All afternoon and evening events are free and open to the public.

Commoning Collective Care is curated by Ronald Kolb, Dorothee Richter, and Daniela Zyman.

Commoning Collective Care is a four-day intense seminar/workshop convened to collectively explore the different implications, practices, and artistic explorations of the ethics of commoning in a fragile and fractured world. Relying on dialogue, conversation, and embodied engagement, it proposes a multi-sensorial pedagogy of learning to live collectively with the exhausting environmental and social threats and the ongoing violence in times of planetary transformations. 

The participatory workshops and presentations foreground how the commons are a site of struggle, a political position that strengthens the capacities of collective doing and transformative thinking against hyper-individualism, extractive neoliberalism, and the destruction of more-than-human life.
 
Commoning Collective Care is organized in conversation with the exhibition Remedios: Where new land might grow at C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba, presenting works from the TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection. In this setting, the gathering will engage with the practices of healing, reparation, and restitution as means to counter the forces of displacement, ruination, and deprivation built into the logic of growth, progress, and accumulation. 

PUBLIC PROGRAM*

FREE ACCESS ACTIVITIES:

Wednesday, June 14, 2023

7 pm
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía
Welcome. Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb

An introduction to the themes and structure of the four-days conference/workshop and the main questions around care and the commons, in relation to the artistic practices presented in Remedios. 

7:30 pm
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía
Forest Mind: Cognitive Territories and Sacred Plants, Ursula Biemann
Public talk (the talk will be held in English with facilitation for Spanish speakers)

In this artist talk, Ursula Biemann discusses her work collaborating with Inga Indigenous leaders and educators, co-creating the project Devenir Universidad, a platform for biocultural education in the Putumayo region of Colombia. Devenir Universidad engages with the living cognitive territory of the Amazonian rainforest and the ways in which Indigenous communities can protect and transmit knowledge generated over millennia. 

8 pm
C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía
Forest Mind (2021), Ursula Biemann
Film screening (30¿) and discussion, 
 
Set in the Amazonian forests of Colombia, Forest Mind unites diverse strands of knowledge on the metaphysics of plants, on plant-human relationships, and on the coding of life with its form of storing information. Drawing on scientific as well as shamanic perspectives of engaging with the world, the video takes an ecocentric worldview in search for the intelligence of nature. With modern science adopting a predominantly mechanistic take on the living world, and Indigenous peoples experiencing an animate natural territory imbued with a spiritual dimension, for a long time these distinct cosmologies were considered vastly incompatible. Forest Mind locates itself at the convergence of scientific and colonial histories in view of decolonizing Indigenous knowledge and bringing it into a common reading with modern science, as for instance plant neurobiology quantum biology, the anthropology of science, ethnobotany, and philosophies engaging with the life of plants.

Thursday, June 15, 2023
9 pm
The Royal Botanical Garden of Córdoba
Dance for Plants, Azahara Ubera Biedma
Workshop and Performance presentation 
Open to public participation
*Bring comfortable clothing for movement exercises

Dance for Plants is both a methodology and a collective movement research dedicated to the creation, articulation, and propagation of a situated practice. It is an invitation to give a gift to a plant and aspires to facilitate a guided exploration to slowly dive into research, exploring questions such as: What can be the different ways of addressing a dance? How to create intimacy with plants? What kind of attunement would allow the plants to lure us into dancing for them? 

Friday, June 16, 2023
8 pm
Centro de Recepción de Visitantes
Hydrocommons: Re-imaging and empowering watery worlds
Led by Mekhala Dave
With: Teresa Vicente Giménez, Professor of Philosophy of Law; Rosela Del Bosque, Postgraduate Student MAS Curating.
In English 
 
The water crisis is the legacy of our environmental violence and extractivist tendencies. Pollution, choking, and droughts¿the watery worlds that we are historically and culturally entangled with have been showing tidal signs of deep concern. Inspired by the case of Spain's Mar Menor, the biggest saltwater lagoon in the EU, that recently attained a legal personhood, how do we seek to feel a water crisis at a planetary level that inscribes and connects us all? A growing global movement around the legal concepts of the "rights of nature" and "ecocide" for water is expanding, but is also limited in conceptual interpretations and strategies of implementation. 

