︎︎︎Art

+ creation 
+ pedagogy
+ research 
= (trans)formation 

19 November 2022

Odradek
Presentation of the research and workshop in La Poderosa. Barcelona.

From 4th to 9th July 2022

La lluna en un cove
Creation workshop as part of the CCCB's Culturnautes project. Barcelona.
 

14 May 2022

The commune
Projection of La comuna as part of the exhibition "Miradas contemporáneas del Centro" by VAC at the Galería Martin Yépez in Lima. Peru

25, 26 and 27 February 2022

Utopia is not an island
Spectator workshop at the Centro Cultural de España in Lima. Perú. 

November 2021 to February 2022

The parallel utopia
Public art project and expanded scene developed within the framework of Chaning Places/Espacios Revelados in the city of Lima. Peru.

11 and 12 December 2021

Assembly
Workshop on archive-fiction practices developed at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona. Catalonia.

From 22 to 28 March 2021

Otros cuerpos
Accompaniment and mediation of the Élida Dorta and Javier Arozena Research Residency as part of the Otros Cuerpos cycle curated by Masu Fajardo for the TEA in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. 

March to June 2021

Spectators in Residence
Programme of mediation with audiences developed in collaboration with Graner Centre de Creació de Dansa i Arts Vives. Barcelona.

January to June 2021

Im_mediations
Co-design workshop on art and education within the Caixa d'Eines Programme of the Pla de Barris de la Marina. Barcelona.

We are a team of artists based in Barcelona since 2013. Our projects relate art, critical thinking and radical pedagogy to inquire about contemporary issues and promote multiple, situated and transversal learning processes through art.

Our activities develop three main action lines: research and creation, mediation and collaboration with networks and communities, and learning & training. All these lines place the body and the experience at the center of the creation and learning processes, encouraging horizontal and collaborative practices aimed at developing situated and sustainable knowledges.

Since 2013 we have developed mediation projects with several institutions and communities as The Parallel Utopian (2021-22, Lima), Contact Zones (2019-21, Barcelona), Im_mediations (2021, Barcelona), Spectators in Residence (2019-21, Barcelona), Showcases: an exhibition of spaces (2016, Barcelona) or [Mu]danzas (2013, Madrid); research a creative environments like [Un]released Laboratories (2014-17) or The ongoing scene (2014-18); and workshops and trainings with social and educational communities in many cities like Madrid, Tenerife, Barcelona, Valencia, Guadalajara, Lima, among others. Also, we’ve created some plays of dance and theatre as Alphabet, Dangerous dances or This image is not available in your country, and documentaries as The commune (2022).

---

The creation and research line develops situated practices and epistemologies to expand the power of art as an activator of social change. 

---

The mediation line develops specific and collaborative projects with the support of local communities and partners, combining artistic approaches with radical democratic strategies to build community and change the local state of affairs.

---

The learning and training line offers artistic tools and methodologies applied to education and social contexts. 

Mediation and collaboration with networks

We understand mediation as a chance to develop learning communities and artistic environments to produce situated knowledge and change the local state of affairs.

Therefore, mediation becomes a contact zone where we can play in other way, leaving the common knowledges to do a collective imagination practice which let us inquiry cultural issues and develop alternative ways of sociability. We start from a few basic principles:

︎Working from the situation

We understand the realities in which we work situationally, as maps that are woven in community. This approach let us pay attention about the difference, and develop spaces to hearing, speaking and sharing affects, issues, and positions.   

︎ Claiming difference

We develop contrast and tensioned spaces which let someone experimented the difference as potency, and as alternative to the power dynamic.

︎ Giving visibility to minorities knowledge

We believe that knowledge is a statement traversed by power, and its logics of privilege and exclusion. Consequently, we want to give visibility to the under commons knowledge that questions and deconstructs power relations.

︎ Weaving plural and sustainable learning communities

We facilitate collaborative dynamics and strategies aimed at creating multiple, transversal and situated learning communities.

