential existences as a way to activate a less human centered speculative practice.
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LISTENING TO POSTNATURE
Workshop facilitator
Fabrica
During the workshop, Yuri Tuma unfolded different approaches, both theoretical and embodied to facilitate our understanding different ways of listening. He particularly focused on the Phonocene, described by Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret as a possible era of sound, in which listening is claimed as a vehicle to access new ways of inhabiting the territory and the current ecological crisis.
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PATO CUCHARA FRENTE AL SOL
Educator
Pilar Juncosa y Sotheby’s artistic education award winner - Fundación Miró Mallorca
Active listening is a practice that develops over time and with repetition. It is a way of listening that presents us with new tools to care for ourselves, our peers and the ecosystems around us. This education proposal was an invitation to groups of students to experimentally explore different ways of giving attention and being present whether in a classroom, in their homes, on the planet or in their own inner space. In parallel, the project invited high school faculty as a research group to collectively reflect critically on the educational system and how active listening can support the development of new care methodologies.
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BECOMING ASSEMBLY
Workshop facilitator
Colectivo Pláka
Throughout a week, the course participants will explore different approaches to processes and pedagogy, coming together and enacting more inclusive futures for the design discipline – and for their own, individual practices. The workshop aimed to be a transformative experience for all those who take part.
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ECTOPLASM TERRITORIES
Mediator
Matadero Medialab w/Institute for Postnatural Studies
Convened by architect Marina Otero Verzier, "Territorio Ectoplasma" is a week-long critical studies program that looks at the territorial dynamics and often overlooked spaces and bodies that sustain the activity of metropolitan centers. In particular, it focuses on the digital infrastructure making possible our datafied, urban life.
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LAB PENDIENTE
Workshop facilitator with Fabiana Vinagre
AMECUM
A laboratory where to experience the dialogue between the inner body space, the imaginary space and the space that surrounds us. From the observation of the environments and active listening, we traced the flows that cross them: human, animal, inanimate, historical, sonic or vital bodies. This action is the fourth session of Pendiente, a cycle of action and reflection for agents/collectives dedicated to cultural mediation. It is the project of AMECUM's residency at the Centro de Residencias Artísticas de Matadero Madrid during the year 2022.
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NONHUMAN DESIGN
Workshop facilitator
Domaine de Boisbuchet w/Institute for Postnatural Studies
Nowadays, and more than ever, we need to understand nature as a complex and political subject that can no longer be romanticized. The way it has been represented has led us to believe that it is something separated from us, resulting in the contradictory dichotomy between Nature and Culture. Design has always been about problem-solving and perhaps it is time to shift its axis by making the process the solution itself. How can we design for a non-human entity? What kind of necessities do we respond to when designing for or with a forest, a river, or a lake?
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DESCAMINHA
Workshop facilitator with Fabiana Vinagre
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
How do you listen to the Museum? A priori, this question may lead us to anatomy, to the act of listening exclusively directed to sound and hearing, but listening has more to do with a conversation than with the isolated act. Listening to a space implies giving it life, perceiving its vibrations, underworlds and resonances, which are returned to our bodies. In this edition of equipo1517 -a research and creation laboratory for a stable group of 10 teenagers from 15 to 17 years old- we start from practices of estrangement of the senses to stimulate non-verbal communication and listening to the body, to other people and to the Museum.
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LOBOS, DELFINES Y ZAMIOCULCAS
Workshop facilitator
La Casa Encendida
Through sound and corporeal research, this workshop proposed to stimulate other ways of communicating beyond the logocentric language as a way to explore interspecies communication. Throughout four sessions we have explored, among other topics, interspecies erotica, sound composition, digital roleplaying, phonetic poetry, expanded listening and field recordings. At the end of our time together we produced a radio program for La Casa Encendida Radio.
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UM SOAR COLETIVO
Workshop facilitator
Ponto d'Orvalho Festival
During the workshop and representing the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Tuma unfolded different approaches, both theoretical and performative, to facilitate our understanding of sound ecology in the dark of the night. In this experimental workshop, we collectively exercise different ways of embodying an expanded notion of the human-animal, through vocal activations, listening sessions, writing, meditation and role-playing. In this collaborative healing process, we found unexpected sonic joys that unite us.
