Sustainable Art Production. Research Residencies of L'Internationale project Museum of the Commons – Climate

Number of residences: 2
Grant: 5.000€ per residence
Dates: december, 2024 – may, 2025
Inside the framework of: Museum of the Commons
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and L'Internationale

Museum of the Commons is a four-year project (2023 to 2026) implemented by the confederation L’Internationale and financed by the European Union through the Creative Europe Programme (Grant Agreement 101100021). The project centres on three main focal points: the climate emergency, decolonial perspectives and situated institutionalism.

As a member of L’Internationale, Museo Reina Sofía calls for, amongst other activities, four research residences, distributed in two calls along the years 2024 and 2025. The first one calls for two residences, whose objective is to foster research through artistic and cultural practices and participation in research networks bound to Museum of the Commons – in particular to its first work line, which focuses on the current planetary climate crisis, the sustainability of institutional, artistic and cultural practices and the urgency to transform our politics, societies, cultures and ways of living towards ecologically sustainable models.

The research lines proposed for this call are:

• Ecological, social and political sustainability of the cultural ecosystem,
• Food sovereignty and situated institutional practices such as community gardens and kitchens,
• Architecture as a lab for institutional and social sustainability,
• Diaspora and migrant communities, in particular as a result of climate change,
• Communal practices and political imagination.

 

Selected Projects

The projects selected in the first call are A hores d’ara. Experiences and Memory of the Defense of the Valencian Huerta through its Archive, by researchers Anaïs Florin, Natalia Castellano, and Alba Herrero; and Fundamental Errors, by filmmaker and architect Mauricio Freyre.

A hores d’ara. Experiences and Memory of the Defense of the Valencian Huerta through its Archive is a digital archive that encompasses the experiences and lessons of individuals and collectives who have defended the territory of L’Horta de València over recent decades. The archive focuses on collecting visual and oral materials produced, and it is realized through a web platform that allows these digitized archives to be shared and made visible. In parallel with this platform, various actions are proposed to activate the archive and foster interactions among the people and agents involved in these struggles. The objective is to contextualize and bring to life the narratives associated with these materials, as well as to collaborate with external individuals and agents from different disciplines to create new narratives and tools that are easily collectively appropriable.

Fundamental Errors engages in a dialogue with the medicinal plant quina, Cinchona officinalis, to explore the radical changes that occur in institutions, policies, and structures when recalling them through forgotten or erased narratives. It also uses representation in fiction as a means to counterbalance the excessive storytelling that has legitimized its dissemination in Europe. Thus, this research proposes fiction and fabulation as a decolonial tool. It challenges the notion of the archive as a single narrative by tracing marginalized and erased voices and experiences, generating a critical genealogy from dissident perspectives. To do this, it employs strategies and methodologies derived from film and installation, as tools for speculation and critical fabulation that explore possible layers of meaning.