︎︎︎ Sustaining the partnership in the long term

We accompany long-term creative-research processes aimed at creating conditions for the involvement and autonomy of the communities we work with.

Parallel Utopia is a public art and expanded scene project developed in Espacios Revelados 2021 Lima, an initiative of the Siemens Stiftung Foundation in collaboration with Cultural Center of Universidad del Pacífico and the Goethe-Institut Lima..





︎︎︎ Documentary film -on post-producción- ︎︎︎ Educational Programme
︎︎︎ Flayer open call
︎︎︎ Website Espacios Revelados
︎︎︎ Instagram of La Comuna

Parallel Utopia
Creation/mediation I Espacios Revelados Lima
Nov. 2021 — Feb. 2022 
Parallel Utopia is a project about art and radical pedagogy developed in collaboration with local communities in the city of Lima. The project invited a group of students of fine arts and theatre to live for 4 months in an old abandoned patrimonial building with the aim of promoting a collective recovery process of the Colegio Real of the UNMSM.

The development of an Utopian Studies Programme is the excipient to produce a process of re-appropriation where reality and fiction, memory and imagination, desires and needs concur in the creation of a new collective character: a commune of students that takes the premises of the Royal College as its headquarters, and the district of Barrios Altos as its theatre of operations. Therefore, Parallel Utopian is a creative dispositive that revels the history and speculate about the future of the Royal College, a run-down colonial building from sixtieth century.  


The creation of a self-managed cultural centre is the formula chosen to materialise a series of artistic actions -exhibitions, performances, installations and cultural activities - that re-signify and recover the Royal College for the community of Barrios Altos.

Through research, artistic interventions and community encounters, Parallel Utopia invites us to think about the past and the future of the Royal College of the UNMSM, connecting its history with the memories, dreams and needs of the local communities. While revealing the traces of history, the project invites the audience to project images of the future through the possibility of co-inhabiting abandoned spaces.

La lluna en un cove is a multidisciplinary creation laboratory developed with children for the Cultural Contemporary Center of Barcelona as part of the Culturanutas programme.

︎︎︎ Website CCCB: Video & pictures
︎︎︎ Odradek: related research 

La lluna en un cove
Mediation I CCCB
July 2022 


What does a seaweed have to do with a fork? A rock with a computer? A crocodile with a cathedral, or the moon with a basket? Among all our faculties, fantasy is the freest and most subversive. If imagination sees, creativity, invention and fantasy think the world to produce unexpected associations and alternative orders.


The ephemeral museum of La lluna en un cove explores the capacity of fantastic thought to elaborate unusual associations and poetic relationships based on the capacity of objects to induce sensorial and symbolic experiences. Through games of association, assembly and composition that work playfully and globally with the arts, the museum's different stations stimulate children's creativity, fantasy and imagination.



This project explores the material, visual, kinetic and symbolic qualities of objects to induce experiences that increase learning, opening up a wide range of possibilities through games based on manipulation and contact -ephemeral sculpture and theatre-, movement -dance-, composition -visual poetry-, or words -potential literature-. The exploration of these aspects in the different rooms of the museum stimulates a multidisciplinary creative environment that vindicates bodily pleasure, play and cooperation as fundamental pillars in the search for the meanings of the world.

Contact Zones is a mediation programme developed for Graner: Center of Creation and live arts focused on promoting horizontal dialogues between art and pedagogy. The programme involves three kindergartens, a family space, five primary schools, two high schools and several artists in a process of reflection-action on the "in-between-places" of art and education.   

︎︎︎ Research website Contact Zones
︎︎︎ Caixa d’Eines 2020-21
︎︎︎ Educational Fanzine 2020-21
︎ Graner website 

Releated projects: 

︎︎︎ Contact Zones (First editon)
︎︎︎ Contact Zones publication 2019-20

Contact Zones (2nd editon)
Mediation I El Graner
2020 — 2021



Contact Zones explores the relationship between performing arts and pedagogy from a perspective that takes body, experimentation and research as common elements between art and education. The project is based in the creation of mixed learning and experimental communities who inhabit on the "in-between-places" of art and education. In order to share times, tools, questions Contact Zones opens spaces of conversation where exchange experiencies, protocols and ways of doing. Therefore, these "in-between-places" involve diverse knowledge, embodied voices and situated experiences in order to estrange, question and commit ourselves through mutual recognition.   

