Applied Sensorialities, an art-science essay was an experimental investigation that was carried out at the Luis Seoane Foundation and in which sensory perception was tested with the artist’s works. To find out what it means for the viewer to visit / inhabit a work of art. To do this, we use sensory analysis software and an electroencephalogram (EEG) to measure emotions by analyzing the electrical activity of the brain using small electrodes; but also through the body itself, trying to bring work closer to the body and vice versa.
Deepening the attention, making it more sustained, fuller is an attempt to resist the economy of attention, as a way to stop, to become aware of the here and now, of the moment, to enjoy the sensory experience, to put the body in fingertips. service of that particular moment. Throughout some workshops, the experience of inhabiting a work was analyzed, a more conscious and less conscious attention was played (which could be the usual when visiting a museum), in order to know what it means for the viewer to see the work , but also how to exercise to train attention and improve sensory acuity.
In this study, the emotions felt at different times during the visit to the Luis Seoane Foundation were measured. Specifically, 10 experiments were carried out that were measured in order to harmonize the results and compare the actions. Measurements were made using two different methods, surveys and EEG headband, as well as through the analysis of conversations derived from each experience. Therefore, participants were measured by engagement, concentration, interest, relaxation, stress, and emotion.
With Deviant Parties we sought to redefine a party by turning it into a political space from which the communities that inhabit a park can turn it into a space of expression. Pradolongo Park in Madrid is one of the biggest parks in the city, it is lived and inhabited by multiple communities, in which the party is one of the great manifestations of a way of being and doing this expression together.
Throughout 2018 and 2019, in the framework of Imagina Madrid, public and community art program, coordinated by Intermedia-Matadero (Madrid City Council) was how Deviant Parties came about, a process that claims the party as that right to make a city and as one of the places of desire from which to plot complicities. The weird thing here is a gamble to deconstruct the hegemonic, established, normative, that marginal space from which to think.
This constituent artistic practice took advantage of the methodology of popular festivals as those pedagogies of meeting up from which to co-create that grand final party that took place on April 7, 2019. Devices such as “the Party Commission” (la Comisión de Fiestas), the Rare Film Factory (la Fábrica de Cine Raro), “the Map of Memorable Parties” (el Mapeo de Fiestas Memorables) and “the Rare Making” (las Haceres Raros) made it possible for this festival to be created by more than 170 people through more than 50 hours of workshops, with the participation of 13 artists/collectives and with the collaboration of 17 associations /entities of the neighborhood.
The celebrations began with “the Divine Transvestite Head” la Cabezuda Travestida Divine as a way of translating an element as popular as the headless and continued with a Precarious Gateway since reporting the working conditions of domestic workers. The food was also a way to enunciate imbalances in the food chain. With “Informed Choreography Bodies that Appear” (Coreografía Participada Cuerpos que Aparecen) we question who is present at the festivities and with the Transfeminist Jota dancing we subvert those ways of making tradition, as a bet to continue to rethink popular folklore. “Weird Poetry” (Poesías Raras) and “Extensive Languages” (Lenguas Extensas) attended to what’s behind the weird talk and with “Choreography of Fight” (Coreografías de Lucha) we talk about migrations, starting from popular dances. It was about starting with a possibility, from all that knowledge transferred from generation to generation and to build from there new popular expressions from which to talk about inequalities that affect us.
Deviant Parties was a rare research, a commitment to think public sphere in another way. We produce the book The party, the deviant and the public space edited by the independent publisher Bartlebooth.
The Cabinet of Political Imagination was a hybrid space which combined art and social technologies, collectives, entities, cooperatives and informal groups in order to obtain resources to achieve greater quotas of autonomy, creative capacity and resilience. In the Cabinet of Political Imagination we ask ourselves (questioned) how imagination can help us dream other microworlds where we can reserve contemporary inequalities and how, through reverie, informal collectives or groups can gain autonomy. At a time when, social ties are increasingly suffering from commercialization or disruption,, it is necessary to weave and strengthen processes of social cooperation.
The Cabinet was formalized as a learning community, which co-makes a process and we try to see how collectives or social groups can gain autonomy in their collective processes. In addition to that, we organised workshops Conversations to Imagine with Mafe Moscoso and Jaron Rowan and a community work with domestic workers wh was activated with the collaboration of the NGO Ecos del Sur and Territorio Domestico, thanks to whom we promoted the Precarious Catwalk. We also published the Manual for Collective Work. Imagine to transform which offers examples of practices and tools that can serve as inspiration for communities.