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ACTIVE HYDRO-LISTENING
Workshop facilitator
Manifesta 15
In this workshop, Yuri Tuma, a member of the Institute for Postnatural Studies, will employ both theoretical and performative approaches to explore sound ecology within the context of Symphony of the Artificial Reef, a work created for Manifesta 15. Since the 15th century, various structures have been built to protect Barcelona’s coastline. In 2003, five artificial reefs were installed two kilometres offshore, which have since been populated by marine life, creating a thriving ecosystem that challenges reductionist ideas of the nature-culture divide. The workshop invites participants to actively “hydro-listen” to the voices that form the symphony of Barcelona’s artificial reefs.
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FONOCENE
Workshop facilitator
CaixaForum
How can sound transform our perception of the environment and our relationship with nature? In the last session, Yuri Tuma from the Institute of Postnatural Studies will invite us to explore through sound the place of the human in the current planetary context. Through a sound exploration workshop, we will discover how sound can transform our perception of space and nature, and how we can use it as a tool to understand and reflect on our world and the place we want to occupy in it.
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PUBLISHING
A BOOK FOR DISAPPEARANCE
Co-editor
cthulhu books
A Book for Disappearance explores themes of extinction and ecology through the lens of contemporary technology and using AI and image-generation platforms as collective tools. While disappearance may seem abstract or esoteric, it has tangible implications for both individual and collective action. In this book, the concept of disappearance emerges as an alternative, including a variety of short poetic and experimental texts on the multiple possibilities that surface from our engagement with AI alter-egos and a collective artistic exercise with image generation technologies.
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COMPOST READER
Co-editor
cthulhu books
From Cthulhu Books, we think of the world to come as a great Compost. Composting as our new relational ontology, as our earthly condition. Composting makes us a single planetary material (humans, beings, objects, technologies). It is the past and it is the future. It is space, place and it is matter. It is a world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, where there are rituals of celebration, entanglements, and interrelationships. This book speaks about beginnings, about new relationships, about unstable modes of doing, thinking, and being, letting questions spawn new questions.
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MAKING KIN: ANIMAL SERIES
Co-editor
cthulhu books
A very important part of how we relate to animals in capitalism gets buried underneath all of the anthropomorphizing tactics imposed on non-human bodies and voices. But what if we were to anthropomorphize on a less human centered level? Even though every time we try to speak through a non-human voice we have to accept the impossibility of truly inhabiting another being’s vital experience, we can find ways through creative practice to expand the way we sympathize or empathize with non-human animals. This is a book of xeno fiction that proposes an exercise of placing our imagination, and with it our body, inside another’s perspective.
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THE LISTENING AFFECT
Editor
Institute for Postnatural Studies + Contemporary Art Department of Ágora - Cultura e Desporto do Porto E.M
Through concerts, workshops, performances, parties, talks and this publication O Afeto da Escuta celebrates sound ecology and the joy of listening to far-away sounds, of dancing to future myths, of being bewildered by artificially generated birdsongs, of imagining other possible futures, but most importantly it invites us to listen as an act of radical ecological care.
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ZOO INDEX
Contributor
by Terezie Štindlová
edited by Jacob Lindgren
Zoo Index Reader examines the relevance of zoos and how they shape our gaze towards nonhuman animals, and by extension, ourselves and one another. Through a mixture of visual research and written contributions on the history of menageries, the confinement and privatization of land, zoo architecture, pets, the “naturalization” of animals, and the roles of zoos and animals in the history of cinema, this first volume asks: Do we need zoos? What does a meaningful coexistence with animals look like? Why have we decided to give a balloon to an elephant?
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WE?
Co-editor
cthulhu books
By critically leaving behind the representational distance between “us” and “them”, “here” and “there”, and “knowledge” and “superstition”, to name just a few of the dichotomies cultivated by Western traditional art and philosophy academies, we forge a necessary and immediate relation to the world. But who is “we”? And how can “we” stay together, despite our differences? How can “we” create collectivity without sameness, and bypass the pull towards homogeneity?
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A GREEN JADE LAKE
Co-editor
CentroCentro
The publication “A Green Jade Lake” compiles research and reflections that were carried out and developed for the first exhibition ever to be curated by the Institute for Postnatural Studies, and includes texts and narratives by thinkers, artists and curators that help us reflect on the idea of nature from different perspectives. Far from being a mere illustration of the exhibition, the book has been conceived as a project in itself, an open dialogue replete with leaks and possibilities.
