ACADEMIC PROGRAMMING |
ECO? TRANS? TECHNO? CYBER? QUEER? BLACK? HYDRO? XENO? FEMINISMS
Co-coordinator Institute for Postnatural Studies The idea of the Earth as an "anonymous mother" (that some self-identified “eco-feminisms” uncritically maintain) is intrinsically linked to the conception of both nature and women as indefinitely exploitable sources of (re)production and wealth and has led us to collide with our planet’s real ecological limits. This recklessness, this negligence, has provoked the "intrusion of Gaia", that is, the brutally implacable response of the Earth-system to these and other violences - which forces us to face another type of finitude: that of a "we" and a "world" yet to be defined. This seminar offers a space meant to be the beginning of an intellectual, embodied, collective, diffractive, emotional journey that brings us closer to the possibility of a world, or many worlds, where thinking together, unknowing, and building modes of affective affiliation become possible. FULL PROGRAM 
XENOXENOXENO
Producer & Faculty Institute for Postnatural Studies This experimental seminar will focus on new modes of overcoming the human/animal binomial by navigating within the postnatural framework. We will explore how humans have interacted with animals in western culture and contrast it with different approaches to multi-species coexistence. Collectively we will also exercise different ways of embodying an expanded notion of the human-animal through vocal activations, writing, and roleplaying through hybrid bodies. The phonocene, case studies of wild children, contemporary practices, and different cultural and popular subgenres of identity and sexuality will provide a horizontal and fertile platform to discuss and learn from each other. We will play with the political potential of imagining new worlds through academic research and artistic proposals. In the process of creating desirable futures and collaborative healing, we may find unexpected joys that unite us in the contemporary ecological crisis. FULL PROGRAM 
HYDRO FUTURES / MEMORY ECOLOGIES
Coordinator Institute for Postnatural Studies with Rhubaba Gallery & Studios Water grounds our lives, from our beginnings in liquid, to our bodies as its containers. Hydro Futures / Memory Ecologies holds a space for research and investigation into our relationships with water through the frameworks of Afrofuturism and Black Geographies. The fields of Afrofuturism and Black Geographic study offer modes of thought and imagination that centre Black spatial thinking and agency. They critique both the erasure of Blackness within the whiteness and coloniality of geographical thought and analyse how the entanglements of race, class, gender, and sexuality determine patterns of habitation, denial, and resistance. (Re)thinking with water requires a fluid reimagining of time, as it serves as an archive of memory and of history - water is its own storyteller. In using Afrofuturism as a lens to creatively and critically view water with, its ecological position is expanded upon to consider its role in the past, present, and possible future(s). FULL PROGRAM |
NEW ECOLOGIES: DECENTRALIZING THE HUMAN THROUGH CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES
Faculty Institute for Postnatural Studies The first edition of the Postnatural Independent Program (PIP) will explore the new implications of postnature as a framework for contemporary creation. In the form of an experimental educational platform, we will speculate and question not only contemporary ecologies but also new academic approaches and radical notions of learning together. It is a new learning space that offers theoretical tools, embodied learning, and expertise to define and develop projects that examine postnature as a framework for contemporary creation. Based on IPS’ ongoing initiatives, it offers an experimental platform for ecological thinking and cultural initiatives in an expanded virtual campus, approaching the students’ potential from a holistic mentoring perspective. It also brings together established researchers and art institutions that will host working sessions, encounters, and presentations. FULL PROGRAM 
MUTABILITY & MUTUALISM Vol. I and II
Coordinator and Faculty Institute for Postnatural Studies with The Institute of Queer Ecology Queer and ecology together make visible the interconnected, entangled conditions of life on earth and honor the strange, multispecies amalgamation we live in community with. To make sense of the broad constellation of practices that emerge from Queer Ecology, we examine at two scales: the individual and the collective. As we explore, the binary distinction between these scales quickly blurs and blends.The speakers in this series considered the influence of mutability and mutualism on their work in the fields of visual art, evolutionary biology, biodiversity, environmental activism, synthetic biology, ecology, and queer theory. FULL PROGRAM VOL.I and VOL.II 
POSTNATURAL INDEPENDENT PROGRAM
