Remedios - Ecologías de la paz

Begin by conceptualizing a world that heals and a world that seeks peace as evolving, relational processes. Despite the cruel optimism this imaginative work demands, at a time when peace—once a beacon of hope alongside freedom, sovereignty, and democracy—now stands fractured, instrumentalized by polarizing ideologies, and weaponized by antidemocratic forces, we cannot afford to turn away. This publication brings together the intertwined visions proposed by Remedios, a world where repair is not only a response to civilizational rupture but a generative force—a way of being that values tradition, relation, and co-survival. At the same time, The Ecologies of Peace reframes peacefulness, moving beyond simplistic binaries of war and peace to expose the fragile and unstable conditions under which peace is demanded, performed or withheld under neoliberalism—shaped by imperial legacies, securitized governance, and the enduring asymmetries of global power. 

Together, these exhibitions form the second and third chapters in a trilogy initiated by Abundant Futures, concluding TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary’s residency at C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, in Córdoba. While each emerged from distinct research trajectories, they converge in their commitment to imagining habitable futures. Across the trilogy, artists, thinkers, and cultural practitioners propose aesthetic, epistemological, and political tools with which to respond to the structural injuries of the present. Whether addressing ecological collapse, social abandonment, or systemic violence, the exhibitions explore the task of world-repair through multidimensional, situated practices.

Remedios engages with repair as a critical response to the enduring violence of history. It calls upon ancestral wisdom, affective knowledge, and radical imagination to mobilize acts of healing that are poetic, political, and grounded. Echoing what anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli calls a “science of dwelling,” the exhibition does not seek to restore a prior idealized state, but rather to inhabit and transform the brokenness of the present. Here, repair is about presence, relation, and the cultivation of meaning in the face of exhaustion, loss, and structural dispossession. 

The Ecologies of Peace, meanwhile, foregrounds peacefulness as a praxis—an embodied and collective quest driven by the longing for justice. It engages with forms of restorative, abolitionist, epistemological, and ecological justice that disrupt hegemonic narratives. By disentangling peace from its conventional framing as the absence of armed conflict, the exhibition recognizes war as present in neocolonial subjugation, the occupation of land and bodies, gendered and racialized violence, the repression of civil protest, carceral systems, and extractivist destruction of the environment. Peace is reimagined as an ecology of transformative practices within these entangled conditions: attentive, reparative, and future-building. Above all, it demands a dedication to social, cultural, and spiritual practices aimed at resolving, reconciling, and healing the wounds, losses, and violence experienced by both postconflict and preconflict societies. 

This dual publication, richly illustrated and deeply layered, combines the artworks of Thyssen-Bornemisza Contemporary Art Collections, commissioned new projects and essays, poetic interventions, and visual documentation from both exhibitions. It traces a broad terrain of inquiry—from the militarized landscapes of contemporary war, to the invisible violence of environmental degradation, to the intimate work of tending to wounds. Drawing from counter-forensics, storytelling, archival activism, and prefigurative politics, the artists presented resist the normalization of violence and offer glimpses into the possibility of co-creating other ways of being. In the face of global, interwoven, and escalating crises, Remedios / The Ecologies of Peace proposes that healing and peace are not static ideals, but practices to be cultivated—ongoing aesthetic and ethical orientations that ask us to sit with contradictions and complexity. Peacefulness, in this view, is a traveling idea: shaped by the many stations, communities, and realities through which it passes. And repair, in all its forms, becomes a proposition for how to live differently—together, in a wounded yet still becoming world.