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ATLAS MENOR #02 POSTHUMAN BODIES
Co-editor
Bartlebooth
In its obsession to classify and find an underlying order to nature, one of the objectives of science has been to develop a system of taxonomies for bodies. Through their representation systems and the devices used for their exhibition, cartographies of the normative body reflect the extractivist violence of the scientific method. This publication is intended as a displacement of the map, i.e., a questioning of the cartographies from the bodily perspective.
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LA CONDICIÖN POSTNATURAL
Editorial Assistant
cthulhu books
What is postnature? How to understand the socio-climatic crisis and where to look for new narratives for a desirable future? What is the relationship between contemporary ecology and artistic practices? The postnatural condition is a speculative glossary of terms and images, of stories and materials, an unfinished archive of intertwined thoughts. This book, which includes theoretical texts, situated examples, and artistic projects, presents a critical view of the modern Western conception of the "natural" and proposes new perspectives and resonances.
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SOUND ART &
PERFORMANCE
METAPHYSICS OF MIXTURE
Performance lecture with the Institute for Postnatural Studies
Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien
Metaphysics of mixture is a performative lecture that evokes the intrinsic, collective longing for plants as living archives of the elementary connections that life can establish with the world. Seen from different cultures and subjectivities, the Institute for Postnatural Studies’ presentation narrates a hidden and esoteric cultural history of botany, seed displacements and spore currents, mapping and mixing different accounts of movement, migration, and fragmentation. Part of the Bordering Plants exhibition .
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A TWITTERING SOUND FROM A CRHYSALIS
Performance lecture with the Institute for Postnatural Studies
Croatian Association of Fine Artists
The Institute for Postnatural Studies invites us to navigate with our imagination and feelings through meditation, theory, and sound. Otherhood, queer, and sound ecologies provide us with a critical space to interpret time through a kaleidoscope of materialities and other-than-human experiences. If we can access (or at least speculate as humans) the planetary genetic memory, as the monarch butterflies do, we may open ourselves up to a deeper connection with our common shared ancestry. Part of the 37th edition of Youth Salon Biennial.
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CRIPSIS
Performance lecture with the Institute for Postnatural Studies
MACBA
Acoustic ecology provides us with tools to explore new experiences of coexistence, based on active listening to the voices and sounds of those around us: human and non-human, technological and organic, imaginary or real. The Institute for Postnatural Studies invites us to navigate the work of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané through imagination and feelings, research and sound, through this performative lecture as the opening of the cycle.
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THE CANE, THE SEAGULL, THE CORK, POSEIDONA AND THE CAT
Sound installation
National Museum of Tossa del Mar, Spain
It is a completely organic work, which consists of a set of bundles of cane Americana rising on one side of the old tower, and also, scattering on the ground. The space is immersed in reeds and sound art, in which the sound of seagulls, the forest and of appraised ritualistic sounds. Why we call certain species invasive, opportunistic or protected? These qualifications respond to anthropomorphic concepts and politics. For this reason, through the composition created by the canes and their sound elements, the work calls into question the terminology with which non-human species are treated by local management. A collaborative work with the local department of environment .
LAND OF AHHNSGRWRH
Radiophonic art
Movement Radio - ONASSIS STEGI
For this episode of Sonic Utopias, Daphne X invites transdisciplinary artists Yuri Tuma, Carincur and João Pedro Fonseca for a sonic fiction piece inspired by an online role-playing dialogue with a member of the Furry community. This sound piece aims to imagine worlds within other worlds, beings that create universes, that suppose new frameworks from which to understand how to inhabit the ecological crisis. We explore anthropomorphicity as a way to rethink our relationship with non-human entities. Furry can be considered a hobby, a fetish, a grassroots movement and much more, but being part of this collective is first and foremost a question of identity.
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THOMÁS PÉFKKAS, SHE HAD NO NAME
Soundwalk and sculpture garden
Kinono Art Gathering Residency, Tinos, Greece
The work is an investigation of collective narratives that take as a starting point a sound piece created with sounds of the island and vocals from fellow residents and myself. This material bore fruit to a sound composition that was shared through a collective guided walk around the landscape. Before starting, the walkers were guided to stimulate their thoughts in search of a mental and/or spiritual meaning of an utopian garden. The hike led us to the Fire Garden installed at the edge of the Gastria marble cave in Tinos island. We then reflected on possible futures in relation to the local and the global, exploring similarities and differences between both scales of narratives.
