10/22/2024
This summer has been a very productive year for BAJO EL OLIVO on many levels. There have been some really wonderful resident artists participating in our summer into fall programming. Nina Rizzo, an American painter and University Professor visiting from Chicago, Illinois created a new series of painting abstractions of vegetal matter that surrounds our natural environment.
Kristina Borg, is a freelance visual and socially engaged artist, a spacemaker and an art educator/lecturer. Kristina and I visited LAB Guanoguacil which is located remotely in the mountains surrounding the national park of Sierra Bermeja, about an hour away from the village of Ronda in the North. The International Rural Innovation Laboratory, also known as "LAB", is a collaborative open model and is dedicated to the transformation and development of rural areas and fostering new practices of innovation. We had a wonderful conversation over a bowl of fresh vegetable soup with Joe Lockwood, Co-Director of Innovation and the residents in-research from other European universities.
image below: Kristina Borg leaving Malaga on her return home in a "slow" travel approach by train, bus and ferry back to Malta. This photo was taken in the company of Derek Brueckner from Winnipeg, Canada who is a Professor at the University of Manitoba and multi-media artist. He is staying with us until mid-November.
Derek will be collaborating with local Spanish multi-media artists during the month of October. Professor from the University of Malaga, Performance artist and Butoh dancer, Laura Maillo & Painter, Sculptor, Sound & Multimedia artist, Alejandro Romero form the collective, Gu!atari and will collaborate on the grounds of BAJOE EL OLIVO with Derek. Contemporary Cuban dancer, Niche Ramirez will also participate in the beginning of a new work with Derek to end his residency stay with us..
Please view his edited collaborative mapping practices video that he captured below with Kristina, Rudy and I and posted below.
image from the left: Derek Brueckner, Juliana España Keller and October Resident, Sylvia Nagy. Sylvia is a registered Social Worker & Psychotherapist from London, Ontario, Canada. Here we are in front of La Mestiza, Cordoba, Andalucia.
13/06/2023
BAJO EL OLIVO is pleased to announce a cultural partnership with HYPE A podcast founded by former BAJO EL OLIVO resident, Cristallina Fischetti who is a visual artist and mystic. This podcast can be found on Instagram, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and through the website link.
BE sure to check in every Thursday and listen to new guests, former & upcoming residents of BAJO EL OLIVO who are interviewed by Cristallina and are featured in her programming this year.
Follow HYPE A on Instagram @hypavoices.
9/06/2023
As our lands and waters face unprecedented change and as our cultural landscapes undergo seismic shifts into the digital age using the tools of technology; what creative possibilities might emerge when like-minded and like-hearted individuals come together to imagine and implement radical new beginnings? And how can the philosophy and regenerative practices of alternative ecologies guide us in getting there?
The role of creatives and storytellers has never carried more
weight than it does now. The Greenhouse Regenerative Lab,
situated in the pueblo of Guaro is led by Alejandro Orioli, Founder and
Co-ordinator of a growing
movement of local farmers, works and growers and creators who
are calling for change
and challenging us to abandon destructive stories of progress that are rooted
in oppression, colonisation, separation, and unlimited economic growth.
The understanding of what it is to make and 'do art' is changing rapidly and
our addiction to object-oriented materiality is being reimagined and
reinterpreted.
On behalf of the MYCO II Festival
directed by Emilio Mula, this year's programming in October 2023 consists of a two-part
creative workshop and performative presentations curated by Juliana that offers local
artists and practitioners
the opportunity to establish skills in building and co-creating spaces of
renewal, reciprocity, and reverence through social engagement, contemporary
art theory, philosophy, in a hands-on approach through the critical humanities.
Artists will learn new knowledge through the dialogical and the formation of what is transdisciplinary practice that can include traditional mediums such as drawing to seed the relation to 'gut metabolism' to the social sciences, biology and the environmental humanities. The understanding of how performativity is now activated by field sound walks through the practice of 'deep listening' and to the body language of eco-somatic movement, which is a conduit to understanding the 'more-than human', 'intersectionality', the notion of queering space and making space for all humans to non-human species and especially those humans with disabilities. The understanding of the more-than-human will open up stories between the earth and our bodies, historicides weaving sensory data, feelings, and a desire to merge into a composite spatial, temporal, and social world that is entangled with micro-communities and the natural world.
The selected artists will be guided to create an artistic concept that will be put to work through the materiality of a sculptural installation work, audio-visual performance artwork, live sound work, open-ended field work or textual research or a social engagement project that will be presented at the Arboretum Foundation in Marbella in October 2023 as part of the Mercado con Valores.
