The Rehearsing Faith workshop cycle
The Rehearsing Faith workshop cycle will be held as a series of four online sessions on the following dates: February 4, 11, 18, and 25, 2025. The workshop cycle produces and unfolds pedagogical resources amongst the SAiR Knowledge Sharing platform, including its selected artists, partner institutions and audiences.
Through four online sessions the platform speculates on strategies that produce environments – sensorial, critical, economic, political, aesthetical, somatic and otherwise – and the potential impact that those environments might establish with a larger natural sphere.
4 February 2025, 11.00-13.00 (CET): Amelie Aranguren: Curatorial radical care
Amelie Aranguren is a curator and cultural activist and a founding member of Paisanaje. She was a member of Campo Adentro/Inland between 2011 and 2023. She is currently the director of the Centro de Aproximación a lo Rural, a space in Madrid where creators, curators, researchers and rural agents can carry out production and research residencies and experiment with artistic forms linked to social contexts and ecological perspectives. She has previously worked as artistic director of the Federico García Lorca Foundation, the Museo Reina Sofía and the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Paisanaje was born out of the work of the Campo Adentro team at the CAR (Centre for Rural Approach) added to the union of other like-minded people from very different backgrounds (artists, curators, artisans, activists...). They are an exploration and action group that addresses the eco-social crisis through art, practicing alternative modes of imagination that move away from collapse and draw other possible futures that are more hopeful. Their goal is to create in the city a space of welcome and participatory coexistence of all forms of life. Paisanaje's work is articulated around different lines of action that address the climate crisis and are oriented towards fairer transitions. All the practices and debates aimed at promoting food sovereignty are grouped around Comer y poder; Ensayos situados (Situated Essays) are those that investigate urban transitions; Hacer el saber (Making Knowledge) recovers traditional knowledge; and Lujo comunal (Communal Luxury), dedicated to the activation of possible imaginaries of the common and the celebration of the collective. All of them are interrelated in many of their projects thanks to the fact that they are always grounded in the practice of everyday life. Therefore, the actions are as diverse as: taking situated collective walks; the transformation of dairy products into yogurts, cheeses and other derivatives; their communal meals; publications; workshops; meetings; celebrations; or exhibitions.
11 February 2025, 11.00-13.00 (CET): Anna Manubens: Sustainability and art production
Anna Manubens is director at Hangar, Barcelona. With a preference for hybrid roles at the intersection between exhibition-making, research, public programming, project development and institutional analysis. She was Head of Public Programmes at the CAPC Musée d’art contemporain in Bordeaux until 2017. She previously combined her activity as curator and programmer with teaching at the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) and a part-time curator position at the Belgian artist-run organisation, Auguste Orts, dedicated to the production of, and thinking around, artists’ films. With them she was founding project manager of On & For Production a Creative Europe project aimed at facilitating the production of artists’moving image through the conception of new working frameworks and peer-to-peer exchange formats. Her recent exhibitions include A L I E N T O (NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona, 2020-2021); Wendelien van Oldenborgh.Tono lengua boca (Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid, 2019 & Centre d’Art Contemporani Fabria i Coats, Barcelona 2020); entre, hacia, hasta, para, por, según, sin (EACC, Castellón, 2019); Visceral Blue (La Capella, Barcelona, 2016); Hacer cuerpo con la máquina: Joachim Koester (Blue Project Foundation, Barcelona, 2016) and Contornos de lo Audiovisual with Soledad Gutiérrez (Tabakalera, San Sebastián, 2015). She has contributed to various publications and in 2020, together with Julia Montilla she edited Hangar: Paradigmas, síntomas, prototipos y proyecciones a book and series of actions on the occasion of Hangar’s 20th anniversary. Since the spring of 2020 she takes care of a network of contemporary art centres from Belgium, Italy and Ireland to imagine a reaction to the pandemic as an occasion of institutional maintenance. She was artistic director of LOOP for the editions of 2011 and 2012.
18 February 2025, 11.00-13.00 (CET): Andrea Rodrigo: Coexistence and politics in user–centered structures
Andrea Rodrigo is a researcher and curator of dance and choreography. Her practice is articulated in different formats and types of movement. She works on long-standing projects through writing, performative arts, and the accompaniment of choreographers and artists. She has curated the programmes Amarre at MDT, Stockholm; What I am already intuiting at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo – CA2M, Madrid; the programme Amarre I at Conde Duque, Madrid; The Sensing Salon with Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva at fluent in collaboration with Fundación Botín, Santander. Rodrigo also collaborates with Isabel de Naverán in various ways, as they support each other in their research and curatorial work. She is active in different contexts such as the Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme, France, where she organises the Spring Meeting alongside Bojana Cvejić, Nikhil Vettukattil and Stefa Govaart.
PAF (=PerformingArtsForum) is a place for professional and not-yet professional practitioners and activists in the field of performing arts, visual art, literature, music, new media and internet, theory and cultural production, and scientists who seek to research and determine their own conditions of work. PAF is for people who can motorize their own artistic production and knowledge production not only responding to the opportunities given by the institutional market. Initiated and run by artists, theoreticians, and practitioners themselves, PAF is a user-created, user-innovative informal institution. Neither a production-house and venue nor a research center, it is a platform for everyone who wants to expand possibilities and interests in his/her own working practice.
25 February 2025, 11.00-13.00 (CET): Blanca de la Torre: Sustainability beyond materiality
Blanca de la Torre is a PhD, curator, art historian and researcher whose professional work lies at the intersection of visual arts, cultural ecology, and sustainable creative practices. Her professional activity includes, in addition to curating exhibitions, artistic director of projects, seminars, workshops, curatorial residencies and international symposiums. Currently she is Head Curator of the Helsinki Biennial 2025 with Kati Kivinen, and artistic director of ISLA, Madrid.
From an approach close to eco-aesthetics and political ecology, she understands art as an instrument of knowledge to rethink and reformulate other possibilities for “the common”. She has also published more than a hundred specialized texts in books, catalogues and magazines, and regularly participates in international conferences and symposiums on culture and sustainability. She is part of the REDS Community of Knowledge and Practice on Sustainable Development.
Concept of the workshop cycle and coordination: Alejandro Alonso Díaz
Invited speakers: Amelie Aranguren, Anna Manubens, Andrea Rodrigo, Blanca de la Torre
Coordination and support: Luisa Espino (Matadero Madrid)
