A través de LA ORTIGA COLECTIVA se presenta la siguiente CONVOCATORIA ABIERTA

Abrimos convocatoria a personas, preferiblemente del entorno rural de Cantabria, interesadas en participar en el proyecto Germinating Futures: Collaborative Art and Care for eco-social (re)balance. Se trata de un proyecto de formación enmarcado en el proyecto Erasmus+ promovido por la organización alemana Lernlabor y dirigido por la artista Seila Fernández Arconada. 

La Ortiga Colectiva es una de las organizaciones colaboradoras que se encargará de seleccionar participantes para el proyecto Germinating Futures junto a otras organizaciones de Serbia, Rumanía, Alemania y Polonia.


¿EN QUÉ CONSISTE EL PROYECTO?Este proyecto de formación busca generar un diálogo inclusivo y reflexivo para explorar formas alternativas de ser en colectivo mientras imaginamos posibles escenarios futuros a través de expresiones artísticas.

El objetivo de este espacio creativo es utilizar métodos artísticos colaborativos y prácticas de cuidados para inspirar reflexiones sobre la naturaleza, la crisis ecosocial, la resiliencia, la sostenibilidad y el cambio climático, entre otros. Durante el encuentro, crearemos juntos entre lo experimental y lo experiencial para germinar interacciones con otros tipos de conocimiento, otras narrativas y otras especies.
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El taller será facilitado por Seila Fernández Arconada, experimentada artista multidisciplinar e investigadora con una amplia experiencia internacional en proyectos transdisciplinares a partir de procesos participativos y colaborativos en diferentes países.

¿DÓNDE Y CUÁNDO? El taller tendrá lugar en Lutter Am Barenberge (Alemania) del 22 de febrero de 2023 al 3 de marzo de 2023.

¿QUIÉN PUEDE PARTICIPAR? Seleccionaremos a tres participantes que serán becados para participar en el taller. Para ello es imprescindible estar interesado/a en la temática, así como tener un buen nivel de inglés y disponibilidad en las fechas indicadas. Son bienvenidas personas de todas las edades a partir de 18 años. Para participar no se requiere experiencia previa o tener un currículum vinculado al arte.

¿CÓMO PUEDO PARTICIPAR? Inscribiéndote en el formulario antes del 2 de febrero de 2023.

TODA LA INFORMACIÓN EN EL SIGUIENTE ENLACE: ​https://laortigacolectiva.net/germinating-futures/

STAFF MOBILITY TRAINNING COURSE LED BY SEILA FERNÁNDEZ ARCONADA

The aim of this creative space is to use artistic collaborative methods and practices of care to stimulate reflections on nature, eco-social crisis, resilience, sustainability and climate change, among others.
 
During the activity, we will create together moving between the experimental and the experiencial to germinate interactions with other kinds of knowledge, other narratives and other species. This project seeks to generate an inclusive and thoughtful dialogue to explore alternative forms of being together while envisioning future scenarios with artistic expressions as our vehicle.
 
This workshop will be led by Seila Fernández Arconada, who is an experienced multidisciplinary artist and researcher with an extensive international portfolio in participatory and collaborative transdisciplinary projects.

This 10 days staff mobility will enable participants to apply artistic experiments and artistic methods and collaborative practices as practical tools for engaging with the theme of eco-social (re)balance.

This Erasmus + project is produced by Lernlabor. Participant countries are Spain, Serbia, Romania, Germany and Poland. 

More information about next stages soon! 
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Sharing is Caring, Oct 2022, Poznan (Poland).
 
Sharing is Caring was a workshop run by Seila Fernández Arconada as part of the series of workshops organised with Logos NGO.
 
This intergenerational collective gathering was an invitation to mums and kids to collaborate through art. The aim was to create a safe space where participants would be able to express themselves. We used different art tools to explore emotions taking care of creating a peaceful and inclusive atmosphere. During the time together we began with some storytelling where participants were able to introduce themselves with stories, a net of stories intertwined with each other, having the shared situation of being refugees due to war in Ukraine. We continued experimenting exploring different techniques, like drawing and painting, where adults and kids were able to collaborate with each other. The process of being with each other was the most important.
 