Co-director and Faculty Institute for Postnatural Studies The first edition of the Postnatural Independent Program (PIP) will explore the new implications of postnature as a framework for contemporary creation. In the form of an experimental educational platform, we will speculate and question not only contemporary ecologies but also new academic approaches and radical notions of learning together. It is a new learning space that offers theoretical tools, embodied learning, and expertise to define and develop projects that examine postnature as a framework for contemporary creation. Based on IPS’ ongoing initiatives, it offers an experimental platform for ecological thinking and cultural initiatives in an expanded virtual campus, approaching the students’ potential from a holistic mentoring perspective. It also brings together established researchers and art institutions that will host working sessions, encounters, and presentations. FULL PROGRAM |
PUBLISHING |
COMPOST READER
Editor cthulhu books From Cthulhu Books, we think of the world to come as a great Compost. Composting as our new relational ontology, as our earthly condition. Composting makes us a single planetary material (humans, beings, objects, technologies). It is the past and it is the future. It is space, place and it is matter. It is a world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, where there are rituals of celebration, entanglements, and interrelationships. Cultivating consciousness from questions rather than from answers, from uncertainty and doubt. This book speaks about beginnings, about new relationships, about unstable modes of doing, thinking, and being, letting questions spawn new questions. With Claudia González, Adrian Schindler and Eulàlia Rovira, Gerard Ortín, Jonathon Keats, Marianne Hoffmeister, Yamil Leonardi, Ricardo Quesada, Sonia Fernández Pan, Azucena Castro, Mónica Mays, Michael Wang and Lucrecia Masson. FOR SALE HERE 
ATLAS MENOR #02 POSTHUMAN BODIES
Co-editor Bartlebooth In its obsession to classify and find an underlying order to nature, one of the objectives of science has been to develop a system of taxonomies for bodies. Through their representation systems and the devices used for their exhibition, cartographies of the normative body reflect the extractivist violence of the scientific method. This publication is intended as a displacement of the map, i.e., a questioning of the cartographies from the bodily perspective. Which bodies are visible or hidden in devices that exhibit the natural world? What spaces of thought allow us to inhabit the taxonomies of science? Or rather, which ones escape them? Wirth Blanca Pujals, Andrea Muniaín, Quimera Rosa and María Molina + María Buey MORE INFO HERE 
SHIFT SPACE 3.0
Contributor Shift Space 3.0, edited by Claudia La Rocco, includes ten new commissioned texts, including essays and interviews on each of the fellows (2023 KNIGHT ARTS + TECH FELLOWS), as well as accompanying poetry, short stories, and creative prose responding to the surreal portraiture that technology can inspire, produce, and mirror back. FULL ARTICLES HERE |
WE?
Co-editor cthulhu books The first Postnatural Independent Program (PIP) offered by the Institute for Postnatural Studies was imagined as a new learning space that could offer theoretical tools and embodied knowledge to help define and develop ideas and projects that examine postnature as a framework for contemporary creation. Using a dual methodology incorporating both theory and practice, it emerged as an inclusive and horizontal virtual campus, in constant shifting. Structured in 3 online modules, and accompanied by renowned international thinkers, artists, curators, and philosophers, it was complemented by two in-person encounters in Madrid; important moments in which the participants (coming from many different countries and contexts) had the opportunity of sharing the embodied experience of being together in one physical space and time-zone. We believe that this complex and multilayered space that emerges from conversations, ideas, shared intimacies, vulnerabilities, and propositions has real consequences in the world. By critically leaving behind the representational distance between “us” and “them”, “here” and “there”, and “knowledge” and “superstition”, to name just a few of the dichotomies cultivated by Western traditional art and philosophy academies, we forge a necessary and immediate relation to the world. But who is “we”? And how can “we” stay together, despite our differences? How can “we” create collectivity without sameness, and bypass the pull towards homogeneity? This book is a reflection, reverberation and resonance of our 7 months together. AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD HERE 
MAKING KIN (ANIMAL SERIES)
