Institute for
Postnatural Studies

The idea of a romanticized nature as a background scenario or neutral framework where human activity takes place is no longer valid and must be replaced by a broader and more complex reflection. In this online course, Nature will be explored as one of the main cultural constructions of modernity, focusing on contemporary perspectives that address environmental and ecological issues, and help foster interspecies relationships between humans, non-humans, matters, and technologies. Through a series of online sessions and lectures, we will explore the entanglements between art, philosophy, and the environment proposing successive decentralizations towards a non-human-centered perspective.

Session I New Ecologies: Dissolving the Nature/Culture Binomial This introductory session proposes an approach to contemporary ecologies that defy rigid categorizations, whilst exploring matters and stories that blur the boundaries between the cultural, the natural, and the artificial.

Session II Genealogies of the Postnatural This session will revolve around the concept of Postnature, understanding it as a political subject, that will function as a debate platform from which to investigate, communicate, and discuss new approaches to artistic practice.  Through political ecology, post-natural aesthetics, and the creation of new ethics we can find the definitive dissolution of the nature-culture binomial. Session III Against The Anthropocene We will raise a critique of the contemporary understanding of the Anthropocene, and deploy other terminologies and approaches, both theoretical and material, in order to think about desirable worlds of the future.

Session IV Decolonizing Time Decolonizing time is an invitation to inhabit multiple temporalities, enfolded and entangled times that are ontologically complex and which involve the cultivation of the capacity to be still, to listen, and not to be self-certain. This session invites us to understand that a post or decolonial time should be defined as a critique of extractivist and hyperproductive inertias, and all its massive material and political complexities.

Session V Gardens of Delights Via a digital visit to botanical gardens, we will explore how we have built the idea of nature into a specific space of the urban landscape that is layered with political, economic, and aesthetical complexities. From queer plants to the rare ginkgo tree, we will investigate how we exploit plants for medical purposes, how we shape nature for aesthetic pleasure, and how botanical gardens have inspired artists in their practices. Session VI Ecologies for The Future Analyzing theories from ecofeminism to new queer and coexistence approaches, this session proposes a political and post-anthropocentric revision of nature as a space for debate, as a parliament from which to be interested in the non-human, with entities, bodies, and things that are not like us, but that also construct us and constitute us.

Gabriel Alonso (Madrid, 1986) is a visual artist and researcher formed between the ETSAM (Madrid), the Technische Universität (Berlin), and Columbia University in New York at the MS-CCCP, where he graduated with honors with his research thesis An Archaeology of Containment. In his works, through various formats such as installation, sculpture, photography, or video, he investigates contemporary relationships between fiction and materiality, in order to blur binomials between the natural and the artificial, the human and the non-human, understanding nature as a complex cultural construct. Represented by Pradiauto Gallery (Madrid), his work has been exhibited in different galleries and international exhibitions, such as Nordés Galería (Santiago de Compostela), CaixaForum (Barcelona), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), CA2M (Madrid), Centro-Centro (Madrid), Fundación La Caixa (Barcelona), Matadero (Madrid), John Doe Gallery (New York), IIAF (New York), Poor Media Leuven (Belgium), Mila Gallery (Berlin) among others. He has been an assistant professor at Barnard College of the University of Columbia (NYC) and at the Master of Advanced Architecture of the ETSAM and has given many lectures, talks, and workshops in different international institutions, museums, and universities. In 2020, he received the Creation Grant from the Madrid City Council, and in 2016 he received the FAD award for his publication Desierto and was awarded one of the prestigious grants from the Graham Foundation for the Fine Arts. In 2020, he founded the Institute for Postnatural Studies. In parallel to his academic experimentation, research, and curatorial practice, he developed an editorial practice through the platform Cthulhu Books.

Yuri Tuma is a multidisciplinary Brazilian artist who focuses on the investigation of contemporary narratives related to diverse ecologies through sound art, installation, and performance as a way to address and reevaluate the human/animal binomial imposed by science and Western thinking. More actively, in addition to academic programming and development, he coordinates the Institute's publishing project, Cthulhu Books, to become a showcase for the political potential of imagining new worlds and possible futures for the planet through academic and artistic research. Starting in 2021, in addition to participating in residencies and coordinating workshops around interspecies thinking, Tuma works with educational and mediation programs through sound art and performance at Spanish institutions such as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Matadero, La Casa Encendida, INLAND, among others.