The Contact Zones Programme proposes a working methodology based on mutual collaboration and the exchange of positions between artists, teachers and students. With this approach we promote spaces of circulation between local practices and knowledge, we facilitate the transversality of knowledge, and we shift the power relationship between the one who teaches and the one who learns -in the educational scene-, or the one who makes and the one who observes -in the artistic scene-.

In accordance with this game of transfers and displacements between scenarios, practices, roles and knowledge, we would like to promote dynamics in which we think art from pedagogy, and pedagogy from art. Our aim is to develop spaces of confluence to experiment with the practices and narratives of art and education.

The releasing power of displacement and collaboration between agents as equals become two pillars for an experience that claims polyphony as the fundamental architecture of research, providing the conditions for new fields of action to be composed between the arts and pedagogies in plurality.

HIGHLIGHT'S PROGRAMME: 

︎︎︎TRANSVERSALITY

︎︎︎COLLABORATION

︎︎︎TRANSDISCIPLINARITY

︎︎︎CORPOREALITY

︎︎︎EMPOWERMENT

.

Spectators in Residence is a study community that promotes learning and research processes based on Graner's programme of artistic residencies in live arts and dance.


Releated projects:

︎︎︎ Project website
︎︎︎ The paradox of the spectator
︎︎︎ Scenes from Confinement

Spectators in Residence (2nd edition)
Mediation I El Graner
March- June 2021


Spectators in Residence is a studio community that promotes spaces for learning and reflection on the contemporary art scene. The programme invites a group of spectators to share encounters with resident artists, taking their creative processes as an opportunity to initiate a conversation about artistic imaginaries and languages.

Through encounters with artists, presentations of work in progress, public debates and exchange practices, the programme explores the epistemic and ludic potential of the public to appropriate and reconfigure the themes of the stage: How do we relate to stage images? What do we do with them? Where do they take us? What kind of imaginary do the images draw? How can the stage become an oracle where future worlds are explored?

Spectators in Residence is open to anyone who wants to enjoy art in an active and dialogical way. It is articulated around two types of encounter:

• The Theatron is a reserved space to show the work in progress of the resident artists. The artist involved in this edition are Joaquín Collado, Núria Guiu, Cuqui Jerez, Raquel Klein and  Xavier Manubens.

• The Theoros is a study space about the contemporary condition of the audience and the poetics of translation. A space where we play with the shared root between the theatron - as a place to see - and the Greek theōría - as the observation of what is seen - to explore the bodily, aesthetic, political and affective dispositions that guide our ways of looking, feeling, talking about art.

 

Collaborative methodologies and pedagogical approaches

Resolve to do group involves to make that chances. A group doesn’t born, it is a fabrication. Therefore, to become group involves to open spaces for enunciation and difference, and to promote strategies so that differences are not experienced as a conflict of unsolvable positions, but as a power that enriches, contrasts and amplifies the process of learning and creation.


We concept the groups as artefacts, ecological systems which experimenting and select among many relationships those that are better for them. Any artifices think themselves on movement and in plural. Its fabrication due to should show the non-natural character of our communities, and should considering that the richest of the any culture it is capacity to artifices to keep the communities on movement, and devolve new identities and knowledges.

︎︎︎ Do It with others
Leadership is collective. We promote horizontal relationships to value all the experiences, positions and knowledge with which we work, because the power of change lies in difference.

︎Experimental ourselves as an issue to practice Knowledge is not neutral, it depends on the subjects and their cultural heritage. That is why we want to problematise our position and vision in each project we do..
︎Leaving comfortable spaces
In order to find the material to work with, we do not look for similarities, but for differences. The margin of difference has to do with going deeper.

︎ Work in progress The most difficult thing is learning to work in progress. That's why we avoid quick decisions, and we rely on the time of the process to get better results.