Editor cthulhu books Non-human animals have played an important role in western culture, from children’s fables to cartoon and movie characters in popular and occult media. We usually see these animal representations responding to human emotions, conflicts and needs. But a very important part of how we relate to animals in capitalism gets buried underneath all of these anthropomorphizing tactics imposed on non-human bodies and voices. But what if we were to anthropomorphize on a less human centered level? Even though every time we try to speak through a non-human voice we have to accept the impossibility of truly inhabiting another being’s vital experience, we can find ways through creative practice to expand the way we sympathize or empathize with non-human animals. Xeno fiction proposes an exercise of placing our imagination, and with it our body, inside another’s perspective. With Zoë De Luca Legge, Paula Proaño, Morgan Wood, Marianne Hoffmeister, Luca E. Lum, Laura Valdivieso, Jorge de la Cruz, John Kazior, Eva Piay, Esther Merinero and Adèle Grégoire. FOR SALE HERE 
A GREEN JADE LAKE
Co-editor CentroCentro In a situation of ecological fragility, we need to rethink the relationships and flows that are established between humans, ecosystems and their environment, and to take into consideration the differences that exist between the natural and the artificial. The publication “A Green Jade Lake” compiles research and reflections that were carried out and developed for the first exhibition ever to be curated by the Institute for Postnatural Studies, and includes texts and narratives by thinkers, artists and curators that help us reflect on the idea of nature from different perspectives. Far from being a mere illustration of the exhibition, the book has been conceived as a project in itself, an open dialogue replete with leaks and possibilities. With Geocinema, Chus Martinez, Inés Muñozcano, Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo, Claudia Rodríguez-Ponga DOWNLOAD FOR FREE HERE |
WORKSHOPS |
DESIRABLE FUTURES, HYBRID BODIES
collective joy workshop Rhubaba Gallery & Studios, and at Fine Arts University of Granada with the Institute for Postnatural Studies Eco-speculation is a form of narrative creation that can be used through art as a tool to think about desirable futures. Through speculation we can imagine hybrid bodies between humans and animals, or impossible landscapes that expand an ecological imagination. These narratives try to move us away from normative structures in order to imagine other worlds and other ways of relating to each other, of coexisting. How can we feel collective joy on an individual level? When we think of the word collective we should also include all of those beings that participate in the health of our shared ecosystem, from microorganisms to the atmosphere. Through embodied performativity and meditation we will try to inhabit other potential existences as a way to activate a less human centered speculative practice. This workshop will explore collective imaginaries as spaces to be shared. Through sound, narrative immersions and material tactuality, we will place our minds, and with it our bodies, in a creative process that will serve as the shared landscape during our time together. In the process of creating desirable futures we may find unexpected joys that unite us. MORE INFO 
LOBOS, DELFINES Y ZAMIOCULCAS
Interspecies sound art & performance workshop La Casa Encendida, Madrid with the Institute for Postnatural Studies Through sound and corporeal research, this workshop proposed to stimulate other ways of communicating beyond the logocentric language as a way to explore interspecies communication. Throughout four sessions we have explored, among other topics, interspecies erotica, sound composition, digital roleplaying, phonetic poetry, expanded listening and field recordings. In the workshop Lobos, delfines y zamioculcas we have worked on listening and sound perception as tools for the dissolution of the categorization between nature and culture, trying to establish a new multi-species environment of creation and experience. Through sound practices we were able to speculate narratives that allow us to rethink the utopia/dystopia dichotomy and enhance the relationships between different fields of knowledge, blurring the boundaries between theory and practice, in order to activate new voices and narrate ourselves beyond traditional canons. At the end of these meetings we produced a radio program for La Casa Encendida Radio. LISTEN HERE |
NONHUMAN DESIGN
speculative design workshop Domaine de Boisbuchet, Lessac with the Institute for Postnatural Studies Nowadays, and more than ever, we need to understand nature as a complex and political subject that can no longer be romanticized. The way it has been represented has led us to believe that it is something separated from us, resulting in the contradictory dichotomy between Nature and Culture. When we think of Boisbuchet we think of designing with and in agreement with the territory it belongs to. Design has always been about problem-solving and we believe it is time to shift its axis by making the process the solution itself. Let’s design by displacing the human from the center of our theoretical and practical approach, by forgetting about social, ergonomic or other anthropocentric production modes. How can we design for a non-human entity? What kind of necessities do we respond to when designing for or with a forest, a river, or a lake? Let's break new ground to explore desirable futures of coexistence. MORE INFO 
