“The stone that I was has softened; cleared the hole. That mud that he was washed away. We already comply. The way is clean. What will I say now? I will say: Good. Like the seed in its blindness, without knowing the tree of tomorrow.” Eisejuaz, Sara Gallardo

For this edition of Together Apart (Spanish cohort) we worked with the concept of the future: Is there a future? What is a gesture with future? How would a collaboration with the future look like?
It was impossible to put aside the feelings of intimidation or contradiction that wondering about the future brings in a pandemic context where instability precisely puts the continuity of life, even more, in crisis.

We took a conceptual-artistic approach to expand the different conceptions of the future from the Western world, moving between utopian and situated futures considerations, and with the intention, likewise, of thinking about other ways of conceiving time, not in a linear and progressive way but through “a proactive work of the nexus between the past and the future”. (Silvia Cusicanqui)

Together with a cohort of 14 Spanish and Portuguese-speaking artists from the American continent we initiated a process of reflection and generation of works. Those collective and individual gestures will be presented to the external public on July 8.

We worked from the sensation and reality of cancelled futures, artistic actions in social contexts where the only apparent future is precariousness. The artistic action also as an ethical gesture of reparation of the past. Other artists produced work by taking as a starting point the suspicion of the future, questioning what futures seem to be available today and pointing out limitations that exist for non-normative bodies.

Various artists identified the difficulty of thinking the idea of the future outside of a linear conception of time, and thus explored the forms of time registration offered by different technologies such as video, photo, and even mechanisms such as the wheel of a printmaking press. The manipulation of such mechanisms, and the reflection with other materials such as ashes or mirrors, allowed us to explore non-linear times and observe how different technologies allow us to expand present moments, expand what is visible to the human eye.

Processes such as recycling, fictionalization, speculative imagination were used, and research laboratories were also activated with the intention to enquiry what our senses perceive as the future. Collaborations were activated not only between the artists of the cohort but also with nature and with other species. The future as a shared secret towards which we move.

DANIELA RUIZ MORENO [ curator-in-residence ]