︎ Creating spaces of contrast and tension We rely on the power of the question to keep artistic practice alive and to promote a critical and creative approach to social and cultural issues.

︎Making minorities more visible The action of majorities dissolves dissident minorities. That is why we prioritise the antagonistic and dissident position, even if it is outside or against the framework.

Utopia is not an island is a workshop for spectators that explores the potential of utopian thinking through imagining post-capitalist futures and projecting alternative ways of life.   

Utopia is not an island
Workshop I Centro Cultural de España en Lima
Febrary 2022



Utopia is not an island invites the public to imagine possible futures through a repertoire of fictions that feed the imaginary and the possibilities of life on earth. Through some cinematographic, literary and artistic fictions, we will explore the utopian movement as a critical tool for questioning hegemonic orders, imagining parallel realities and testing new forms of social life that install temporary fictions in a world of transition.

Assembly is an archive-fiction workshop that rehearses ways of creatively occupying the assembly in order to think about the new pedagogical paradigm triggered by the student demonstrations at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona. 


︎︎︎ Assembly Programme 

Assembly: el parlamento de los cuerpos
Workshop I Institut del Teatre
Febrary 2022

In English, "Assembly" means both a gathering of people and a combination of actions, discourses or bodies. An assembly is a theatre, an assemblage, a cyborg body made up of extensions and prostheses and, of course, a history that we could reconstruct through the memories and documents it throws out into the world. 

If events overflow the matrix of any story, documents are the fossils with which we can reconstruct a history, a story or a new cyborg that brings together fantastic extensions, joining the facts with the fictions provided by the bodies.

This workshop just propose inhabit that ambiguity to go back the history, linking the events with its creative reconstruction to think about the new pedagogical paradigm triggered by the student protest at the Institut del Teatre de Barcelona.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the image proposed to us by the Assembly is that of a curtain that rises to reveal us as spectators-actors of a story that happens on both sides of the stage: a present assembly that inquiries about a past assembly, and a past assembly that calls for a present assembly. An uncertain scenario in which only the future can make us leap into a new reality worth fighting for. So, the curtain rises for the parliament of bodies to renew the images of the world.

Im_mediations is a collaborative working group programme with 4 institutions (El Graner, La Bàscula, La Inefable and AMCL) to reflect on the intersections between culture, education and territory within the Caixa d'Eines programme.


︎︎︎ Im_mediations programme 

Im_mediations
Workshop I Pla de Barris de la Marina
January-Juny 2021


This programme proposes a collaborative space in which to reflect on the politics and aesthetics of proximity through the design of mediation spaces with the educational communities of the Marina neighbourhood. The programme aims to rethink community spaces and times, transform mediation practices in artistic-educational contexts, and shift the dynamics of cultural consumption towards an ecological approach to collaborative practices.

What are the matters and subjects of education, art and culture? What kind of relationships do we establish from the field of culture with educational communities? How to work on the quality of links in times of pandemic? How to question the paradigm of cultural consumption through the co-design of spaces of mediation? How to promote a cultural ecology in the Marina neighbourhood based on collaborative practices that involve diverse communities in the creation of spaces of encounter and conversation?

Fahrenheit 356 is a laboratory aimed at developing the methodology for the creation of a library within the Interseccions project of El Prat de Llobregat. The laboratory is based on the need to create a collaborative design space between Interseccions, Institut del Prat, Teatre del Artesà and Espai Cultural del Cèntric to plan the creation of a library.

Faharenheit 356
Co-desing workshop I Interseccions
July-September 2021


Fahrenheit 356 is a collaborative design laboratory that browse between the utopia of the public library as a space to imagine together, and the heterotopy of the books as an artifact that store the telling’s and spaces imagined by many cultures.

This workshop takes the thermal metaphor of the famous dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury, to rethink the role of books and fictions as activating and binding elements of the cultural ecosystem of El Prat. If the 451 Fahrenheit degrees of the novel point to the process of combustion of paper, the 356 degrees of our workshop point to the process of melting paper to bind together the set of institutions that participate in the creation of the library.

