Geopoetics Imaginaries for a Planet in Crisis
Through poetry, music, and performance, Geopoetics brings together the voices of artists and writers who intimately and experientially utilise the first person to reflect on a present marked by the irreversible transformations of planet Earth.
Do the sighting of a Pacific grey whale off the coast of Santa Ponsa (Mallorca), the mysterious news of 3,500 sea lions infected with avian flu in Perú, and the trampling of dozens of owls on an interstate highway in Idaho have anything in common? Climate change imposes a global scale on the collective imagination and links our existence to the fate of the planet through a complex network of interdependencies.
Geopoetics proposes a dialogue with Nancy Holt’s exhibition at MACBA, a conceptual artist and pioneer of Land art, whose work coincides with the publication in 1968 of the first photograph of Earth seen from space. An image that would forever change our view of the world by depicting the idea of a fragile planet with limited resources. If in her day, Holt was a trailblazer in pointing out those devices that frame our perception, the question is who are the artists and writers of the present whose work shows us to look at the world from a more responsible, careful, and situated position.
Drawing from diverse traditions like autofiction, epistolary, and travelogue, the writers brought together for this program give shape to new imaginaries of the ecosocial crisis. These voices invite us to confront the aesthetic, political, and
existential implications of the current climate emergency while echoing its intimate impact on our lives.
The programme consists of poetry, music, and performance sessions with Ingela Ihrman, Daisy Lafarge, Imani Mason Jordan, Luz Pichel, Himali Singh Soin, and Ona Bros, whose workshops with the Communities of Ice will imagine children’s stories and fertilisation metaphors beyond the normative idea of nature. The cycle includes screenings of short films from the collective KADIST, which tracks the emergence of new mythologies across the Earth.
Curated by Sabel Gavaldon, Head of Programmes at MACBA, and Alicia Escobio, Programmes Coordinator for the museum.
Programme
Ona Bros: BetaBlastoCuir
Hacer Historia(s) V is a series of contemporary dance performances focusing on archives, memory, history and the body. Organised together with La Poderosa, this two-week programme, which addresses the cyclical nature of life, includes dance, performance, meetings, laboratories and other artistic contexts.
In this fifth edition of the series Hacer Historia(s), MACBA extends a warm welcome to Ona Bros and her project BetaBlastoCuir. This performative conference will be an experiment: the open code for a possible stage piece. A heterogenous framework of voices and presences that explore the techno-cultural imaginaries and discourses of genetic science.
Communities of Ice with Ona Bros
Communities of Ice is a meeting space designed for people involved in the process of raising children and/or with children whose fertilisation involved the use of "donated" genetic material (egg, sperm or embryo).
Over the course of the three day workshop we will examine the rhetoric, both scientific and popular, surrounding genetics and how it influences our understanding of life, bonds and relational ecosystems. Our aim is to promote an environment where new discourses may emerge, one that goes beyond essentialist and transactional, capitalist discourses. A space to test out nomenclatures and ways of naming experience that invoke affirmative power without obscuring responsibilities. Invoking collective narratives from embodied knowledge and embracing a mutual recognition of children’s vocal patterns.
Imani Mason Jordan & Felix Taylor: Earthly Accomplice
Earthly Accomplice is an experimental performance by Imani Mason Jordan in collaboration with Felix Taylor. Playing with techniques of repetition in language and sound (the oral and the aural) Earthly Accomplice weaves together narratives about blackness, materiality and ecological disaster in the afterlives of transatlantic enslavement.
Ingela Ihrman, Daisy Lafarge, and Luz Pichel: Resonances in Nancy Holt
In dialogue with the work of the conceptual artist and pioneer of Land art Nancy Holt, the poets and artists invited to this session of Geopoetics will explore the narrative possibilities of the Nancy Holt / Inside Outside exhibition as a sounding board to revisit the artist’s work from the present day.
Spells Upon The Land
Featuring seven short videos made by artists from across the Americas, Spells Upon The Land highlights humanity’s consequential relationship to the land. Each of the artworks in this program conjures the social and political imaginaries of the earth, an awareness of animal intelligence, and the poetics of protest and play.
Artists: Elena Damiani, Colectivo los Ingravidos, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Ana Vaz, Paul Kos, Minia Biabiany and Camilo Echeverri.
Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser: Body of Light
Body of Light is an epistolary reading by Himali Singh Soin accompanied by drummer David Soin Tappeser on the gongs, with healing dismantlements by Hadja Sidibeh. The performance installation will form a landscape of speculations and reflections about nuclear culture, porosity, leakages, toxicity and love, spiritual-scientific entanglements, environmental catastrophe and geopolitical faultlines.
If you have any question, feel free to contact us on 93 481 33 68 or by email at macba [at] macba [dot] cat
