Organismo | Public program - Spring

Independent study program, Year One

February 26 – June 20, 2025

MNTB Madrid

Jumana Manna, Foragers, 2022, still.

Current

TBA21–Academy

Public Program

The Spring public program of Year One of Organismo | Art in Applied Critical Ecologies offers a series of open sessions as part of its independent study program. These sessions will take place between February and June 2025, on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at 6:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, as well as in other locations throughout the city of Madrid.

Through these in-person gatherings, we aim to experiment with different formats of meetings and knowledge sharing, placing particular emphasis on experiential learning. They are open to the general public as a way to create spaces of connection between Organismo and an expanded audience.

 

ACTIVITIES

February 26, 2025, 6:30 PM
Auditorium. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bonemisza
PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION
Unraveling the process of Building for Quantium, with Marina Otero Verzier, Manuel Correa and Aran García-Lekue
Participants: Marina Otero Verzier, Manuel Correa and Aran García-Lekue
Age recommendation: All audiences.
Language: Spanish.

In this new session of the public program Organismo Year One, Marina Otero, architect and researcher, and Manuel Correa, filmmaker and researcher, will present the research and creative process behind the film that accompanies the video installation Building for Quantum. This work will be featured in the upcoming 19th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale— “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective” —and will premiere during the event's inauguration in May this year.

The film Building for Quantum follows the construction of the building that will host one of the few quantum computers in the world, the first in Spain. As quantum computing redefines the boundaries of knowledge, this film, still in process, examines the imaginaries and aspirations surrounding the arrival of this technology at the Quantum Basque Center in Donostia-San Sebastián. The film navigates the intersection of the physical and the philosophical within quantum architecture—juxtaposing the tangible, ordinary materials of brick and mortar with the meticulous precision required to sustain near-perfect vacuum chambers at temperatures colder than deep space.

The event will feature Aran García-Lekue, physicist and PhD in materials science and technology who specializes in the development and application of computational tools for the simulation of quantum electronic properties at the nanoscale. With her, we will explore the principles of these theories, which have been counterintuitive for humans so far, and the horizons that may emerge from their instrumentalization. The three will engage in a conversation to unravel the potentials of this science and the paradigm shift it represents compared to classical mechanics, according to which we have traditionally organized our ways of living.

This activity is part of the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.

Free admission until full capacity is reached, after downloading the free ticket here. A quota of 20% of the capacity is reserved for access without a ticket on the day of the event.


April 1, 2025, 6:30 PM
Invernadero del Palacio de Cristal de Arganzuela (Paseo de la Chopera, 10, Madrid). Thanks to the Madrid City Council.
CONFERENCE AND PRESENTATION
Earth Works (Toward a reparation architecture), with Paulo Tavares
Participants: Paulo Tavares and Maite Borjabad
Age recommendation: All audiences.
Language: English (with simultaneous translation into Spanish).
Collaborators: Caja Negra Editora

Drawing from past and recent visual, spatial, and curatorial projects that deal with the Earth, in this activity of the public program of Organismo Year One, Brazilian architect, author, and educator Paulo Tavares, who recently published La naturaleza política de la selva (The Political Nature of the Forest, Caja Negra, 2024), will explore the tentative concept of “reparation architecture.” 

According to Tavares, “Reparation Architecture is not a theme; it is a form of engagement. It is not a qualifier as in ‘social architecture,’ but a position in relation to architecture as knowledge and practice. As such, it can take many forms across the trans-disciplinary fields where architectural thought and action manifest, from design to curating, from planning to publishing, from advocacy to building. Imagining a future in which healing and rebounding society means recovering land and restoring the climate, we may prompt ideas for the repair of human and nonhuman communities through the means and medias of architecture, drawing new material and imaginary bounds between us and Earth. If our most urgent political task today is re-building the world differently, reparations constitute a central question to architecture practice across its trans-scalar, trans-disciplinary, and trans-media manifestations.”

 

Tavares' presentation will be followed by a conversation with the architect, curator and researcher Maite Borjabad. Earth Works (Toward a Reparation Architecture) is an activity of Organismo. Year One in collaboration with Caja Negra Editora.

Free admission until full capacity is reached, after downloading the free ticket here. A quota of 20% of the capacity is reserved for access without a ticket on the day of the event.

 

 

May 27, 2025, 6:30 PM
Auditorium, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza
SCREENING AND CONVERSATION
Screening: Foragers by Jumana Manna, followed by a conversation with Sonia Fernández Pan and Skye Arundhati Thomas
Participants: Jumana Manna (online), Sonia Fernández Pan, and Skye Arundhati Thomas
Age recommendation: All audiences.
Language: Film in the original version with Spanish subtitles. Conversation in English with simultaneous translation into Spanish.

This activity of the public program of Organismo | Art in Applied Critical Ecologies will feature a screening of Foragers, a film by Palestinian artist Jumana Manna. After the screening, Manna will participate online in a conversation with Spanish writer and curator Sonia Fernández Pan and Indian author and editor Skye Arundhati Thomas, who also play active roles in this edition of the Organismo study program, in the artistic accompaniment of the Museum Entanglement case study, and as head of the Writing History research line, respectively.

 

Foragers (2022, 65 mins) depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and  za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further dispossesses them of their land while the occupation's state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. 

 

Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely, who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.
 

Free admission until full capacity is reached, after downloading the free ticket here. A quota of 20% of the capacity is reserved for access without a ticket on the day of the event.

 

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer and editor from Pune, India. They are currently a curator-in-residence at the Beaux-Arts des Paris. Their first book, Remember the Details, on viral images, courtrooms, and a brief history of a protest movement, is out with Floating Opera Press. Their second, Pleasure Gardens, co-written with Izabella Scott, on constitutional law, military occupation, and communications blackouts, was published in 2024 with Mack Books, as was their third, on the painter Lalitha Lajmi, with Sternberg Press.

