Commoning Collective Care

“Where the commons give refuge; where refuge gives the commons.” —Fred Moten

The idea of the commons is an old, even archaic political concept that today serves an important reparative and redistributive function. The commons are practiced by many different people, from rural and Indigenous communities, anarchists, ecologists, to knowledge and artistic collectives. Although the commons have come to mean many things, they are most simply defined by a common vision of care and sharing access to material and immaterial resources across differences, based on collective decision-making, solidarity, and responsibility for what is being held and cared for together. Rather than offering a stable ground for political action, they are constantly being reimagined, reclaimed, and renegotiated by practitioners.

“Commoning Collective Care” is a four-day intense seminar/workshop convened to collectively explore the different implications, practices, and artistic explorations of the ethics of commoning in a fragile and fractured world. Relying on dialogue, conversation, and embodied engagement, it proposes a multi-sensorial pedagogy of learning to live collectively with the exhausting environmental and social threats and the ongoing violence in times of planetary transformations. Focusing on issues such as Building Caring Infrastructures; Gendered Landscapes and Queered Nature; the rights of nature in the form of legal personhood, an example of which was announced in October 2022, when Spain’s Mar Menor, a coastal saltwater lagoon in Murcia, was recognized as such; the larger analytics of the so-called Hydrocommons; and the safeguarding of ancestral plant knowledge, the participatory workshops and presentations foreground how the commons are a site of struggle, a political position that strengthens the capacities of collective doing and transformative thinking against hyper-individualism, extractive neoliberalism, and the destruction of more-than-human life.

“Commoning Collective Care” is organized in conversation with the exhibition “Remedios: Where new land might grow” at C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba, presenting works from the TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection. In this setting, the gathering will engage with the practices of healing, reparation, and restitution as means to counter the forces of displacement, ruination, and deprivation built into the logic of growth, progress, and accumulation. Ancestral technologies, sounds, and rituals of collective care, seen by Euro-American modernism as wild, mythical, and primitive, provide communities with a refuge from the extractive contingencies of contemporary existence. They are possible conduits for converting violently unequal historical pasts and experiences to a curative and reparative space of reconstitution and attunement. And they offer a bi-cognitive lens through which to reshape ways of knowing and being that strive to create alternatives and multiply perspectives on living in a more-than-human world.

ADDRESSES

C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba
Carmen Olmedo Checa, s/n, 14009 Córdoba

Molino de Martos
C. Rda. de los Mártires, 30, 14002 Córdoba

Real Jardín Botánico de Córdoba
Av. Linneo, s/n, 14004 Córdoba

Torre de la Calahorra (surroundings)
Puente Romano, s/n, 14009 Córdoba

TRAVEL & HEAT RECOMMENDATIONS

GETTING TO CÓRDOBA 

International travel
Plane + train: best options are to fly to either Madrid (Aeropuerto Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas), Sevilla (Aeropuerto Internacional de Sevilla-San Pablo), or Malaga (Aeropuerto de Malaga-Costa del Sol). All three cities are connected by high speed trains with Córdoba: 1 hour and 50 minutes from Madrid, 50 minutes from Sevilla, and 1 hour from Malaga.
Transfers: for transfers to/from the airport/train station, we suggest getting a taxi, which offer fixed rates to the airport.

WEATHER CONDITIONS

Córdoba has extreme weather conditions during the summer season, with temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius and an almost desert-like climate. During the day, we strongly advise you to walk in the shade (and whenever possible, try to avoid the sun between 12:00 and 15:00), to always carry water, and to wear light-colored, loose clothing. Wearing a hat, cap, or any other sort of head covering is always a good idea while in Córdoba. 

In case of emergency call 061.

Events open to the public: GREEN
Attendance by registration via open call: BLUE

19:00
Welcome
Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba

An introduction to the themes and structure of the four-days conference/workshop and the main questions around care and the commons, in relation to the artistic practices presented in “Remedios.” This four-day program is an occasion to reflect together on projects and tools for addressing and acting upon ecological devastation, and for thinking about the idea of commons and commoning within curating, exhibition making, and institutional practices. How can we make sure that the commons do not just stay as an image, but as a living entity and ongoing process?