Participants will have the opportunity to share their collective understanding of regenerative change by planting seeds of symbiotic reworlding by those working in the field of spiritual ecologies, one that is rooted in mental health and well-being for all.
The meaning of a Deep Ecology
The Greenhouse Regenerative Lab is now looking into soil regeneration as a focused view of microbial life. Increasingly, microbes are seen as indispensable symbionts to all other forms of life, including humans. They provide essential nutrients and break down organic material. Every ecosystem on the planet is dependent on the wellbeing of microorganisms.
The importance of microbial and plant life not only unsettles the status quo within the life sciences. In the humanities and social sciences, the knowledge that humans are dependent on their symbioses with invisible critters, fungi, plant life, gut metabolism and the relation to food security has captured the attention of philosophers, artists, musicians and ethnographers. Many proclaim nothing less than a new worldview in the light of these findings—a worldview that emphasises cooperation and indeed commune-like ways of living by considering symbiosis as a guiding principle.
Symbiotic knowledge has always been both a biological and a political idea for both scholars and artist practitioners and is situated in the context of the social movements of the 1960s and the increasing neoliberalization of society and the university in the following decades. Thus, this project contributes to the historization of transdisciplinary knowledge formations. Thus 'getting one's hands dirty' is to understand the connection to the land and human-non-human labour and to a cultural history of knowledge that takes into account cultural, sociopolitical aspects of research in biology as well as in the critical humanities.
A post-human approach to nature allows us to use language and methodologies to examine their reparative potential based on the efficacy of situated relationships. A transdisciplinary approach makes possible an entanglement of interdependent relationships between human and non-human agents.
As artists, staying with the trouble, a phrase coined by Donna Haraway, is propositionally not only casting our lot with other animals and plants and ecologies but moving us to reflect on the stakes of what we are doing, what is being created as artist-practitioners as to when to stop and observe—even with the best intentions—to influence the conditions of earthly coexistence, well-being for others and vital self-care—a provisional condition for the future of this planet. Why not strive to live with gestures of radical entanglements, multivalent creative expressions, and everything felt in between, because we are all in this together ?
In addition, Juliana will be in Cordoba, Spain for five days in June upon acceptance to a thematic workshop hosted by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and On-Curating, Zurich, Switzerland at the Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Cordoba.
"Where the commons give refuge; where refuge gives the commons." —Fred Moten
The commons are most simply defined by a common vision of care and sharing access to material and immaterial resources across differences, based on collective decision-making, solidarity, and responsibility for what is being held and cared for together. Rather than offering a stable ground for political action, they are constantly being reimagined, reclaimed, and renegotiated by practitioners.
"Commoning Collective Care" is a four-day intense seminar/workshop convened to collectively explore the different implications, practices, and artistic explorations of the ethics of commoning in a fragile and fractured world. Relying on dialogue, conversation, and embodied engagement, it proposes a multi-sensorial pedagogy of learning to live collectively with the exhausting environmental and social threats and the ongoing violence in times of planetary transformations. Focusing on issues such as Building Caring Infrastructures; Gendered Landscapes and Queered Nature; the rights of nature in the form of legal personhood, an example of which was announced in October 2022, when Spain's Mar Menor, a coastal saltwater lagoon in Murcia, was recognized as such; the larger analytics of the so-called Hydrocommons; and the safeguarding of ancestral plant knowledge, the participatory workshops and presentations foreground how the commons are a site of struggle, a political position that strengthens the capacities of collective doing and transformative thinking against hyper-individualism, extractive neoliberalism, and the destruction of more-than-human life.
"Commoning Collective Care" is curated by Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb, and Daniela Zyman.
Your continued support is vital to our mission. At BAJO EL OLIVO, artists live with an awareness of what happened in the past - drawing inspiration from and reflecting on it - while creating new and challenging work of the future. Help us continue our momentum by making a small donation by email bank transfer and becoming a member...
12/12/2023
We are pleased to announce that the SÍM RESIDENCY in Iceland under the Direction of Ingibjörg Jóhanna Gunnlaugsdóttir has agreed to a cultural partnership with BAJO EL OLIVO. We are now offering a 10% discount to Icelandic members of the SIM who wish to apply to our guest residency in (2023).
Hafnarstræti 16, 101 Reykjavík, Ísland
Phone: (+354) 551 1346
Email: residency@sim.is