 

Maite Borjabad López-Pastor︎ is an architect, curator and researcher currently based in Chicago and whose work revolves around diverse forms of critical spatial practices, operating across the disciplines of architecture, art and performance. Since 2017 she has been Architecture and Design Curator at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her last show If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust (2022) is the first exhibition by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme in a major US museum. The four interconnected works on view in this site-specific exhibition present broken narratives and fragmented compositions that critically foreground the sociopolitical reality of violence in Palestine—all too often underreported in media and unrecorded in historical accounts. Previous projects include the exhibition and book, Design for Different Futures co-curated along with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center (2019-2021) and the exhibition My Building, Your Design: Seven Portraits by David Hartt (2018) organized around a new commissioned photographic series of iconic contemporary buildings across the Americas, exploring non-normative narratives of the built environment we inhabit.

 

Manuel Correa is a Colombian artist and filmmaker based in Madrid. His work explores memory and post-conflict reconstruction in contemporary societies. Manuel's work is exemplified by the difficult task of negotiating highly complex and fragile social relations formed in the aftermath of trauma. He has used documentary filmmaking as a tool to bring people together by creating meeting points for war victims, survivors, activists, and scientists. Correa has an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths College, University of London. He was part of the Forensic Architecture project. His works have been presented in venues such as the Spanish Pavillion at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Kunsthaus Graz, Rotterdam International Film Festival, Museo Tamayo in Mexico, Presentation House Gallery in Canada, MediaLab Matadero, The Medellín Museum of Modern Art, The 8th Norwegian Sculpture Biennial, Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Chile, e-flux Architecture, DOK Leipzig international documentary film festival, amongst other spaces.

 

Sonia Fernández Pan is a writer, (in)dependent curator, podcast host, threshold thinker and conversation partner. Polyrhythms, conversations, and a sense of disorientation are all part of her way of doing things with others. Host of the podcast series The Tale and The Tongue for the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW, she works with the living and spontaneous dimension of thinking. Attracted by unstable positions and forms, her projects are interconnected by gestures of uneven intensities. She is the author of Edit with Caniche Editorial, a book of remixes written from the introspection of the dance floor and a rhythmic relationship with language. She moves through different places and cultural scenes without belonging exclusively to any of them.

Aran Garcia-Lekue is an Ikerbasque Researcher at the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC). She holds a degree in Physical Sciences (Extraordinary Prize, 1998) and a PhD in Material Science and Engineering (European PhD, 2003) from the University of the Basque Country. She conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Liverpool (UK) and at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley (USA). In 2007, she joined the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) through the Fellows Gipuzkoa program and, in 2012, became an Ikerbasque Researcher. Since 2015, she has been teaching the Master's in Nanoscience at the University of the Basque Country. She is involved in several international collaborations and has been a Mercator Fellow at the University of Kiel in Germany, as well as a visiting researcher at the LBNL in Berkeley.

 

Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated, focusing on the body, land and materiality in relation to colonial inheritances and histories of place. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher whose work sits at the intersection of critical spatial practices, ecology, technology, and activism. In 2022, she received the Harvard GSD's Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. Her winning proposal, 'Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse,' examines new architecture paradigms for storing data and how reimagining digital infrastructures could meet the unprecedented demands facing the world today. She is a Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard GSD and Dean's Visiting Assistant Professor at GSAPP, Columbia University, New York, where she leads the 'Data Mourning' clinic, an educational initiative focused on the intersection between digital infrastructures and climate catastrophe.

Paulo Tavares is an architect, author, and educator. His practice dwells at the frontiers between architecture, visual cultures and advocacy. Operating through multiple media, Tavares’s projects have been featured in various exhibitions and publications worldwide, including the Oslo Architecture Triennial, the Istanbul Design Biennale, the São Paulo Art Biennial, and the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023. He is the author of books questioning the colonial legacies of modernity, including Des-Habitat (2019), Lucio Costa era racista? (2022), and Derechos No-Humanos (2022). The curatorial project Terra, in collaboration with Gabriela de Matos, was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation at La Biennale di Venecia 2023, and Tavares was selected by ArchDaily as one of the Best New Practices of 2023. He was co-curator of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial and is part of the advisory curatorial board of Sharjah Biennial 2023. Tavares teaches at the University of Brasília and leads the spatial advocacy agency autônoma.

 

ABOUT THE COLLABORATORS

Founded in 2005 by Diego Esteras and Ezequiel Fanego in Argentina, Caja Negra is an independent publishing house with offices in Buenos Aires and Madrid that distributes its books throughout Latin America and Spain. Their catalog proposes a transversal journey through the fields of essays, literature, film, visual arts and music and promotes the coexistence of heterogeneous materials and the multiplication of surreptitious connections between them. Caja Negra is a thinking entity, a tentacular organism whose mission is to map the history of radical episodes of aesthetic, political and vital experimentation. From those experiences, it makes books, and from those books, a proliferation of alliances, cultural activations, discussions and critical resources aimed at deprogramming the machinery of the present and multiplying uncertain futures.

International Year of Quantum Science and Technology. Recognizing the importance of quantum science and the need for wider awareness of its past and future impact, dozens of national scientific societies gathered together to support marking 100 years of quantum mechanics with a U.N.-declared international year. On June 7, 2024, the United Nations proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology (IYQ). According to the proclamation, this year-long, worldwide initiative will “be observed through activities at all levels aimed at increasing public awareness of the importance of quantum science and applications.” Anyone, anywhere, can participate in IYQ by helping others to learn more about quantum on this centennial occasion, participating in or organizing an IYQ event, or simply taking the time to learn more about quantum science and technology.



 

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