19:30
Ursula Biemann, Forest Mind: Cognitive Territories and Sacred Plants
Public talk
The talk will be held in English with facilitation for Spanish speakers
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba

In this artist talk, Ursula Biemann discusses her work collaborating with Inga Indigenous leaders and educators, co-creating the project Devenir Universidad—a platform for biocultural education in the Putumayo region of Colombia. Devenir Universidad engages with the living cognitive territory of the Amazonian rainforest and the ways in which Indigenous communities can protect and transmit knowledge generated over millennia. The talk will be followed by a screening of Biemann’s recent film, Forest Mind (2021).


20:00
Ursula Biemann, Forest Mind, 2021, 30:00 mins.
Film screening and discussion
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba

Set in the Amazonian forests of Colombia, Forest Mind unites diverse strands of knowledge on the metaphysics of plants, on plant-human relationships, and on the coding of life with its form of storing information. Drawing on scientific as well as shamanic perspectives of engaging with the world, the video takes an ecocentric worldview in search for the intelligence of nature. With modern science adopting a predominantly mechanistic take on the living world, and Indigenous peoples experiencing an animate natural territory imbued with a spiritual dimension, for a long time these distinct cosmologies were considered vastly incompatible. Forest Mind locates itself at the convergence of scientific and colonial histories in view of decolonizing Indigenous knowledge and bringing it into a common reading with modern science, as for instance plant neurobiology quantum biology, the anthropology of science, ethnobotany, and philosophies engaging with the life of plants.

11:00 Commoning and Collective Care: Practices of Healing in Art and Curating
Introduction by Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba


11:30–13:30
Ursula Biemann, Forest Mind: Cognitive Territories and Sacred Plants
Workshop
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba

Drawing on Biemann’s work Forest Minds, this workshop discusses the multiple perspectives needed to comprehend and work with today’s lifeworld, in light of how the Western epistemological view and scientific objectivism have failed the environment. What is required is a two-eyed view that sees both Western and Indigenous paradigms. An ongoing epistemic shift will bring Western cognitive science ever closer to Indigenous ways of knowing, where learning is a lifelong endeavor deepened by medicinal practice and an embodied position within the ecosystem. How can art develop new imagery and narratives to address this discursive shift?


14:30–15:30
“Remedios: Where new land might grow”
Curator’s tour with Daniela Zyman
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba

Curator Daniela Zyman will take the participants on a guided tour of the exhibition “Remedios: Where new land might grow” at C3A, exploring different paths of healing and remediation through the artistic positions that unfold the narrative of “Remedios.” With contributions from over forty artists that include Amazonian, Pacific, Indigenous American, Afro-diasporic, and European perspectives, the exhibition “Remedios: Where new land might grow” invites the public to engage with works of art for solace, respite, and replenishment. The works, selected from the TBA21 Collection and the commissioning bodies TBA21 on st_age and TBA21–Academy, echo the curative paths of healers and elders who have politically, culturally, and spiritually guided communities through the remembrance of past wrongs toward reconciliation and the celebration of renewed worlding.


15:30–17:00
Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb, Workshop on Commons—Scores—From Situated Knowledges to Shared Action
Workshop
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba

This workshop builds on the archive of the Small Project for Coming Communities, an ongoing research, workshop, and exhibition project on community realized through the means of the contemporary art practice of so-called “scores.” The workshop focuses on the realization of scores that emerge from a situated knowledge of the cultural producer and incorporate the embodied knowledge of those who realize the score. We will engage in a discussion of the multiple perceptions that unfold around a written, contextual score and its various outcomes. This project is an activation of political consciousness on many levels. For us, writing a score is a political form of thinking that does not involve representative power, but activation and reflection. It thrives on creating empathy, cultural exchange, and relationships. Change is just a thought away. Scores can help imagine change.

