Notes for a Time Apart

Azahara Alonso holds a degree in Philosophy and is the author of the book of aphorisms Bajas presiones (Ediciones Trea, 2016) and the poetry collection Gestar un tópico (RIL Editores, 2020). She has been coordinator of the writing school Hotel Kafka and a cultural manager in the José Hierro Poetry Centre Foundation. Currently, she conducts literary workshops and publishes specialised critique, and in her most recent work Gozo (Siruela, 2023) she reflects on themes such as work, tourism, the body, rest and leisure.

Juan Alonso holds a degree in IT, with an MA in Sound and Music Computing from Aalborg Universitet (Denmark). In his work he combines technology teaching from a humanist point of view with the creation of works that re-imagine reality through the prism of social critique, technology and humour. He is the author En mi casa lo decimos así (Arranca Editorial, 2022).

Javier Bassas is a philosopher, translator and editor. He holds a PhD in French Philology and Philosophy from the Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV, and from the University of Barcelona, where he currently lectures in the Department of French Studies. His work focuses on the relationship between language, politics and aesthetics, and the translation of contemporary French thought.

Jérémie Bennequin is an artist who develops his multi-disciplinary practice around themes of memory and time. In his plastic work, literature is a raw and privileged material with which to create ambiguous works that sit at the crossroads between the legible and the visual. He gained acclaim with Ommage, developed between 2008 and 2016, his own homage to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. His subsequent work has commonly adopted the format of the artist’s book, for instance Le Hasard n'abolira jamais un coup de dés (Yvon Lambert, 2014) and Les Lesbiennes (Éditions Dilecta, 2016), while his latest book Les Ommes (Manuella Éditions, 2022) received an honourable mention from the jury at the Prix Bob Calle du livres d’artiste in 2023.

Romina Casile is an artist, researcher and teacher. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina, and an MA in Research in Artistic and Visual Practices from the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM), where she is currently studying a PhD in Humanities, Art and Education. She is part of UCLM’s research group ARTEA: Research and Stage Creation.

Elena Castro Córdoba holds a qualification in Philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid and an MA in Gender, Media and Culture from Goldsmiths University in London. Moreover, she is a pre-doctoral FPU contract researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, a cultural researcher and the co-founder of Ontologías Feministas (Feminist Ontologies), a collective of cultural production specialised in virtuality and education programmes from a feminist perspective.

Elena Córdoba is a dancer and choreographer whose work is built from a detailed observation of the body, the core part and subject matter of her work. She vindicates sensoriality as a form of knowledge and the act of dancing as one of its manifestations. Dance, understood as a human manifestation, forms the backbone of the collective projects Bailar ¿es eso lo que queréis? (2012–2017), Déjame entrar (2017) and ¿Bailamos? (2018–2020).

Alberto Cortés is a stage director, playwright and performer. He started his journey in stage in 2009 from, as he describes it, “a bastard and peripheral dramaturgy that has been getting wilder with the passage of time, towards a freedom that doesn’t arrive”. He creates pieces in different formats and disciplines, in an attempt to keep on having hope in the intangible, mystery and the human. He is the author of Los montes son tuyos (Continta Me Tienes, 2022).

elii is an architecture office founded in 2006 in Madrid by Uriel Fogué, Eva Gil and Carlos Palacios. Its professional practice encompasses teaching, research and publishing, and its projects have been part of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016 (awarded the Golden Lion) and 2023, and the exhibition Home Stories 100 Years, 20 Visionary Interiors (2020) in the Vitra Design Museum and at the Fifth Istanbul Design Biennial (202–2021). They have also written different publications, for instance What is Home Without a Mother (HIAP – Matadero Madrid, 2015) and Super Petites Maisons (EPFL, 2022) and are the co-editors of UHF, included in the Archive of Madrid Creators.

Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky are an artist/film-maker duo who live between Berlin and Paris. Their short and medium-length films explore socio-political and historical contexts through the prism of altered states of consciousness (lucid insanity, hallucinations, dreams), exhibiting the multiplicity of the self through a spiral of metamorphosis that interrogates the relationship with the Other. They were awarded the EMAF Award for The Sun Experiment (Ether Echoes) (2013–2014) and Conversation with a Cactus (2017), and the Prix Cinéma du Réel for Back to 2069 (2019) and Don’t Rush (2020). 

Adela Franzé is head professor in the Department of Social Anthropology and Social Psychology at the Complutense University of Madrid. In her strands of research she reflects on time devices, such as the watch, which regulate and mark our day-to-day rhythm.

Raquel Friera is an artist. With a degree in Economics and Fine Art, her projects combine a critical gaze of economy, gender awareness, historical re-readings and themes such as work and the production of subjectivities. In recent years, she has exhibited her work at different institutions such as CentroCentro (Madrid), MUSAC (León), Casal Solleric (Palma), Fundació Tàpies (Barcelona), Virreina (Barcelona) and MUAC (Mexico). With Javier Bassas, she founded the Instituto del Tiempo Suspendido (ITS).

Nilo Gallego is a musician and artist. In his work, always with a playful element, he looks for an interaction with the environment and the quotidian, and designs tools and conducts educational workshops based on listening and sound creation. 