Thank you to Logos staff and volunteers, in particular to the amazing translator Daryna Martynenko and all participants for their incredible attitude and motivation to create together.

Floating Studio, When the River Sounds Like the Amazon River (2019–2022) is an artistic project inspired by the relationship between human beings and water, in the most important freshwater reserve on the planet: the Amazon River. This project suggests a ‘collective artistic expedition’ as artistic method framed within the itinerary of the river’s course, from its origin in Nevado Mismi (Peru) until it reaches the ocean at Belém do Pará (Brazil).
 
Starting with an expedition to the source of the river, Floating Studio continues as a route in cargo and passenger boats ‘cargueros’ as shared spaces suspended in the river’s flow, its times and experiences as well as collective encounters in territories near the river banks: meetings or stays with individuals and groups, like scientific research centres, universities and artistic and community centres. Therefore, these boats become floating studios, places of interaction and creation based on the extended time where the goal is to research about the river whilst being on the river.
 
This search to ‘be more river-like’ reflects on narratives and plural forms of understanding relations between bodies of water, their tensions and their connections. With their fluidity, rivers are bodies that not only carry ancestral stories, memory and knowledge but also contain emotions and epistemic and ontological symbolism . They are a common good. However, these water sources, and even more so the Amazon River, are in constant tension, impacted by a global, colonial and patriarchal system which makes them a victim of their own life potential.
 
Its name: Amazon. In Spanish, the female name of the Greek myth was given as a result of its colonial discovery and represents one of the epistemic impositions on its biodiverse essence in the name of progress and development. Fictional narratives that sustain hegemonic imaginaries, silencing voices and forms located in territories where plural rivers are experienced, which remain today through the broad flow of History.
 
This project addresses the process as a means of eco-social investigation based on exchange, a dialogue of different kinds of knowledge to work with the territory in order to look for transversal questions and emergent relations arising from this diversity of encounters and artistic languages. From the local to the global, they are nurtured from exchanges that go beyond what may be represented in the exhibition space, some of them are tangible, others intangible, meanwhile there are some made visible, others remain invisible in the places where they took place.

The materiality of this project is approached from a variety of techniques; however, sound is a very important element in this project. In this case, the soundwaves travel, inhabit and go across bodies of water, each human body that (co)habitates alongside the creations presented in the exhibition space:
 
Drop by Drop Water is Drained is a sound creation situated in the course of the journey in the Peruvian Amazon. This composition includes documentation and sound exploration based on different collective experiences, including workshops with youth, ‘concerts to be more river-like ’ and other experiences along the way. The artist has used hydrophones and other recording strategies to collect sounds. This work presents a sound experience to ‘be more river-like’, portraying the movement through the corporal based on the experience in the Amazon River.
 
Amazon, Between Reality and Fiction is a reflection situated in the context of return and the final presentation (Spain). Due to the interruption of the route by the pandemic in 2020, the project was redirected while seeking to close a narrative cycle that would be meaningful for the investigation and its ethical principles. Therefore, this sound creation uses a Western musical genre: opera as an approach for reflection. This ‘fictionalised reality’ give voice to some other silence histories bringing important questions to Europe from a reality in real emergency.
 
The choice of the opera La Gioconda, with music by Amilcare Ponchielli and libretto in Italian by Arrigo Boito reached this investigation because it was the opera that opened the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus in Brazil’s Amazonia on 7 January 1897 in the midst of rubber fever. The Teatro Amazonas is and represents a colonial imposition which is tangible in Amazonia even today, hence the importance of using this musical piece.
 
The extract chosen for this work reproduces the opera’s original score. However, the lyrics were rewritten by the artist. These intensely profound lyrics connect the context of their original creation to today, winding down the Amazon River, the guardian of its shores, the witness of what happened then and what happens now, becoming memory while containing ancestral stories of life and death. The writing process has many points of collaboration along the way. It comes from the Amazon River and in its first presentation leads in the Guadalquivir River, accompanied by people from the Amazonia who collectively did a ritual of ‘payment to water’ to continue to weave relations between bodies of water.