18:00–22:00
Azahara Ubera Biedma, Dance for Plants
Workshop and performance.
Public presentation at the Botanical Gardens (bring comfortable clothing for movement exercises)
Open to public participation

Azahara Ubera Biedma is an artist, dancer, and researcher rooted in Córdoba and based in Brussels. Dance for Plants is both a methodology and a collective movement research dedicated to the creation, articulation, and propagation of a situated practice. It is an invitation to give a gift to a plant and aspires to facilitate a guided exploration to slowly dive into research, exploring questions such as: What can be the different ways of addressing a dance? How to create intimacy with plants? What kind of attunement would allow the plants to lure us into dancing for them? When dancing for plants, we collaborate with artists, activists, institutions, scholars, witches, gardeners, dead people, pets, bodies of water, and many other humans and nonhumans in order to proliferate experiences, scores, texts, frameworks, movements, affects, thoughts, stories, images, intimacies, ethics, gatherings, and myriad wiggling materials as companions to conspire accountable ways of relating and belonging.

11:00
PLATA, CASE STUDY. "PATIO 0": LOVING AND LIVING THE RUIN
Starting at the Salon Boeticus, C3A

“Patio 0” is a demolished house right outside of the C3A Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Andalucía that serves to contextualize “the ruin” within the neighborhood's social and environmental history. Anticipating a future crisis of food sovereignty, Patio 0 suggests that any ruined space is potentially valid for future urban agriculture. To this end, it proposes a future based on the revival of traditional farming and irrigation technologies. Plata invites the participants to visit this space where their curatorial practice foments a utopian view of possible urban food futures, through an exercise of collective imagination that starts from the living memory of the place itself—the ninth-century Islamic suburb of Saqunda—and its connections with the current neighborhood of Miraflores and the Guadalquivir basin. We are recovering memory, self-organization, and learning how to deal with vegetation. Can we imagine a ruin as a habitat?

14:30–17:00
Sascia Bailer, Building Caring Infrastructures—Toward Care as a Lived Practice in the Arts
Workshop

Care has become a buzzword since the Covid-19 pandemic and is increasingly being taken up not only by corporations but also in the arts. How can we ensure that “care” is not just used as a trendy topic but that infrastructures of organizations become rooted in a lived practice of care? How can we avoid “care-washing” and instead establish frameworks of “caring infrastructures”? What strategies and methods that are consistent with an ethic of care can we develop for our curatorial and artistic practices? The workshop explores these questions, along with theoretical and practical input from Sascia Bailer. The aim is to find practicable strategies for the participants and their respective artistic, curatorial, and/or activist work contexts.


20:00
Hydrocommons: Re-Imaging and Empowering Watery Worlds
Led by Mekhala Dave
With: Teresa Vicente Giménez, Professor of Philosophy of Law; Rosela Del Bosque, postgraduate student, MAS curating.
In English
Centro de Recepción de Visitantes, Turismo de Córdoba (IMTUR)

The water crisis is the legacy of our environmental violence and extractivist tendencies. Pollution, choking, and droughts—the watery worlds that we are historically and culturally entangled with have been showing tidal signs of deep concern. Inspired by the case of Spain’s Mar Menor, the biggest saltwater lagoon in the EU, that recently attained a legal personhood, how do we seek to feel a water crisis at a planetary level that inscribes and connects us all? A growing global movement around the legal concepts of the “rights of nature” and “ecocide” for water is expanding, but is also limited in conceptual interpretations and strategies of implementation. Where do we begin to reflect on such modes of legal inquiry? How do we design alternative practices and tools to inspire care from situated knowledge and practices, Indigenous perspectives and sustainability narratives? How do we take into account these lingering questions, the flow of language and visualization with the rhizome of critical thinking to act as a united and collective front? From enacting our agency and as an embodied inquiry from the weave of our collective thought, dialogue, and action, we will experience hints of empowering our watery worlds from the flows of care and fluid connections.