Learning and training

The training workshops bring the languages of contemporary art closer to educational contexts through an experiential, active and transdisciplinary approach.

Our educational approach situates the embodiment into inner to the learning processes, promoting ludic and experiential environments where explore the corporal, plastic, effective and relational possibilities of the contemporary arts.

︎ Connecting art and education
Our work blends artistic and educational approaches to connect the practices and thinking from both fields.    
︎ Developing a transdisciplinary environment
Our learning workshops are based on a transdisciplinary game that allows for spaces of dialogue and circulation between the performing, visual and plastic arts.  

︎ Learning by doing
We propose a kind of performative pedagogy in which there is no difference between the acting subject, the speaking subject and the thinking subject.

︎ Visibilising artistic genealogies
We share all artistic and pedagogical references according to the ethics of open-source practices.

︎Promoting transversal learnings
We understand art as a space for learning and experimentation that goes beyond instrumental reason and proposes the integral development of human sensitivity.

Affective Geometries

Training course I art-education

Affective geometries propose a sensitive re-reading of abstract grammar through the creation of living patterns that situate the body and its movement within the work of form, line and colour. This training proposes a transdisciplinary space where formal work is literally traversed by the axiomatic of the body, movement and affects, developing strategies to relate patterns, structures and living forms with the art of painting, architecture, sculpture and installation.

---

Artistic referents: Lygia Clark, Sol Lewitt, Monika Grzymala, Àngels Ribé, Piet Mondrian, Senga Nengudi, Bernard Piffaretti, Sophie Taeuber‑Arp, Kazimir Malèvitx, etc.

︎ Workshop pictures 

[Dis]plays

Training course I art-education

[Dis]plays proposes a multidisciplinary work space based on the plastic, choreographic and sculptural possibilities of textile materials. This training course proposes an exploration of the plasticity of form through various textile artefacts that relate the body to the disciplines of sculpture, dance and architecture.

---

Artistic referents: Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Erwin Wurm, La Ribot, Trisha Brown, Lois Bourgeois, Christo Vladimirov, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, etc.

︎ Workshop pictures

Experimental scores

Training course I art-education

Experimental scores proposes a creative dialogue between drawing, dance and music based on the concept of score. This training blurs the boundaries between the arts, shifting their interpretative codes to reveal unusual relationships between the graphic aspects - the stroke, the scribble, the trace and the sign- and the movement of the body.      

---

Artistic referents: Trisha Brown, Pablo Picasso, Ivonne Rainer, Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker, Helena Almeida, Yves Klein, Tony Orrico, Merce Cunningham, Fernand Deligny, Cy Twombly, etc.

︎ Video
︎ Workshop pictures

PLAYgrounds

A manual of actions to shake up the city
Training course I art-education

PLAYgrounds is a book of scores to initiate a process of exploration of the city that contains practices based on performance art and public art. This training course takes the form of a set of scores to introduce adults, children and teenagers in a fun way to some reflections on the spaces of the city and the way they affect our lives.

---

Artistic referents: Guy Debord, Carole Douillard, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, Àngels Ribé, Erwin Wurm, Allan Kaprow, Francis Alÿs, etc.

︎ Research
︎︎︎ Workshop pictures

︎︎︎ Releated with La Utopía paralela

The commune

I IN POST-PRODUCTION I

A young collective of artists occupies an old abandoned school in the centre of Lima. The building is a powerful colonial symbol that tells part of the city's history. In their attempt to appropriate and socialise the cultural heritage with the communities of central Lima, the artists of the commune invite us to think about the role of art in the process of recovering memory.

Between the past and the future, their efforts speak to us of the wounds and omissions of history, but also of the hope embodied by a youth obstinate in projecting a more just and egalitarian society.

---

FILM INFO

Title: The commune /La comuna
Genre: Documentary.
Length: 100 min.
Country: Spain/Peru.

