Studies
Postnatural Independent Program 2025

The third edition of the Postnatural Independent Program (PIP) will explore the new implications of postnature as a framework for contemporary creation. In the form of an experimental educational platform, we will speculate and question not only contemporary ecologies but also new academic approaches and radical notions of learning together.

2025/01/20 2025/06/08
Postnatural Matter: Synthetic Life, Hybrid Agglomerates, and the Ethics of Contemporary Materiality

This seminar will establish a critical analysis and approach to the separation of nature and culture, one which has its roots in Western philosophy, where the natural world has often been viewed as a passive backdrop to human activity, a mere resource to be exploited. This anthropocentric worldview has led to a hierarchical relationship, one in which matter has been conditioned by the vertical understandings that categories and taxonomies that Western science has imposed on them. Living and non-living, sentient and nonsentient, productive, beautiful, matter has also been captured within its moral, aesthetic and political systems. However, this perspective fails to acknowledge the intricate interconnections and interdependencies that bind all forms of life and matter.

2024/11/06 2024/12/11
Sound Ecologies & Ways of Listening

Earth's symphony extends far beyond the ozone layer, weaving its way into the very fabric of life and the cosmos. From the tiniest microorganisms to the vast expanse of matter, we are constantly transformed, both mentally and physically, by the sonic and cultural vibrations of our urban and natural environments. Yet, these intricate entanglements often go unnoticed by a culture fixated on the visual, failing to recognize listening as a powerful tool for self and collective care. By Giving attention to the sounds around us, we can unlock exciting possibilities for forging new systems of kinship and interconnectedness.

2024/11/05 2024/12/17
Seminar
New Ecologies: Decentralizing the human through contemporary practices

This seminar will examine the glossaries that characterize new ecologies, analyzing inter-species articulations, cultural productions, ecological awareness, and the challenges of artistic, design, research, and curatorial practices in today’s climate crisis.

2024/09/18 2024/10/23
Cyberwitches and Feminist Technologies

Cyberwitches and Feminist Technologies is a seminar series designed to place feminist theory in close dialogue with the complexities of cyber-space, technology, and the many philosophical formations that configure digital worlds. Approaching feminism as plurality and spatiality, we will discuss multiple iterations of feminist efforts on a global scale – and work through ways of engaging feminism in developing artistic practices, inside, outside, and between digital environments.

2024/09/17 2024/10/30
Academic Program
Postnatural Independent Program 2024

The second edition of the Postnatural Independent Program (PIP) will explore the new implications of postnature as a framework for contemporary creation. In the form of an experimental educational platform, we will speculate and question not only contemporary ecologies but also new academic approaches and radical notions of learning together.

2024/01/22 2024/06/16
Seminar
ECO? TRANS? TECHNO? CYBER? QUEER? BLACK? HYDRO? XENO? FEMINISMS

The intricate postnatural tangle that we live in is composed of a multitude of infinitely entangled threads that clash and interact, pointing to the fact that "nature" has progressively become an immense reservoir of resources for globalized human societies; in many cases, without attention to its finiteness and scarcity. The idea of the Earth as an "anonymous mother" (that some self-identified “eco-feminisms” uncritically maintain) is intrinsically linked to the conception of both nature and women as indefinitely exploitable sources of (re)production and wealth and has led us to collide with our planet’s real ecological limits.

2023/10/16 2023/11/20
Seminar
Hydro Futures / Memory Ecologies

Hydro Futures / Memory Ecologies is a program in which to explore the relationship between Afrofuturism and ecological thinking. Afrofuturism is a means to redefine the connections of land and space and to imagine kinships that can become technologies (as a way of connecting people), through water as an archive and time travel.

2022/11/29
Seminar
Xenoxenoxeno

We will play with the political potential of imagining new worlds through academic research and artistic proposals. In the process of creating desirable futures and collaborative healing, we may find unexpected joys that unite us in the contemporary ecological crisis. This experimental seminar requires active participation.

2022/11/17 2022/12/22
Seminar
Mutability & Mutualism Vol. II

At the scale of the individual—the organism—Queerness is mutability: it is the power of transformation; of shapeshifting, fluency, and the freedom to move from form to form; of code-switching, mimicry, flamboyance, delight; of subtlety, grace, and the embrace of fluidity. It plays in contrast to rigidity, permanence, and stasis; to one way of being. It is a metamorphosis and a constant becoming.

2022/10/18 2022/11/22
Seminar
Critical Earth Browsing: Virtual Postnatural Landscapes

We want you to travel and think with us. We invite you to be part of our first virtual research group. Join us in the browsing and investigation of some of the most interesting, complex and intriguing postnatural landscapes through six virtual journeys.

2022/06/22 2022/07/27
Seminar
Mutability & Mutualism

To make sense of the broad constellation of practices that emerge from Queer Ecology, we examine at two scales: the individual and the collective. As we explore, the binary distinction between these scales quickly blurs and blends.

2022/05/17 2022/06/18
Seminar
Encounters at the Edge

We believe that "the edge" can be one experimental space, and "thinking at the edge" one of the practices to enable us to open the possibility of thinking and imagining beyond the categories and boundaries that hold us captive.

2022/02/11 2022/09/15
Seminar
Postnature and Contemporary Creation

The idea of a romanticized nature as a background scenario or neutral framework where human activity takes place is no longer valid and must be replaced by a broader and more complex reflection.

2021/04/20 2021/06/08
Seminar
After the Future

This seminar consisted of theoretical and practical sessions that allowed us, by guiding us through different case studies, to prepare ourselves to resist the present and thus create a new earth for the world to come.