21:30
Parallel program
Tarek Atoui, Susie Ibarra, Nancy Mounir, and Ziúr, Al Qabali
Public performance adjacent to Torre de la Calahorra, near Roman Bridge

Al Qabali, literally meaning “the primitive” or “tribal,” is a new research and performance project by Tarek Atoui. Over the course of three years, Atoui is collecting and experimenting with sounds and musical forms most closely associated with Tarab—a trance-inducing Arabic musical tradition—drawing on a collection of musical recordings from tribes and villages from across the Atlas to the Persian Gulf that follow the path of the Tuareg. The ancient rural tribal music traditions of Qabali are raw and earthy, and based on choral improvisation and complex cross-rhythmic patterns while yielding distinctive microtonal melodies. In his exploration of this material, Atoui overlays recordings of souks and stores in Ouarzazate, Essaouira, and Marrakesh, weddings in Bahrain, and music salons and diwan majlis in Kuwait, Sharjah, and Oman with contemporary electronic amplification and improvisation or analogue material generated by his self-developed computer software and large collection of instruments.
He works together with musicians and artisans to revive the layered context of craft production and economy, ranging from instrument building to pottery, leather work, and weaving, making imaginative use of the scarce materials found in the arid landscapes of the Atlas. He explores tribal music at the root of urban musical forms such as Andalusi, gitano music, and flamenco, deeply concerned with un-bordering the one-way route through contemporary Euro-African border spaces. As part of his research, Atoui will host a week-long research retreat in Córdoba with percussionist Susie Ibarra (New York) and musicians Nancy Mounir (Cairo) and Ziúr (Berlin) to create new compositions departing from the Al Qabali compilation. The participants will host a series of sessions with musicians from Andalusia and meet researchers from various disciplines in search of “Al Qabali.”

12:00–13:30
Sofia Lemos, Regenerative Practice: Thinking Oceanically About More-Than-Ocean
Workshop
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba

The impact of sustainability policies, ecology, and environmental discourses has become central to aesthetic inquiry and institutional practice in contemporary art. What can convening communities through artistic research tell us about the roots and routes of ecology and environmental action, and how can these, in turn, reshape our institutional practices within the wider context of the world-systemic conditions that endanger planetary life?

In this workshop, Lemos reflects on TBA21–Academy’s regenerative approach to prototyping policy-driven and community-oriented futures for contemporary art collections. She will focus on the experience of developing the artistic research program Meandering, offering insights about the collective symbolic agency through which humans enact ecological narratives in relation to the program’s methodologies. Through a series of experiences and experiments based on critical-creative reflection and co-creative action, we will consider what a regenerative curatorial and institutional practice means personally and what it could collectively look like.

14:30–16:30
Anja Lückenkemper, Of Gendered Landscapes and Queered Nature
Workshop
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba

Queer ecology invites and challenges us to reinvent our understanding of nature in light of queer theories. How can we overcome the dichotomies between human and nonhuman entities, between the natural and the cultural spheres, between a living and a non-living world? Based on exercises, as well as theoretical and artistic inputs, including the work of artists and academics such as Natasha Myers and Marisol de la Cadena, this practice-based workshop will explore and attempt new ways of thinking about our relationship with nature and biology. Together we will speculate on queer nature as a new form of relationality based on kinship and fluidity instead of domination and destruction.


16:30–17:00
Closing remarks
Ronald Kolb, Dorothee Richter, and Daniela Zyman
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba


19:00
Parallel program
Tarek Atoui, Al Qabali
Workshop at the Molino de Martos

In this workshop-demonstration, Tarek Atoui introduces his long-term research project Al Qabali. Since 2022, Atoui has been collecting and experimenting with sounds and musical forms most closely associated with Tarab—a trance-inducing Arabic musical tradition—drawing on a collection of musical recordings from tribes and villages from across the Atlas to the Persian Gulf that follow the path of the Tuareg. Atoui’s interest in these traditions grew with his research project Re-visiting Tarab on Arabic music of the Renaissance and Classical periods. At that time, he worked closely with the collections of the AMAR Foundation in Lebanon, which holds the world’s largest collection of recordings of Arabic music from the early twentieth century. Through AMAR, Atoui observed the importance of rural traditions and their influence on religious, urban, and classical repertoires and how they were preserved while most coastal and urban practices evolved, dissolved, or disappeared with the political, technological, and social changes that swept across the Arab world since the 1940s. Atoui will contextualize and present Al Qabali for the first time in public, weaving sounds with narratives and demonstrations with research.