DESCAMINHA
Sound art and performance workshop with Fabiana Vinagre Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia How do you listen to the Museum? A priori, this question may lead us to anatomy, to the act of listening exclusively directed to sound and hearing, but listening has more to do with a conversation than with the isolated act. Listening to a space implies giving it life, perceiving its vibrations, underworlds and resonances, which are returned to our bodies. Listening is not a passive act: it implies walking, seeing from different points and lenses, activating a sonar more than a hearing, listening to the walls, the voices, the images, the memories, the futures. In this edition of equipo1517 -a research and creation laboratory for a stable group of 10 teenagers from 15 to 17 years old- we start from practices of estrangement of the senses to stimulate non-verbal communication and listening to the body, to other people and to the Museum. Through the exchange of perceptions and experiences, we work on non-daily ways of inhabiting space and the limits between the concepts of human, nature and technology, guided mainly by listening in its multiple forms. MORE INFO |
PODCASTS |
SPECULATIVE INTERVIEWS Vol. I & II Coordinator and interviewer La Casa Encendida Radio with the Institute for Postnatural Studies Thinking of an interview as an excuse to create a speculative dialogue derived from the artistic or research work of the interviewees, we shared thoughts and ephemeral intuitions in an exercise of collaborative creation. We start from the idea of tentacular frameworks, of imaginaries that connect and relate the different inhabitants of this or other worlds and their narratives. This program is a space in which to participate in the visualization of futures, navigating between utopia and dystopia, the dreamlike and the real, the possible and the impossible. Through these types of dialogues we can project images of new desirable worlds, attending to, cultivating and caring for the relationships between their agents, both human and non-human, and their ecosystems. LISTEN HERE 
CUENTA CUENTA
Voice-over guest (in spanish) La Casa Encendida Radio Podcast of the program En Familia de La Casa Encendida, where they tell stories and poems, contemporary or traditional. Today we bring you the story "Almost True" by Clarice Lispector. In this story the narrator is her dog Ulysses, who tells a fabulous and funny story. Mercedes Pineda has translated this story for Siruela and Mariana Valente accompanies the text with her illustrations. Clarice Lispector was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but a few months later her family emigrated to Brazil, so she always considered herself Brazilian and wrote in Portuguese. We listen to the story in the voice of Yuri Tuma, who like her is Brazilian. LISTEN HERE 
DRIVING THE HUMAN x FORM MAGAZINE
Invited guest Form Magazine Welcome to the sixth and final special episode from the Driving the Human festival! Yuri Tuma is an old acquaintance of ours – or should we say an old friend? We first met him in 2021 in the legendary summer school Domaine de Boisbuchet where he was causing some attention because he was wearing a furry tail with a little red bow at its end. Just recently, he had been hanging out a lot in the online message boards of the “furries” – a subculture that worships anthropomorphic animals. But apart from geeky subcultures, Yuri has a lot of other interesting things to talk about. The sound artist from São Paulo is one of the founding members of the Institute for Postnatural Studies in Madrid that challenges our concept of nature. Recently, Yuri is also diving into the field of art mediation. And that’s exactly why Driving the Human called him to give a special kind of guided tour at the festival site. Listen to the podcast to find out what connects mediation and meditation – and make sure to listen to the end as Yuri shares one of his meditations! LISTEN HERE |
SONIC UTOPIAS EP. LAND OF AHHNSGRWRH
Invited guest Movement.radio - ONASSIS STEGI For this episode of Sonic Utopias, Daphne X invites transdisciplinary artists Yuri Tuma, Carincur and João Pedro Fonseca for a sonic fiction piece inspired by an online role-playing dialogue with a member of the Furry community. This sound piece aims to imagine worlds within other worlds, beings that create universes, that suppose new frameworks from which to understand how to inhabit the ecological crisis. We explore anthropomorphicity as a way to rethink our relationship with non-human entities. Furry can be considered a hobby, a fetish, a grassroots movement and much more, but being part of this collective is first and foremost a question of identity. LISTEN HERE 
