Something We Don’t Know We Know, but Know: Mycorrhiza
Experimentation Lab with Forms of Plant Life
Free, until full capacity is reached, with prior registration via email until 6 November, stating personal details (name, surname[s], place and date of birth) and reasons for participating in the workshop
Registration closed
Certain strict plant-based diets stem from a profound concern for communicating with other life forms, and it is from these diets that artist Adriana Reyes’s stage piece Coreografías selváticas (Jungle Choreographies) surfaces. The work in turn gives rise to the laboratory Something We Don’t Know We Know, But Know, led by Reyes in the company of Manuela Pedrón Nicolau, an experimental approach with subtle forms of perception and awareness through work with plants.
Putting into practice a set of collective and personal rituals through different sessions, the laboratory seeks to generate a temporary community which works with natural dyes, made traditionally with autochthonous plants from the Iberian Peninsula. In this proposal, the use of plants is understood not in an instrumental but relational code, seeking to put together a human- and plant-based molecular dialogue from ancestral knowledge brought into the present in a non-linear transmission.
Something We Don’t Know We Know, But Know reaches the Museo Reina Sofía with an eagerness to set the stage for Archives of the Commons V. Fungal Memories, the fifth edition of the biannual series of encounters organised between the Museo and the Southern Conceptualisms Network. On this occasion, it will centre on the fungal kingdom as both medium and discourse for approaching practices about/with/on archives.
Moreover, in dialogue with this project, the activity will set forth a terrain in which plant roots encounter fungi in a symbiotic relationship. Thus, just as plants synthesise carbohydrates and vitamins for fungi, in gratitude for the nutrients, minerals and water they receive, this laboratory is presented as the mycorrhiza — the symbiosis between plant roots and fungi — of Archives of the Commons V. Fungal Memories.
Participants
José Ramón Hernández is an Afro-Cuban multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works between Madrid and Havana. His practice moves between artistic direction, dramaturgy, choreography, live art curatorship, installation, performance, teaching, mediation and cultural management. He is also the founder and artistic director of Osikán — a creative plant nursery. His creative research shines a light on different forms of Afro-descendant rituality, performativity, outsider bodies, matter, spirituality, memory, migration, cartography and desire.
Manuela Pedrón Nicolau works in contemporary art curating and education, more specifically in areas related to artistic research and forms of narration which, from this sphere, explore the social and the political. She is part of the Catenaria collective and, with Jaime González Cela, has curated exhibitions and directed programmes in an array of institutions. She has also held residencies at Spain’s Royal Academy in Rome, Hangar Barcelona, Centro Huarte in Pamplona and DAAD Berlin.
Adriana Reyes Rosón is an anthropologist and creator in the sphere of live arts. She holds an MA in feminist studies, and has specialised in sexualities and diversity and trained with different female creatives between Spain, Brazil and Portugal. Notable are her interests in social sciences, live arts, transfeminist studies, spirituality and forms of plant life, diverse spheres which also entail fields of pleasure and action in her daily practice.
Programme
— In collaboration with José Ramón Hernández