21:00
Sonia Fernández Pan, Moving the World of Words with Gestures
Talk at the Molino de Martos
The talk will be held in Spanish

There are ways of being together that happen mainly through our bodies, by moving between gestures, feelings, and borrowed ideas. Perhaps they are not forms, but events. However, their transience does not make them less important. They also suggest directions for a common life, among them that of relating beyond language and coming into contact with the uneasiness of difference.
Driven by intimacy and the desire to think with others, Sonia Fernandez Pan’s research on dancing cultures—as a study and as an embodied knowledge—is part of a multi-year project that entails writing, encounters, conversations, and dance in the anonymity of the dance floor, which led her to think with the many dancefloor communities that gather around the sharing, repetition, invention, and propagation of gestures, rhythms, and sensitivities.

Tarek Atoui is a French-Lebanese artist and electroacoustic composer working within the realm of sound performance and composition. He engineers complex and inventive instruments as well as arranges and curates interventions, concerts, performances, and workshops. His work often revolves around large-scale, collaborative performances that develop from extensive research into music history and instrumentation, while exploring new methods of production. Using custom-built electronic instruments and computers, Atoui references current social and political realities, revealing music and new technologies as powerful aspects of expression and identity. Education and social connection are integral aspects of Atoui’s practice.

Sascia Bailer is a feminist researcher, writer, and curator working at the intersection of care, gender, and contemporary art. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Reading. She has worked internationally in the arts, including at MoMA PS1, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In 2019–2020 she was the artistic director of M.1 by Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung. She is the author of the article “Care for Caregivers” (Curating with Care, London: Routledge, 2023) and the booklet “Curating, Care, and Corona” (Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, 2020). Bailer is the co-editor of the anthology Letters to Joan (HKW, 2020) and of the artist books Re-Assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices by Maternal Fantasies (Onomatopee, 2021) and What We Could Have Become: On Queer Feminist Filmmaking by Malu Blume (Onotmatopee, 2021). She holds an MA from Parsons School of Design and a BA from Zeppelin University.

Ursula Biemann is an artist, author, and video essayist. Her artistic practice is strongly research-oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations from Greenland to Amazonia, where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests, and water. In her multi-layered videos, the artist interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, science fiction poetry, and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. Biemann’s pluralistic practice spans a range of media including experimental video, interview, text, performance, photography, cartography, props, and materials, which converge in formalized spatial installations. Her work also adopts the form of publications, lectures, and curatorial as well as collaborative research projects.

Mekhala Dave is a lawyer and art academic based in Vienna. She is the ocean law and policy analyst/legal researcher at TBA21–Academy and a doctoral researcher in contemporary art history and theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In her past and current work in legal practice, as well as in her PhD research, she advocates for a social turn in artistic practices and explores encounters located across knowledge spheres and communities in the Global South at the intersection of activism and newly shaping ocean policy. From her lived experiences across borders, she draws inspiration and spiritual guidance from water to the questions of historicity and the search for emerging “new” relations of identity and belonging.

Rosela del Bosque is a curator and researcher from Mexicali, Mexico, currently based in Zurich. Her practice has focused mainly on the specific context of Baja California, Mexico, and works with art education, curatorial practice and research-led methodologies. On a larger scope, her ongoing project and curatorial research with Archivo Familiar del Río Colorado focuses on overcoming the flat and instrumental notions of the Colorado River as a provider of ecosystem services and of water as a resource to delve into the experiences of the tangible, embodied research tactics and non-extractivist relations with water and land.