Directors: David Pérez & Esther Blázquez.
Montage: Esther Blázquez & David Pérez.
Photography: Gabriela Urco.
Direct sound: Fernanda Pozo.
Camera crew: Gabriela Urco, Fernanda Pozo and David Pérez.
Audio and image post-production: Carlos Cuya and César Pérez.
Production: Espacios Revelados Lima & Artefactum.

Cast: María Mendieta, Juan Malpartida, Tatiana Luján, Leonardo Sifuentes, Gabriela Gutiérrez, Marcia Huse, Maritza Díaz, Sergio Armasgo, Jestsabel Valdez, Christopher Gaona, Azules Tavera, Diana Cornetero, Michelle Vallejos, Cristina Mauricio and Augusto Gutiérrez.

Alphabet

Alphabet proposes a space of play between bodies and words that aims to explore the drives and accidents of language. If our relation to the world traverses language, Alphabet calls language as a space of estrangement, and develops scenic writing as a paradoxical and queer sign that transports us to the space of misunderstanding between things and words, mobilizing the political possibilities of poetic invention as a disorder of language.


What operations does language perform on the world? How do bodies act on language? What orders of thought and hierarchies does it mobilise? What happens when we disrupt the metaphors and analogies that organise thought? How do we make bodies define words, make words become space, object or subject of action? What happens when we disrupt subject-object, matter-meaning, difference-similarity relationships and all the other oppositions that organise the experience of language?

---

ARTISTIC INFORMATION_

Direction and dramaturgy: Esther Blázquez & David Pérez.
Interpretation: Esther Blázquez & David Pérez.

Supporting: Bea Fernández & Mónica Muntaner.
Graphics: David Pérez
Photography: Laura Barone.
Video: Laura Costa.

---

WITH THE SUPPORT OF_
La Poderosa: espai per la dansa i els seus contaminants and Convez Zero.

Dangerous dances

Is it so dangerous not to use your eyes to see, your lungs to breathe, your mouth to eat, your tongue to speak or your brain to think, or your legs to move? In Dangerous dances bodies are a battleground against the normalisation of spectacle, a place to break down the staged sense of production. There are no names to respond to. There is nothing to say or perform. There is no story to tell. Only intensities, nuances and energies to liberate in order to move forward without proposal or project.


ARTISTIC INFORMATION_

Direction: David Pérez
Dramaturgy: David Pérez and Esther Blázquez
Scenic space and lighting: David Pérez
Interpretation: Oihana Altube, Karoolina Rychlik and Francisca Araújo

Technical coordination: Nuria Miralbell
Lighting technician: Carlos Lucena
Machinery technician: Vilma López
Sound technician: Toni Suñé
Sound consultant: Solange Jacobs and Alberto Cendra Accompaniment: Magda Puyo
Video: David Pérez
Barcelona, 2015.

Thanks to Élida Dorta, Paz Rojo, Bea Fernández, Carmelo Salazar, Chema Egea, Magda Puyo and Jaume Ayza.

WITH THE SUPPORT_.

Factoría de Nuevos Creadores de Teatro y Danza del Instituto del Teatro.

︎︎︎ Teaser

This image is not available in your country

This image in not available in your country suspends the visual codes of the show to place the spectator before an interrogative situation that inaugurates a peripheral and haptic vision of the scene. Stillness, waiting and self-reflexivity on the spectator's position lead the proposal to a space where the gaze is simultaneously object and subject of a deferred scene that extends over the domain of the imperceptible.

---

ARTISTIC INFO_

Direction & dramaturgy: David Pérez.
Performance & co-creation: Esther Blázquez, Élida Dorta and David Pérez.
Space: David Pérez & Esther Blázquez.
 
Sound and video: Élida Dorta.
Photographs: David Pérez
Accompaniment: Roberto Romei.
Barcelona, 2014.

---

With grateful thanks to Paz Rojo, Paulina Chamorro and Luis Zamorano.   

---

WITH THE SUPPORT OF_
Institut del Teatre de Barcelona.

