Environment The sustainability of life and co-responsibility
'There is much to preserve, and what you preserve can help reconfigure a social order that is at once fair and within the limits of our planet'.
Emilio Santiago Muiño
Working simultaneously in various fields such as academia, social movements, and public policy, Emilio Santiago Muiño (b. Ferrol, 1984) studies and supports social processes involved in transitioning to ecological sustainability. His research is based on evidence of a growing energy shortage that will force Western societies to learn to reduce energy use in coming decades. This is by no means a gloomy scenario, but a historical window of opportunity to promote the reenchangment of everyday life, weakening the neoliberal consumer drive and making it posible to imagine a new culture base don values such as mutual care, life stability, and physical activity linked to a satisfying effort. In Muiño’s words, the idea is to “become poor, so as not to kill”. To make a transition based on desire rather than fear, in order to prevent the emergence of a “resource fascism” driven by competition, geopolitical advantage, and the plunder of increasingly scarce material reserves.
'My intention in this series of works is to approach nature and physical phenomena. The works deal in perception, some by searching for new information, others by artificially recreating the physical laws.' Àngels Ribé
Ribé’s actions were based on her own body and on space as elements of research and experimentation. In many of them, Ribé registered natural phenomena, provoking a shock between nature and human actions. Subsequently, her work became interested in mental behaviour and the mechanisms of perception.
Fina Miralles: I Am All the Selves that I Have Been addresses the work of this artist through a number of her actions, photographs, installations and paintings. Not only does her reflection on nature and artifice subvert the conventions of our relationship with the environment in which we live and develop as individuals, it also invites us to rethink what we mean by the artistic, the values that underpin art and what gives it meaning.
A cloud is water and air,
Rain is water and air,
Lightning is fire, cloud and air,
A bird is air, earth and water.
A cloud when no longer
a cloud is rain,
Rain, river; the river is
the sea; the sea is a cloud.
Fina MirallesNotebook, no. 1
This content is not available in English. You can consult it in Spanish.
From the intersection between environmentalism and feminism, Herrero reminds us that we are eco-dependent and interdependent beings, and that our life is subject to limits: limits that arise from the vulnerability and transience of our own bodies and social life, from the scarcity of natural resources, from climate change, from the extinction of biodiversity, and from pollution. For this reason, Yayo Herrero calls for institutions to join citizens and social movements to implement new, sustainable, co-responsible models of society that redefine notions of production and work in favour of approaches that are “biophysically feasible and socioeconomically fair.”
This book addresses the way in which the use of fossil fuels as a primary source of energy during the Industrial Revolution, and the development of thermodynamic physics in the mid-nineteenth century, were accompanied by a series of cultural imaginaries that led to a productivist worldview in the relationship between humanity and nature.
The book describes the effect that the imaginaries of fossils and energy have had, over the last two centuries, on various scientific disciplines and cultural practices, while critically challenging their validity in the context of neoliberalism and the ongoing eco-social crisis.
This content is not available in English. You can consult it in Spanish.
The aim of Petroleum is to reflect on the way in which the collision against the limits of economic growth imposed by bio-physics, towards which we have been inexorably heading since the seventies, has found in energy, especially liquid fuels, its first point of impact, although not the only one nor the most important.
In the seminar, four lines of theoretical and political exploration will be brought together: a precise diagnosis of our excesses; a debate on the future of economic growth; the dissolution of political regimes and production of subjectivities typical of post-Fordism; and the mapping of embryonic forms that prefigure eco-social relationships adapted to a world without fossil fuel.
As a public institution, the MACBA has always worked on process optimization and efficient resource management. Since 2017 we have also incorporated environmental sustainability and social responsibility as priorities in the production and development of our work.
The commitment to the environment, one of the pillars of the museum’s social responsibility project, is embodied in the museum’s own system of environmental management, which develops a wide range of measures to reduce the negative impact of our work on the environment, with the aim of being a more sustainable museum, raising public awareness and curbing climate change.