Sonia Fernández Pan is a writer, (in)dependent curator, and podcast host. Conversation and entropy are part of her research methodology, thanks to the ongoing exchange of gestures and ideas with other people. She understands dancing as an experience of radical listening not only to music but also to the environments in which it happens. Co-curator of “You Got To Get In To Get Out”, a long-running project from and into techno with La Casa Encendida (Madrid), she is also the host of several podcast series for “Promise no Promises!” at/with the Institute Art Gender Nature, HGK Basel FHNW. She recently published Edit with Caniche Editorial, a book that draws on her personal experience on the dancefloor to produce a remix of texts mirroring each other. Her perception of art and dance culture keeps shifting, looking for experiences of contact between the two scenes.

Teresa Vicente Giménez is professor of the philosophy of law and deputy director of the Center for Cooperation and Development Studies (CECODE) at the University of Murcia. She is also director of the Chair of Human Rights and Rights of Nature of the same university. Her teaching and research profile focuses on theory of justice and human rights. In this area, she has researched the new paradigm of ecological justice and the rights of nature and has participated as a speaker in international and national congresses, conferences, and seminars as well as international meetings. She is the author of numerous publications addressing ecological justice, the rights of children, social rights, and the rights of nature, among many other subjects. Giménez has been the leader of the Iniciativa Legislativa Popular (ILP) or popular legislative initiative in Murcia that seeks to give legal personality to the Mar Menor lagoon and basin.

Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. She is the founder of Susie Ibarra Studio and Sound, Health & Habitat, a cultural studio and journal that focuses on sharing and supporting listening health practices, global soundwalks, acoustic ecology focused on climate and eco-friendly and sustainable global music practices. She created Drum Labs: Rhythm in Nature, a course and e-book through her studio that demonstrates her six part analysis of rhythms in nature. Many of Ibarra’s projects are based in cultural and environmental preservation: she has worked to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures; her sound research advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters; and she collaborates with The Joudour Sahara Music Program in Morocco on initiatives that preserve sound-based heritage with sustainable music practices and support the participation of women and girls in traditional music communities.

Ronald Kolb is a researcher, lecturer, curator, designer, and filmmaker based between Stuttgart and Zurich. Co-head of the postgraduate program in curating at ZHdK and co-editor-in-chief of the journal On-Curating.org, he is also a PhD candidate in the practice-based doctoral program in curating at Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Reading. His PhD research deals with curatorial practices in global/situated contexts in light of governmentality, its entanglements in representational power, and self-organized modes of participatory practices in the arts.

Sofia Lemos is a curator and writer. She is a curator at TBA21–Academy, where she leads the policy-oriented artistic research program Meandering through scholarly, sensorial, and spiritual approaches to art and ecology. From 2018–2021, she was curator of public programs and research at Nottingham Contemporary and associate editor at The Contemporary Journal. Recently, Lemos was associate curator of public programs to the 2nd Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art— RIBOCA (2020), with previous curatorial and research roles at HKW, Berlin, PRAXES, Berlin, DRAF, London, and MACBA, Barcelona. She is editor of Sonic Continuum: On the Sound and Poetics of Time (Archive Books, 2023) and METABOLIC RIFTS (Atlas Projectos, 2019) along with the monograph Musa Paradisiaca: Views on Misunderstanding (Bom Dia Books, 2018). Her writing has been featured in various contemporary art and culture publications as well as exhibition catalogues and artist monographs.

Anja Lückenkemper is an independent curator, researcher, and writer based in Berlin. She is co-initiator of the platform GOSSIP GOSSIP GOSSIP for events and exhibitions in Berlin’s urban space and is currently a PhD candidate at the her practice-based doctoral program in curating at the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Reading. Her practice focuses on an analysis of the present in its historical and global embedding, with a special interest in the construction of knowledge and knowledge production. In 2016–2017 she was artistic director at Kunstverein Göttingen and has also worked for art institutions such as Kunstverein Munich, KW Institut for Contemporary Art, daad Gallery Berlin, and Kunsthalle Osnabrück.