[Mu]Danzas

... select disassemble inventory sort stack fold cut move roll pack stack assemble separate pile protect stack protect close collect lift carry transport move sweep close open clean  verify check plan test change fit out imagine  centre negotiate arrange install glue paint sweep reassemble explain listen push divide empty fill approach  find enter sit settle live ... together

[Mu]danzas is a specific action-performance developed in the ¿YSDDSA? Festival. This performance proposes to occupy the courtyard of La Casa Encendida for seven days. The performance refers to the action of moving, and explores choreo-political ways of inhabiting and composing the scene in the plural, redefining its uses, limits and cares through a choreographic game of live reassembly.

---

ARTISTIC INFO_

Idea and Dramaturgy: Esther Blázquez & David Pérez Accompaniment: Paz Rojo & Paulina Chamorro
Spatial advisor: Fernando Quesada
Participants: Artists and audience

Carrier: Mudanzas El rastro
Video: Enrique Espinosa (PKMN)
Madrid, 2013.

---

WITH THE SUPPORT OF_
La Casa Encendida. 

Artistic research and knowledge production

Our approach in the field of research involves several types of methodologies, such as art practice as research, research in art and collaborative research to promote art as an agent of knowledge.

With this hybridisation we advocate an in disciplinary area that explores the capacity of art to enable fictions, social dispositive and processes of subjectivisation to articulate a cognitive ecology based on under commons, situates and non-specialised knowledge.

︎ An experiential and situated knowledges

To situate the knowledges in the experience fields allows us question power relations and to create optimal conditions for dialogue, difference and the exchange of ideas and positions.

︎ An undisciplined Knowledge
We understand indiscipline as a way of organising knowledge that transcends disciplines in a radical way; it is what is between disciplines, what crosses them and what is beyond them, where knowledge mutates and takes on an unexpected dimension.

︎ A knowledge of the invisible
We believe in the competence of the arts to work on the revelation of undercommons: invisible, lateral and subordinate knowledge. Therefore, our research is not limited to the creation of artistic objects, but aims to develop and extend the cooperation between the agents and objects involved in the research.

We want to promote open spaces where our research can be nourished by diverse perspectives, especially those that are anti-hegemonic and silenced.

Odradek is research about the capacity of objects to induce sensorial and symbolic experiences in the learning processes of the arts with the support of the research grants of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya and the collaboration of the CCCB, the Xirinacs School and La Poderosa.



Related content:
︎ Research website 
︎︎︎ La lluna en un cove
︎︎︎ Training courses
︎︎︎ The ongoing scene

Odradek
Reaserch I
2020-2022


Odradek is a research about the capacity of objects to induce sensorial and symbolic experiences in the learning processes of the arts. Through a methodology based on bodily relations with object, we propose a transversal perspective on contemporary art that links experimentation around the (per)formativity of the object in the artistic field with the trends of experimental pedagogies that are committed to globalised artistic learning spaces based on playful and cooperative play, exploration, intuition, and children’s creativity.

The investigation points to the phenomenological potential of the object as a mediator in learning processes. The title takes the Kafkaesque figure of the animated object to allude to the active and paradoxal condition of objectuality in arts, linking a set of plastic, choreographic, visual, and literary strategies that claim bodily experimentation with the object through play to developed sensitivity, creativity, imagination and divergent thinking. 

Therefore, the research aims to transfer a set of references, tools and views of different artistic disciplines such as dance, sculpture, visual poetry, architecture o design, and settle the practices and methodological principles to articulate a globalised work frames of the arts in formal and informal education environments.

Contac Zones: between-places of live arts and education is site-specific research carried out on the basis of the Caixa d'Eines Programme at Graner Center of dance and live arts that explores the relationship between art and pedagogy from a hybrid perspective that is situated between the art scene and the educational scene.




Related content:
︎ Research webside
︎︎︎ Caixa d’Eines Programme
︎︎︎ Research articles
︎︎︎ Publications
 

Contac Zones: between-places of live arts and education
Research I New institutionality and art mediation
2019-2021




Contact Zones explores the relationship between live art and pedagogy with the aim of developing mediation models, formats and methodologies that involve art and education actors and institutions in collaborative strategies based on dialogic, polyphonic and transformative collective knowledge processes.