#SalónDoMARCO is configured as a space recognizable by society itself, like that living room of a home in which to gather around a table or sit on the sofa and talk about becoming and everyday life. This ‘place to be’ is conceived as a project of mediation, experimentation and collective research that facilitates the promotion of learning communities; considering mediation not as a process of explanation of what happens there, but as a device that seeks to weave networks and generate connections.
Contemporary art museums are spaces that create subjectivities, and also amplifiers of narratives; they are places for the sublime, but also makers of the present. They should be places that challenge society and are affected by it, in which the commitment to contemporaneity conditions the creation of other ways of doing, in which discourse is configured as a cornerstone of art.
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The rural environment as a territory, habitat, place and a knowledge-producing space has been undergoing a process of colonization by urban centers. It is urgent to understand the rural environment not only as a space that produces food and other raw materials, but also as a context that produces subjectivities where other (re) existence poetics have been and are being given. And in the search for these other alternatives to modernity, ruralities can give us important clues. With Ruraldecolonized, we try to see how certain ways of being in the rural environment and living it, certain knowledge or ways of relating to nature have been marginalized in favor of a supposed modernity.
Through this experimental research we seek to open debate, generate debate spaces and facilitate a dialogue of knowledges. We question how we have gone, and in that we are all accomplices, moving away from the rural. This process has caused a subalternization of knowledge and ways of being in the world. It is urgent to weave other mechanisms that reverse these processes and that help to deform these relationships of subalternity.
The Common Man Study Program «Ruralidades, Feminismos e Comúns» (PEMAN) was born from the need to create a space for thought and analysis on how the community management model that the more than 2,900 Communities of Neighborhood Forests in Mano Común de Galicia carried out can be transferred to other areas.
This initiative has been promoted by the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) through the HISTAGRA research group and the seven research groups that are part of the ReVOLTA network, coordinated by the contemporary creation collective Montenoso and the participation of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vigo (MARCO), and the Communities of mountains of Vincios (Gondomar) and O Carballo. And it had the support of the Franco-Spanish Daniel & Nina Carasso Foundation.
The PEMAN was a space for the exchange and production of knowledge, becoming a peer-to-peer network promoted by different artistic groups, collectives and research entities, which came together to collaborate in the construction of new narratives and readings around the three epistemic axes: commons, ruralities and feminisms. The Study Program itself replicated / translated the management and governance mechanisms of the neighborhood forests in a common hand, allowing the participants in the same to self-manage the Program itself, guaranteeing good governance of the same, as well as the community members. They do it with a neighborhood mountain, The Program promoted a research and action community and different sessions were developed in it throughout 2016/2017.
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Montenoso is an experimental epistemic community whose context of investigation and action are the communities of mountains in common hands in Galiza (North of Spain). These mountains are properties protected by Germanic law that transcend the public-private dichotomy, since they are collective properties. They represent practically 25% of the Galician territory. More than 150,000 community members participate in the management of this territory that covers more than 700,000 hectares. Thus, and thanks to its magnitude and the type of property on which it is based, we see that it is a common reality with great affection.
(Re) thinking and (re) updating discourses around the commons [as well as its mechanisms, dynamics, praxis, achievements, dark points …] and connecting them with other manifestations of the commons is an exercise of commitment to reality. It allows breaking with homogenizing discourses about the residual and marginal of these realities. The commons and specifically the neighboring mountains in common hands, are the source of possibilities and futures; as a result, it is necessary to mediate connections between different agents and activate strategies of contagion and transfer to other areas, which also affect this reality.
Investigating the experiences of the commons as real alternatives on the fringes of capitalist property management is a necessary and urgent exercise. The deep knowledge of these centuries-old knowledge and practices is essential in this moment of change. This is the main input of Montenoso, a trans-disciplinary contemporary creation community, which seeks to comprehensively address the reality of the comunal land in Galicia and connect it with the movement around agroecology, hacker culture, social movements , research around the commons, expanded pedagogy, ethnography, or social communication.
Montenoso received an award at the prestigious Ars Electrónica 2014, an honorable mention in the Digital Communities community. It was the first Galician project awarded at this international festival held in Linz, Austria.