ABOUT MODULE VII
With the title Todas las aguas son del agua / All Waters Belong to Water, Module VII – Summer 2024, will take place from 22 to 28 May, and it is curated by invited mentors Mafe Moscoso & Claudia Delso.

CONCEPTUAL NOTE, OR A FIRST TRIGGER: The starting point of our proposal is that we live in Europe in a situation of cognitive darkness that affects our ways of understanding the relationship between life and death and, consequently, our ways to imagine post-apocalyptic scenarios. Therefore, we believe that incorporating non-Western ontologies and imagination through fiction into artistic research opens up the possibility of a deeper understanding of how we think what we think, as a condition for imagining forms of knowledge beyond ontological realism.It is known that the Mediterranean Sea has been subjected to an unprecedented ecological pressure that has led to its collapse. Part of the responsibility for this collapse lies in a capitalist/colonial vision of the Mediterranean as a spiritless being, a body to be exploited and an object separated from the subject. During modernity, in Europe, “nature” is separated from “culture” and life from death. The hidden face of this process is the coloniality of human and non-human and the separation between life and death. “Nature” becomes an “outside”, that is, an object of domination, exploitation, plunder and domination – just like all those subjects who were outside the logos (De la Cadena, 2018). On the other hand, Despret (2021) explains that, during modernity, a conception of mourning was also imposed in Europe that rests on the idea that when someone dies, they no longer have any form of existence. There is a conception of death and life as everything or nothing. In this way, it can be stated that the collapse of the Mediterranean is a post-apocalyptic capitalist/colonial scenario, because it is an ecosystem that has suffered a radical transformation of the conditions that allow its existence while representing the materialisation of a (Western) cosmology that interprets that the sea has died and that death is the end of life.

METHODOLOGIES:Our desire is to accompany and take care of a collective process focused on developing ways of speculative research (listening, walking, collective reading and cooking, drawing, assembling rituals). The idea is to imagine, together, scenarios in which present, past and future come into play in order to generate alternative narratives to the hegemonic European view that see death as not accompanied by processes of rebirth.