JOY WITHIN THE TROUBLE Episode #7
Invited guest Rhubaba Gallery & Studios In this episode, committee members Freya Yeates and Khadea Santi speak with artists and co-founders of The Institute for Postnatural Studies, Gabriel Alonso and Yuri Tuma. The discussion explores how acts of collective joy, listening and imagination can move us beyond staying within times of trouble in ecological crisis and toward actively disrupting the structures of power that maintain it. By positioning collective joy, and speculative-fiction as forms of pleasure activism (Adrienne Maree Brown), we can work against the paralysis of survival and move towards something more like transformation, more like becoming with. LISTEN HERE 
BARRO
Co-producer and artistic direction Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, hablarenarte and the Reina Sofia Museum This podcast series arises from the need to tell what cultural mediation is and what it does. In collaboration with Sara Torres-Vega we met with different mediators in different spaces to model this viscous material that is the cultural industry. BARRO is the podcast of MAR, a project promoted by the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, hablarenarte and the Reina Sofia Museum, whose main objective is to promote relevant actions of change in the field of new institutionalism. COMING SOON |
ARTISTIC PRACTICE |
THE CANE, THE SEAGULL, THE CORK, POSEIDONA AND THE CAT
Multidisciplinary installation National Museum of Tossa del Mar, Spain It is a completely organic work, which consists of a set of bundles of cane Americana rising on one side of the old tower, and also, there is a scattering on the ground. The space is immersed in reeds and sound art, in which the sound of seagulls, the forest and of appraised tribal sounds that Tuma has performed and recorded. Why we call certain species invasive, opportunistic or protected? These qualifications respond to anthropomorphic concepts and politics. For this reason, through the composition created by the canes and the sound elements, the work calls into question the terminology with which non-human species are treated by local management. A drawing is shown by Jordi Couso, Environmental Technician at Tossa de Mar City Council, who made it to the artist while explaining the problem of the invasion of the American Cane to the river spaces and their effects on native species. This work is characterized by collaborative work with the Environmental Agency of the town and a local musician, the connection with the environment, the town, its workers and the power that the artist attributes to the materials. MORE INFO 
THOMÁS PÉFKKAS, SHE HAD NO NAME
Soundwalk and sculpture garden Kinono Art Gathering Residency, Tinos, Greece is an investigation of collective narratives that take as a starting point a sound piece created with sounds of the island and vocals from fellow residents and myself. This material bore fruit to a sound composition that was shared through a collective guided walk around the landscape. Before starting, the walkers were guided to stimulate their thoughts in search of a mental and/or spiritual meaning of an utopian garden. The hike led us to the Fire Garden installed at the edge of the Gastria marble cave in Tinos island. We then reflected on possible futures in relation to the local and the global, exploring similarities and differences between both scales of narratives. MORE INFO 
NO SON OTRA COSA QUE TOCARSE EL UNO AL OTRO
Sound installation BAÑARTE, Río Tobías, Spain The process is a collective investigation of speculative narratives that resulted in an installation created with sounds from the local landscape, voices and stories derived from the memories of the older women residents in the small rural town. Together with the participants we spoke about possible futures in relation to the local and the global, exploring similarities and differences between both scales of narration. Through these conversations I composed a sound piece that can be heard from under the bridge on the river that has changed drastically throughout the decades due to climate change. Their voices, stories and fictions will reverberate in the landscape, mixing with the sounds of the river and the passage of time that it metaphorically represents. MORE INFO 
SOBRE FONDO BLANCO
Performance Centro de Cultura COntemporánea Conde Duque, Madrid Sobre Fondo Blanco is a hybrid proposal between performance, sculpture, architecture, installation and sound art. The art in movement; the human being as a construction and destruction machine; the temporality of the metropolis; light dance; the sublime language and the supremacy of the spirit in geometry and architecture are some of the futuristic themes that reverberate in the work. The use of industrial and natural materials and sounds on this occasion explores their qualities in both their microcosm and their macrocosm by considering the four dimensions of a new postnatural landscape (distance, surface, interior and exterior) in relation to the imagination and the living (post)human spirit in the Capitalocene. MORE INFO HERE |