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NO SON OTRA COSA QUE TOCARSE EL UNO AL OTRO
Sound installation
BAÑARTE
The process is a collective investigation of speculative narratives that resulted in an installation created with sounds from the local landscape, voices and stories derived from the memories of the older women residents in the small rural town. Together with the participants we spoke about possible futures in relation to the local and the global, exploring similarities and differences between both scales of narration. The sound installation can be heard from under the bridge of the river that has changed drastically throughout the decades due to climate change.
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NEW SUN
Digital Sound installation
Cryptovoxels multiverse
New Sun wants to break away from linguistic and rational constructions when trying to create possible utopias and/or dooms, fictions and/or futures that reflect on coexistence. Within us lies a collective and informative genetic more-than-human memory that can potentially be awakened through sound alone. When we speak of doom we might as well be speaking of a time before “creation”; doom is full of chaotic activities, but it could also be a time of slow silencing and emptying of time and space. The piece was created by mixing walk spaces together with phonetic poetry and musical composition derived from burnt music sheets.
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SOBRE FONDO BLANCO
Performance
Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Conde Duque
Sobre Fondo Blanco is a hybrid proposal between performance, sculpture, architecture, installation and sound art. The art in movement; the human being as a construction and destruction machine; the temporality of the metropolis; light dance; the sublime language and the supremacy of the spirit in geometry and architecture are some of the futuristic themes that reverberate in the work. The use of industrial and natural materials and sounds on this occasion explores their qualities in both their microcosm and their macrocosm by considering the four dimensions of a new postnatural landscape (distance, surface, interior and exterior) in relation to the imagination and the living (post)human spirit in the Capitalocene.
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RADIO
SPECULATIVE INTERVIEWS Vol. I & II & III
Coordinator and interviewer
La Casa Encendida Radio with the Institute for Postnatural Studies
Thinking of an interview as an excuse to create a speculative dialogue derived from the artistic or research work of the interviewees, we shared thoughts and ephemeral intuitions in an exercise of collaborative creation. We start from the idea of tentacular frameworks, of imaginaries that connect and relate the different inhabitants of this or other worlds and their narratives. This program is a space in which to participate in the visualization of futures, navigating between utopia and dystopia, the dreamlike and the real, the possible and the impossible. Through these types of dialogues we can project images of new desirable worlds, attending to, cultivating and caring for the relationships between their agents, both human and non-human, and their ecosystems.
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BARRO
Co-producer
Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, hablarenarte and the Reina Sofia Museum
This podcast series arises from the need to tell what cultural mediation is and what it does. In collaboration with Sara Torres-Vega we met with different mediators in different spaces to model this viscous material that is the cultural industry. BARRO is the podcast of MAR, a project promoted by the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, hablarenarte and the Reina Sofia Museum, whose main objective is to promote relevant actions of change in the field of new institutionalism.
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CULTURAL
PROGRAMMING
THE LISTENING AFFECT
Co-curator/coordinator
Galeria Municipal do Porto
Thinking of an interview as an excuse to create a speculative dialogue derived from the artistic or research work of the interviewees, we shared thoughts and ephemeral intuitions in an exercise of collaborative creation. We start from the idea of tentacular frameworks, of imaginaries that connect and relate the different inhabitants of this or other worlds and their narratives. This program is a space in which to participate in the visualization of futures, navigating between utopia and dystopia, the dreamlike and the real, the possible and the impossible. Through these types of dialogues we can project images of new desirable worlds, attending to, cultivating and caring for the relationships between their agents, both human and non-human, and their ecosystems.
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SER MONTAÑA
Co-curator
Travesía Cuatro CDMX Gallery
Bajo el Sol and the Institute for Postnatural Studies present «Ser Montaña», an exhibition that crosses three artistic and curatorial practices to address the voice that territory acquires in the face of processes of dispossession, against colonization or in the face of the violence of extractivism.
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Co-curator/coordinator
Institute for Postnatural Studies for CentroCentro
Through themes such as coexistence, botany, territorial politics, or aesthetics associated with the representation of nature, the exhibition is understood as a constellation of investigations, installations, and objects that creates open and transforming universes, bringing us closer to ecology from different perspectives.
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