9:30 pm
Torre de la Calahorra
Al Qabali 
Public performance Tarek Atoui, Susie Ibarra, Nancy Mounir, and Ziúr, 

Al Qabali, literally meaning "the primitive" or "tribal", is a new research and performance project by Tarek Atoui. Over the course of three years, Atoui is collecting and experimenting with sounds and musical forms most closely associated with Tarab¿a trance-inducing Arabic musical tradition¿drawing on a collection of musical recordings from tribes and villages from across the Atlas to the Persian Gulf that follow the path of the Tuareg. The ancient rural tribal music traditions of Qabali are raw and earthy, and based on choral improvisation and complex cross-rhythmic patterns while yielding distinctive microtonal melodies. In his exploration of this material, Atoui overlays recordings of souks and stores in Ouarzazate, Essaouira, and Marrakesh, weddings in Bahrain, and music salons and diwan majlis in Kuwait, Sharjah, and Oman with contemporary electronic amplification and improvisation or analogue material generated by his self-developed computer software and large collection of instruments. He works together with musicians and artisans to revive the layered context of craft production and economy, ranging from instrument building to pottery, leather work, and weaving, making imaginative use of the scarce materials found in the arid landscapes of the Atlas. He explores tribal music at the root of urban musical forms such as Andalusi, gitano music, and flamenco, deeply concerned with un-bordering the one-way route through contemporary Euro-African border spaces.

As part of his research, Atoui will host a week-long research retreat in Córdoba with percussionist Susie Ibarra (New York) and musicians Nancy Mounir (Cairo) and Ziúr (Berlin) to create new compositions departing from the Al Qabali compilation. The participants will host a series of sessions with musicians from Andalusia and meet researchers from various disciplines in search of Al Qabali. 

Saturday, June 17, 2023
Molino de Martos
7:30 pm
Al Qabali, Tarek Atoui, 
Workshop 
 
In this workshop-demonstration, Tarek Atoui introduces his long-term research project Al Qabali. Since 2022, Atoui has been collecting and experimenting with sounds and musical forms most closely associated with Tarab¿a trance-inducing Arabic musical tradition¿drawing on a collection of musical recordings from tribes and villages from across the Atlas to the Persian Gulf that follow the path of the Tuareg. Atoui's interest in these traditions grew with his research project Re-visiting Tarab on Arabic music of the Renaissance and Classical periods. At that time, he worked closely with the collections of the AMAR Foundation in Lebanon, which holds the world's largest collection of recordings of Arabic music from the early twentieth century. Through AMAR, Atoui observed the importance of rural traditions and their influence on religious, urban, and classical repertoires and how they were preserved while most coastal and urban practices evolved, dissolved, or disappeared with the political, technological, and social changes that swept across the Arab world since the 1940s. Atoui will contextualize and present Al Qabali for the first time in public, weaving sounds with narratives and demonstrations with research. 

9 pm
Molino de Martos
Moving the World of Words with Gestures, Sonia Fernández Pan
Talk (will be held in Spanish)

There are ways of being together that happen mainly through our bodies, by moving between gestures, feelings, and borrowed ideas. Perhaps they are not forms, but events. However, their transience does not make them less important. They also suggest directions for a common life, among them that of relating beyond language and coming into contact with the uneasiness of difference.

Driven by intimacy and the desire to think with others, Sonia Fernandez Pan's research on dancing cultures¿as a study and as an embodied knowledge is part of a multi-year project that entails writing, encounters, conversations, and dance in the anonymity of the dance floor, which led her to think with the many dancefloor communities that gather around the sharing, repetition, invention, and propagation of gestures, rhythms, and sensitivities.

*The program is subject to change