Husos arquitecturas is an office and platform of architecture, gardening and urbanism which explores the possibilities of these practices as tools for social transformation. It was founded in Madrid in 2003 by Colombians Diego Barajas (Bogotá) and Camilo García (Cali). Their work has been on display at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Quito Biennale, Rotterdam Biennale, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, Fundación Tàpies and Ecovisionarios. They are the authors of the books Urbanismos de remesas, viviendas (Re)productivas de la dispersión (Caniche, 2017) and Dispersion: A Study of Global Mobility and the Dynamics of a Fictional Urbanism (Episode, 2003).

Enri La Forêt is a musician and producer. He has been artist-in-residence at the Etopia Centre of Art and Technology, and develops performance and sound research with the poet Helena Mariño, with whom he has performed at La Casa Encendida, the Marpoética Festival, Teatro del Barrio and Cruce Contemporáneo, among others.

Helena Mariño is a poet and translator who has published Los bañistas (RIL Editores, 2022) and Este frío no es nuestro (Entropía Ediciones, 2019) and translated the poetry collection Los hijos de enero (Visor, 2022), by Safia Elhillo. She is part of the research and creation collective Una Fiesta Salvaje.

Roberto Martínez is an artist, dancer and stage director who studied Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country and trained at the Andalusian Dance Centre in Seville and the Centre de Développement Chorégraphique in Toulouse. His interests revolve around the visual arts, botany and performance, and in his practice he explores the association between dance and different artistic expressions such as drawing, painting, sculpture and textile creation. His works most notably include El pintor y la modelo (2007), Me, the son (2014) and Tratado Botánico de Ilustración Coreográfica (2021). As a performer, he has collaborated with Christian Rizzo and Meg Stuart, among others, and as an artistic director, set designer and wardrobe artist he has worked with artists such as the singer-songwriter Rocío Márquez and the producer Bronquio on his record Tercer Cielo (2022).

Julián Mayorga is a musician, producer and artist who lives in Madrid. His music, which emerges from the riskiest wing of the new Latin American tropicalia scene, draws from and explores elements of popular Andean and Antillean music, electronic music, sound experimentation and Colombian folklore. He is part of the Poetas Menores collective and the experimental pop group Flash Amazonas.

Julieth Morales is an artist who defines herself as a “Misak artist by birth and mixed-race by context” and situates her work at the intersection between gender and decoloniality. Her practice, spanning performance, video, photography, painting and drawing, challenges representations of the Indigenous subject and critically reformulates the rituals of her community. She has recently exhibited work in the El Dorado space in Bogotá, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Medellín and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Panama, among others.

Las Niñas is an artist’s collective created in Seville in 2018. Focused on stage and performance arts, transvestiteness and drag, it aims to recover and vindicate Andalusian culture from all artistic and vital areas. Its members are Agu de Barbate, Belial, Josefita Belladona, Berrenga, Carvento, Rosario Molina, Pakita, La Susi, Laca Udilla and Xess.

Christian Pérez Yates is a musician who was born in Florida. He studied jazz in Washington D.C. and moved to Madrid in 2004. His perspective is both open and broad: from the roots of tradition to the most innovative and experimental.

Laura Ramírez Ashbaugh is a choreographer, dancer and DJ who was born in Spain and has Ecuadorian and North American roots. Her research centres on dance, choreography and sound practices, and currently she is immersed in a long-term choreographic research project called serenity rave.

Servando Rocha is a writer and the editor of Editorial La Felguera and the publication Agente Provocador, as well as the BRUTALISTAS podcast he hosts with Carlos Arévalo and David Bizarro. He has published numerous works, most notably La Facción Caníbal. Historia del Vandalismo Ilustrado (Editorial La Felguera, 2012); Nada es verdad, todo está permitido. El día que Kurt Cobain conoció a William Burroughs (Alpha Decay, 2014); Algunas cosas oscuras y peligrosas (Editorial La Felguera, 2019); and Todo el odio que tenía dentro (Editorial La Felguera, 2021).

Paz Rojo is a choreographer, dancer and researcher. Her interests revolve around dance and its potential to create alternative ecologies that include debates on the ontology of dance in late capitalism and the aesthetic of dance after the end of the future. She studied her PhD in Performance Practices, specialising in Choreography at the Stockholm University of the Arts with the research thesis The Decline of Choreography and Its Movement: a Body's (path)Way (2019). As part of this research, she published the book To Dance in the Age of No-Future (Circadian, 2020).

Orkan Telhan is an artist, designer, teacher and researcher who holds a PhD in Design and Computing from MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Architecture Department. He investigates critical questions of cultural, environmental and social responsibility, and his work has been displayed at different editions of the Istanbul Biennial (2013, 2022), the Istanbul Design Biennial (2012, 2016, 2021), Ars Electronica, ISEA, LABoral, Matadero Madrid, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Others to the Front is a collective that started in January 2021 through the desire to create a non-existent and necessary space to make a critique possible, from music and dance, of a system that oppresses and which dictates policies that exclude the queer community. A political commitment towards transformation, intervention and action from the dancefloor, the club, music and mixing. With different formats and different friends, the collective looks to build a queer-rave community from self-management and autonomy to dance to exhaustion.

Fefa Vila (aka Fefus) is a writer, activist and queer feminist who promotes the artivist dyke-queer collective LSD (Madrid, 1993–1998). She has also been a professor of Sociology in the Methodology and Theory Department at the Complutense University of Madrid since 2008 with her areas of research encompassing cultural studies and gender. She has directed projects as a curator and independent artistic director, for instance El porvenir de la revuelta. Memoria y Deseo LGTBI_Q in 2017. She is a follower of Others to the Front on the political floor of dancing-queering the city.