2020/10/20 2020/12/15
Design
Seminar
Acidic Waters

he seminar will have six sessions, which will focus on different aspects from which speculation can lead us to a fluid and proactive practice through this watery medium. Designers, writers, thinkers and creatives will share their practices and thinking during the conversations, open to participants, in order to understand the urgency of incorporating design processes into the contemporary ecological debate.

2022/03/31 2022/05/05
Seminar
Echoes of the South

In the seminar Echoes from the South we will delve into research and practices that analyze and propose responses to the mechanisms, manifestations, representations and consequences that the colonial enterprise has provoked, from its beginnings to the present day, through the subjugation of nature as a commodity for the pursuit of its economic and political interests. Six authors will give voice to pre-existing and coexisting ontologies in different contexts, vindicating other histories that have been annulled through Western models.

2020/10/07 2020/11/11
Research
La condición postnatural

La Condición Postnatural is a speculative glossary of terms and images, of stories and subjects, an unfinished archive of intertwined thoughts that are born as an invitation to take a critical distance from the modern Western conception of the "natural" by proposing new gazes and resonances. To this end, this book tries to articulate and mix affective philosophies, minor anthropologies, critical historical reviews, minimal histories, narratives, and stories on the margins, counterexamples that proliferate a kaleidoscopic vision of ecology in an increasingly deteriorated world. This book puts in crisis the hegemonic narratives around the natural, inviting to imagine and propose other worlds to come from respect, empathy, and coexistence.

Concert
Conversation
Curatorial
Podcast
The Listening Affect

The Listening Affect is an arts and science festival with more than 18 international artists including music composers, experimental sound artists, and acoustic researchers. The sonic ecosystem of Porto is amplified, reverberated, and entangled through concerts, conversations, sound activations, and performances. The festival is an open platform and playful ecosystem for generating collective critical thinking around sound ecologies and exploring new modes of empathy and relationships with the environment.

2023/11/10 2023/11/12
Conversation
Film Series
Residency
Fluid Toxicity

Over four days in July members of Floating University Berlin, the Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid), and researcher Maria Morata as a pollinating agent will gather in Floating University’s rainwater retention basin together with guests and allies to think, exchange, and explore and resonate with each other on the theme of toxicity, in search of new ways of survival on a planet that has truly become intoxicated. Employing various modes of engagement, the group of artists and researchers will work to expand the term, establish a more fluid understanding, and establish a living archive on site. The research process will be shared in open events, including screenings, presentations, and discussions.

2023/07/20 2023/07/23
Essay
Exhibition
From Flesh to Data: Non-Human Intelligence and artificial Stupidity

This text explores the traditional recipe of Polbo á feira using a tentacular approach whereby three different voices reveal their intertwined perspectives on our relationship with the octopus. Beginning with an essay, the concept of intelligence is questioned within its anthropocentric understanding. An artificial intelligence adds short fragments related to the concepts explored throughout the essay. Lastly, a third participant, a young culinary blogger, introduces us to a speculative version of the recipe in which history, slow violence and tradition are foreseen from a close future in which octopuses are not hunted but raised on farms.

2023/05/18 2023/11/26
Exhibition
Soft Matter, Deep Time

Through interventions in specific places in the environment and a series of devices that blur the natural and cultural lines, we invite the experience and estrangement to be part of a complex ecosystem. Soft Matter, Deep Time activates a multi-species framework where biology, geology, and fiction dissolve.

2022/06/30 2022/07/02
Exhibition
A Green Jade Lake

Through themes such as coexistence, botany, territorial politics, or aesthetics associated with the representation of nature, the exhibition is understood as a constellation of investigations, installations, and objects that creates open and transforming universes, bringing us closer to ecology from different perspectives.

2021/10/13 2022/02/14
Exhibition
Mayrit Bienal 2022

Mayrit is the first design Biennial to be hosted in Madrid. Developed from the hydrological origin of the city, and the understanding of water as a political subject, its conceptual climate is thought of as an operational research analysis, stating both the basis and the methodologies for future editions of the event.

2022/06/16 2022/07/06
Essay
The Political Dimension of The Invisible

Text elaborated by the Institute for Postnatural Studies that continues the line of research that arose thanks to the participation in the residency "El Aire Tiene Peso" at MediaLab Prado, developed together with the mediator and researcher Silvia Teixeira.

De-sterilising Design

This research traces the relations between hygiene, microbes and domestic design through the concept of sterilisation, shifting from a one-sided concern with human health to a postnatural perspective in which relationships between species come to the fore. To achieve a post-anthropocentric approach toward contemporary design, we propose looking at contemporary philosophers and scientists such as Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and Lynn Margulis to stop perceiving microorganisms as a threat in design and instead see them as our allies for interdisciplinary practices of co-designing.

Island of Simulation: A Tropical Playground

Island of Simulation: A Tropical Playground, a research project by artist Andrea Carrillo, explores the technological, ethical, and aesthetic implications embedded in the simulation of tropical ecosystems. The narrative is set against the Climatron, a geodesic dome greenhouse built in the 1960s in St. Louis, Missouri that attempted to simulate the climate zones of Hawaii, Java, the Indies, and the Amazon for research and spectacle purposes.

Archive
A garden of queer delights
Conversation
2024
Tanques y Tormentas
Research
2024
Interior Ecologies
Symposium
2023
Residencia nacional
Residency
2023
Making Kin: Animal Series
Publication
2023
Territorio Ectoplasma
Laboratory
2022
Ashthe - Mira Festival
Exhibition
2022
Ser Montaña
Curatorial
2022
Precious Strata
Film Series
2021
Reprogramming Time
Residency
2020
Negative Commons
Conversation
2020
Nature's healing
Conversation
2020
Techno Nature
Conversation
2020
Pimoa Cthulhu
Residency
2020
Formafantasma
Conversation
2020