LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE OF OUR PLANET EARTH....

09/18/2022

INDIVIDUAL GIVING

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 of our non-profit association. All proceeds will go towards the residency and its on-going activities. A member page will follow shortly with a list of our current members and a Board of Interdisciplinary Artist Members.

INSTITUTIONAL GIVING

BAJO EL OLIVO is grateful for the commitment and generous support of foundations, government agencies, small businesses and other artist associations, collectives who support our mission.

CULTURAL PARTNERSHIPS

BAJO EL OLIVO's diverse and evolving International Arts Residency initiatives cultivate curiosity, wonder and new methods of creating new knowledge in the fields of the Creative Arts and Environmental Humanities. Local Guest Residents are provided with the opportunity to engage with our international Artists-in-Residence through multi-disciplinary workshops, studio visits, short residencies. With an emphasis on the creative process, professionals in their fields lead hands-on activities to inspire confidence through risk-taking and group activities with the local community of all ages, abilities and backgrounds.

We are honoured to have forged a strong cultural partnership with The Arboretum of Marbella founded and directed by Alejandro Orioli in Marbella, and the 'myco' festival (2023) co-directed by our Board Member in Multi-media & Public Space Planning, Emilio Mula. With their support we are shapeshifting our speculative research collectively to bring our message to a wider public audience engagement in the surrounding regions of Andalucia.

Next year's 'myco' festival at the Arboretum will include a commitment to supporting creative projects that integrate genres and art forms from diverse viewpoints and that break from traditional forms of representation to trace the complex coexistences and interrelationships of microorganisms with each other as well as with plants, animals, and fungi. Since biological knowledge is central to the Western understanding of reality, life, and self, it is not surprising that this profound questioning of the discipline's fundamental assumptions has also resonated with a broader public. Science and art exhibitions in museums, in particular, have taken up symbiotic knowledge and we plan to engage in public space planning & public engagement that will extend this research through local workshops, food security, artist talks as well as visual & performing art work and installations.

We hope to provide a unique opportunity to observe the development and performance methodologies of our partnership and our upcoming new Board Members to investigate what it means to be a global artist in a Posthuman world. In this context, climate change and the Anthropocene form a basis on which this coexistence takes on a new importance. It exceeds the romantic notion of connectedness to nature and instead focuses on questions of humanity's survival and the biosphere as we know and need it. In this context, recent research findings on symbiosis are treated as evidence for a conception of nature that understands and describes life as a generally cooperative process. On a microscopic level, nature might be much more benevolent and cooperative than we previously assumed. This allows for a new political and ontological understanding of symbiosis as well as for a revaluation of the human species as part of a living planet.

We are using our strategic planning skills to shape the transformation of a scientific concept into a political and philosophical one around climate action and the Anthropocene. We are investigating and curating on a platform that asks:

What role do metaphors and other representational techniques play in the creative arts?
What philosophical resources are included or alluded to through 'climate agency' in this relation'?
What is the role of scientific networks and cultural friendships in the visual and performing and virtual arts?
To what extent can their practices be understood as symbiotic, open and porous that is inclusive of everyone and every creature and life-form?
How can we work with local government, universities and other associations to create a more collective consciousness around climate action and radical affection for this dying planet.

https://www.fundacionarboretum.org/proyectos-arboretum/myco

https://www.fundacionarboretum.org/noticias/los-ojos-en-el-agua-se-despiden