Himali Singh Soin
Technologies of Love
December 14, 2022 – January 18, 2023
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Design: Rose Nordin.
Past
Programming
MNTB Madrid

EN / ES

Drawing from the technologies of love that inspire the exhibition, the participating poets, scientists and thinkers will bring us closer to other views and perspectives on interdependence and affections.
 
"FIRE BLANK" 
Beatriz Ortega Botas and Leticia Ybarra 
Wednesday, December 14, 2022, 5:30 pm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Exhibition hall, level -1
Language: Spanish

This talk proposes a critical survey of the relationship between love, theatricality and fires through the work of various contemporary artists and poets. On the basis of Terence McNally’s play The Lisbon Traviata, which deals with the loneliness of two gay men obsessed with a very rare recording of a single performance by Maria Callas in Lisbon, we shall think of the vagaries of love as running parallel to the mechanisms of amplification and emptiness found in the theatre. Taking ardor and fire as universal symbols of love, we will focus on different fires that have affected theaters and forests. The processes of decomposition begun by fire, together with other forms of decay that occur in organic material, will ground our examination of the possibility of expression and reanimation in absence and devastation.

Free admission until full capacity is reached.
 
BIOXENO - NOTHING IS MORE QUEER THAN NATURE -
Ce Quimera and Gaia Leandra
Wednesday, January 18, 2023, 5:30 pm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Exhibition hall, level -1
Language: Spanish
 
Bioxeno is a research and performance project developed by Ce Quimera and Gaia Leandra. It draws from the desire to establish an interspecies entanglement with cyanobacteria communities as well as it acknowledges our human limitations and the dependence in technology to mediate these relationships. We ask ourselves: what artistic formats could show/translate this type of relationship without reproducing anthropocentric or colonial gazes? How can we account for the biodiversity and extractivism present in the ecosystems we inhabit? How do we think of the bio in so much life? What do we think about our lives? Or rather, how do we live? And by doing so, we are interested in questioning the bases on which technologies and tools, both scientific and artistic, are defined; contaminating them with trans*feminist ways of doing very much informed by a hacker ethic and a decolonial gaze. In other words, ways of doing that are committed to an open culture and science, to the generation of hybrid, situated and transversal narratives, taking into account the geopolitical context in which they develop. The research focuses on the cyanobacteria that inhabit the Ebro Delta in Catalonia and the Tigre Delta in Argentina.

Free admission until full capacity is reached.

*This project was supported by the “Barcelona 2020 Awards” Grant from the Ayuntamiento of Barcelona and Hangar.org’s residence in the wetlab.
CURATOR
Soledad Gutiérrez
 
DATES
December 14, 2022, 5:30 pm
January 18, 2023, 5:30 pm
 
LANGUAGE
Spanish
 
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Beatriz Ortega Botas (Oviedo, 1990) is a curator and teacher. Together with Leticia Ybarra, she curates and edits the poetry project Juf. Since 2017, she has co-directed the curatorial platform and independent space Yaby, and she is the co-editor of the online magazine AH. As a curator, she has worked with institutions like Vleeshal (Middelburg, Netherlands), Fundació Miró (Barcelona), ARCO, Sala de Arte Joven de la Comunidad de Madrid, La Casa Encendida (Madrid) and Hangar (Barcelona).

Leticia Ybarra (Madrid, 1991) is a poet who pursues her practice both in writing and in the visual arts and curatorship. She and Beatriz Ortega Botas are the co-founders of the Juf project (2021-the present). She is the author of the book of poems Fantasmita eres pegamento (Caniche Editorial, 2021), and has presented her poems and visual work at Luis Adelantado (Valencia), La Casa Encendida (Madrid) CentroCentro (Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Madrid), Haus Wien (Vienna), Fluent (Santander) and Intersticio (London). She has been in residence at Gasworks (London, 2022) and Tabakalera (Donostia, 2022), and will shortly take up residence at Matadero Madrid (2023). 

Ce Quimera. Artist and researcher born in Argentina and living in Europe since 2000. She studied Social Anthropology in Buenos Aires and at the same time did an internship in performing arts. In 2008 she created, together with Kina Madno, the Quimera Rosa laboratory. From there, she focuses her body work and research on post-identity gender policies and on experimentation on the body, identities and technosciences from a trans*feminist perspective. Her work is currently focused on the development of performances, transdisciplinary projects and interactive installations, scientific research and biohacking experiments. In 2016, the Trans*Plant project began with Quimera Rosa. In 2019, she participated in Here I am the one who left: Sudaka stories in Fortress Europe, a first compilation of stories made by and for migrants from Abya Yala and the Caribbean in Europe. She is a resident artist at the Hangar wetlab, where she carries out projects and consults on research and experimentation in art and science from a transhackfeminist and decolonial perspective.

Gaia Leandra (Naples, 1990) is a scientific art researcher. She has a degree in biology and worked at the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems (IMM) of the Italian National Research Council CNR. Later, she began to collaborate artistically with Paula Pin within the Fotosintetika project. She has participated in the Maker Faire (Rome). She exhibited a sound piece at the Flussi media arts festival in Avellino. She also collaborates with the collective Riot Studio conducting DIY biology workshops within "Hormons", a project of Mary Magicc. Together with the artist Oskar Martin they offer workshops on biology, sound and electronics. She is part of the Italian collective Merda Elettronica and teaches DIY synthesizer workshops with the artist Corazón de Robota. She is the curator of independent music festivals such as FTS, Multiversal, Ràdio Black Out and TPA I 76A Napolitan squatt. She is a resident artist at the Hangar wetlab since 2020 in Barcelona.