The programme takes the notion of the "contact zone" as a border space to explore the transformative power of mediation as a strategic space capable of renewing and democratising the meanings of culture between the domains of art and education. 

Understood as zones of encounter and contrast, contact zones shift knowledge and artistic-educational practice to a liminal space where they reconfigure their own tools and imaginaries to promote processes of hybridisation of knowledge. This situates mediation as an experimental and (tans)formative space in which to explore new fields of action and knowledge.




Through the creation of learning communities, this research proposes to open spaces in which to share the meanings that emerge in the friction between the arts and pedagogies, to elaborate questions about situated and lived practices, and to exchange tools, procedures and ways of doing.


With this game of transfers and displacements between practices, scenarios, roles and knowledge, we want to promote dynamics in which art is thought from pedagogy, and pedagogy from art, opening spaces of confluence to develop a radically inclusive institutionalism where all the voices of the actors involved are heard.

The paradox of the spectator is an research into the gaze and the condition of the contemporary spectator, produced with the support of the Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya and Graner Center of dance and live arts.


Related content:
︎ Research graphic memori
︎ Spectators in residence
︎︎︎Scenes from Confinement

---

 

The paradox of the spectator
Research I Visuality criticisms  
2019-2021



The paradox of the spectator arises from the observation of an oversight in the field of the arts. In the face of the insistent attention that artists and works have received during modernity, this research proposes a decisive turn that leads us to lose ourselves in the domains of the spectator. An elusive figure that has managed to remain a secret, veiled by the gloom of the theatres, hidden in cinemas, dispersed in galleries or hidden behind the screens of hyperreality.

The spectator's tendency towards imagery, his supposed passivity in the face of the world, his "enchantment" with fiction, his voyeurism or the idleness of his habits have made him the declared enemy of iconoclastic doctrines, the critique of the spectacle, revolution (Rousseau) and knowledge (Plato). His condition as a double being, willing and exposed to the powers of the fake - fiction and representations - has cost him expulsion from the doctrinaire space of truth. Perhaps this explains the nocturnal and stultifying condition with which it is presented in the corpus of Western tradition.


From Plato's dialogues, Rousseau's revolutionary maxims, Brecht's pedagogical theatre, Debord's analyses of the inflation of the spectacle, or the more contemporary attempts to create "a theatre without spectators", the West seems determined to remove the spectator from the space of the rapture of fiction and return him to the domains of "the real". His silence, his recollection, his apparent inaction clash with a large part of the aesthetic and political projects of modernity. However, a large part of these projects focus their criticisms on that which is the object of the gaze, ignoring the set of processes that take place in this inevitable and constitutive gesture of vision. What happens in this space and the condition of who holds the powers of vision are the two pillars of this research:

If the gaze is an organ that oscillates between passion and action, a kind of seismograph that traces relations between seeing, saying, feeling and thinking: what scene does the spectator's gaze return to us? How does their gaze act on the scene? Where does it lead and what senses and affects are elaborated in this twilight zone that spectators inhabit? What are the poetics of translation and the games of equivalences that intervene in the production of meaning and experience? How to problematise the field of constitution of the gaze in order to liberate the imagination from the circuits of authority, consumption and spectacle that saturate the space of art and culture? How to rethink the powers of the stage from the perspective of the spectator? How to transform the materials of the stage into a collective territory in which to affirm the imaginaries of the stage to come?

Playgrounds is a research project that explores artistic strategies, practices and methodologies aimed at playfully exploring the aesthetic, political, ethical and affective dimensions of city spaces.    
Related content:

︎ A manual of actions to shake up the city 
︎ Showcases: an exhibition of spaces
︎ [Un]released workshops

Playgrounds 
Research I Public art
2020- 2021

« What happens every day and comes back every day, the trivial, the everyday, the obvious, the commonplace, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual, how to account for it, how to question it, how to describe it? »
L'Infra-ordinaire, Georges Perec

---