Nancy Mounir A versatile multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and composer, Nancy Mounir is a key member of Egypt’s alternative music scene. She contributes original music to
theatre productions, films, and international art installations. Mounir plays a range of instruments—including violin, piano, bass, Theremin, and the traditional Egyptian bamboo flute called the kawala—and in the process she has explored both the harmonic principles of the Western canon and the microtonal foundations of Arabic maqam (musical modes). Lately she has stepped further into the limelight with her solo debut album (3 June 2022, Simsara Records), Nozhet El Nofous — a transcendent exploration of musical freedom through the lens of century-old archival recordings. She was born in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and now lives in Egypt’s capital, Cairo.

PLATA is a project based in Córdoba founded in 2021 by Jesús Alcaide, Gabrielle Mangeri, and Javier Orcaray. It is an institution under construction which aims to organize a coexistence in common with our commons, a place where the community is invited to propose lines of creation, thought, action, and research. Most of its projects focus on improving both the rural and urban context by working on issues of ecology, sustainability, and equality, offering new visions of contemporary cultural production and alternatives for critical and creative thinking.

Dorothee Richter is professor in contemporary curating at the University of Reading, and head of the postgraduate program in curating, CAS/MAS Curating, at the Zurich University of the Arts, www.curating.org. She is director of the practice-based doctoral program in curating, PhD in Practice in Curating, University of Reading. Richter has worked extensively as a curator: she was initiator of Curating Degree Zero Archive, curator of Künstlerhaus Bremen, where she curated different symposia on feminist issues in contemporary arts, and an archive on feminist practices, Materialien/Materials; recently she directed, together with Ronald Kolb, a film on Fluxus: Flux Us Now! Fluxus Explored with a Camera, www.fluxusnow.net.  She is executive editor of On-Curating.org and she is also the initiator and head of the OnCurating Project Space in Zürich. Together with Ronald Kolb she also launched the platform Small Projects for Coming Communities.

Azahara Ubera Biedma is an artist, dancer, and researcher based in Brussels. Their practice is situated at the intersection of dance, choreography, experimental pedagogy, artistic creation, and how to translate philosophical ideas around feminism and queer culture into somatic practices. They teach these pedagogies at the postmaster program in art in social political context at Sint Lucas in Antwerp. Through performances, installations, workshops, and social situations they create spaces for humans and nonhumans, for being together, intimate encounters to connect with otherness through movement, language games, and sound.
Azahara also develops their work and practices along with several collectives and organizations and thanks to all the learnings with Somatecx, research group initiated by philosopher Paul B. Preciado, after his advance program on queer and gender studies at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.

Ziúr is an experimental producer/musician and a fixture in Berlin’s rich musical topography. It seems as though she produces her releases in the way someone scoring a television series does, gathering and arranging their selections for each episode…isolating and apprehending definitive scenes and memorializing their ethos in song. Soundtracks, like her release Antifate, guide the listener through radically different emotional states, yet somehow still offer an idea of what underpins a show’s (or in this case an album’s) particular hues. Ziúr produces music within a scope that is expansive, rich, and diverse in texture. The sounds are simultaneously machinic and deeply anthropomorphic, toying with mechanical isolation and the chaotic spectrum of human emotion. Unlike a soundtrack or score, there is no film to which one can turn to narrativize the music, there is only evocative sounds reaching from each song toward the cybernetic sublime.

Daniela Zyman is artistic director of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. She joined TBA21 in 2003 and has been instrumental in co-shaping its exhibitions and commissions program. Between 1995 and 2001 Zyman was chief curator of the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna, which included the founding and programming of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. From 2000 to 2003 she worked as the artistic director of the Künstlerhaus, Vienna, and as director of A9 Forum Transeuropa. Zyman is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, and regularly writes essays for art publications. Her many years of research into forms of artistic “counter-research” led to a doctoral thesis in 2020. Since 2022 she has been curating on behalf of TBA21 a series of exhibitions at C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, including the exhibitions “Abundant Futures” and “Remedios: Where new land might grow,” and co-curating of the performance assembly “The Journeying Stream” together with Sofia Lemos.