Stone, Paper, Scissors
5 May
Paper making workshop
Aitor Climent Barca
The paper-making workshop is a dynamic made up of small concatenated actions to transform the cellulose of plant fibres into paper, by means of water. The actions will take place between Saturday, May 4th and Sunday may 5th. On the first day, the fibres will be softened through the bleaching process to later undo them. The next day the pulp will be mixed with water to form the papers, pressed and left to dry. This proposal has the format of an open workshop and will be run in parallel with the rest of the activities, offering a sustained collective learning space during the two days.
Monumentum – The ‘momentum’ of an ephemeral monument
Vasilis Ntouros, Dora Zoumba & Aris Papadopoulos
Monumentum is a collectively developed project which seeks to achieve a communally dreamt, practice-based and contextualized prototype for counter-monument making. What would a contemporary counter-monument be today? What would it look like and what would its functions be?
Using the dry stone wall technique as a metaphor and a vessel into which collective dreams, desires and memories are merged with locality, fiction and texture, the collective hopes to find the invisible connections between the hand-made, the in-between societal frictions and future desires.
When no mortar is used what are the invisible forces holding a community, a collaboration, a wall, an everyday practice together?
This collaborative endeavor extends beyond the physical construction, as the collective delves deeper into the processes of counter-monumenting and counter-mapping, exploring the intricate intersections of art, nature, and community through art practices, repetition and trial-error attempts.
Temple
Esther Rodriguez Barbero
What makes a place sacred? What is the value of the immaterial that has not been classified? How to preserve the essence of that which keeps it alive? What words and actions are necessary?
For some time now I have been observing and working on what happens in moments of transition, when something ceases to be what it was and becomes something else, something as yet unknown. That moment when there is a multiplicity of latent possibilities. This is an invitation to look at this present from a near future to reveal some mysteries.
Emergency brake or new common sense: How do we (re)situate degrowth in our territories?
Borja Nogué
In theses on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin wondered if revolutions would not be the locomotive of history, as Marx said, but rather its emergency brake. A few years ago, the idea of degrowth as an emergency brake or new common sense towards the acceleration of socio-ecological disaster became unusually popular, reaching a significant international relevance both in the scientific and media fields and, more recently, even in institutional policies. From the degrowth perspective, not only is the irrationality of trying to grow unlimitedly on a finite planet emphasized, but it is argued that this is a dangerous and undesirable social goal. In the hegemony of common sense that 'the more, the better' degrowth proposes to build 'a simple life, so that everyone can simply live' as an alternative common sense. In this sense, the central proposal of degrowth is a planned and democratic reduction in the consumption of materials and energy especially in rich countries and the wealthy classes, emphasizing strategies that reduce the material and energy footprint of social metabolism, based on values of sufficiency and equality in reestablishing the balance between society and the environment. Even so, it should be noted that degrowth is not meant to be a messianic creed or the new Arcadia, but rather an analytical, normative and action concept designed for the transformation of reality. Degrowth therefore requires a situated discussion of how to ground, articulate and nurture new ways of living in tune with human and planetary needs that are just and desirable.