NEW SUN
Crypto art sound installation Cryptovoxels multiverse New Sun wants to break away from linguistic and rational constructions when trying to create possible utopias and/or dooms, fictions and/or futures that reflect on coexistence. Within us lies a collective and informative genetic more-than-human memory that can potentially be awakened through sound alone. When we speak of doom we might as well be speaking of a time before “creation”; doom is full of chaotic activities, but it could also be a time of slow silencing and emptying of time and space. The piece was created by mixing walk spaces together with phonetic poetry and musical composition derived from burnt music sheets. To imagine a new sun is to imagine the end but also the beginning, the birth, the transformation towards a new existence. VIEW INSTALLATION 
FLYING CREATURES
Sound score for the film "El Manzanares" by Andrea Molina Matadero Madrid, Madrid As part of the artist's residency in response to climate change at the Instituto Mutante de Narrativas Ambientales (IMNA) and the Centro de Residencias Artísticas de Matadero, artist Andrea Molina proposes the Eco-Fictions Laboratory, a project that seeks to deepen the use of science fiction narratives as tools with which to design future urban situations in a context of ecological transition. Throughout history, human beings have used fictions to design the worlds they have longed to address, making through them the imaginaries with which to activate the desire to materialize them. However, the dreams and fictions of the past contradict an increasingly delicate reality, and their stories draw scenarios where even the possibility of life on earth in the long term is denied. Trying to abandon the catastrophic discourse, we believe that there are still options to turn the script around. Why don't we write the fictions that suit us then? With the accompaniment of theoretical references from authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Donna Haraway or James Tiptree Jr. who vindicated the resources of fiction and artefacts to project images of a less oppressive and more egalitarian world, but also tracing an archaeology of the local past with which to rescue practices, gestures and imaginaries that have been forgotten, we will try to re-imagine the complex cosmopolitical landscapes that the cities of the future will demand, attending to and caring for the relations between their agents, both human and non-human, and their ecosystems. Perhaps in this way, understanding the idea of fiction not as techno-utopy, but as a collective imaginary narrative of a world that does not exist but is attainable, possible and desirable, we can take the first step towards a new coexistence. LISTEN HERE 
GARDEN CITIES OF TOMORROW
Sculpture garden, sound installation, artist book ARNIS Residency, Arnis, Germany The project emerges from architectural research based on the same-titled book. First published in 1898, its proposals for cities — allowing the benefits of rural and urban areas to thrive at the same place — were visionary. Inspired by a utopian novel, the book found great approval by the progressive artist community “Crystal Chain”, initiated by the architect Bruno Taut in 1919. Within a chain letter, also known as the ‘Utopian Correspondence’, they discussed ideas for building a society in which all people would live in equal conditions and work inspired by a common goal. Glass, which would allow architecture to dematerialise and dissolve with nature, was one of the most desired materials to correspond with this egalitarian society. In Arnis, Yuri has not only been inspired by architectural theory and the fluidity with nature, but made both an intrinsic part of his work. His abstract architectural sculptures are made from shared and disposed materials — provided by the local community marking them as collective and altruistic efforts. Placing his pieces in a small wooden area, his compositions of human remnants are in contrast with the immediate natural environment. Their unpretentious installation bring forth the bare qualities of its composite materials, reminding us of their utopian association with equality and a common horizon. Producing his own book, "Schlei Schlick", the artist makes use of another minimalistic gesture to dissolve the boundaries between human-made and natural matter, allowing the paper of his pages to be drawn by water of the Schlei. Presented in an old dismantled ship cabin made of rough and heavy steal, Tuma further plays a sensory composition of everyday sounds from Arnis with "Plan cannot be determined until site selected", turning them into another material towards the balance between human welfare and architectural hull." MORE INFO |