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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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.
