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The Conference on the Study of The Image is an event dedicated to collective reflection on the theory, practice, semantic openings and contemporary demarcations of visual cultures. It is structured to include a debate forum, seminar and workshops, as well as a public call for research projects (details below).

This conference offers an encounter between artistic, theoretical, activist and epidemiological perspectives on mental health, in an attempt to think about these intersections through certain collaborative artistic practices and the public’s participation.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic unleashed a wave of depression and anxiety-related disorders, the question of its impact on particular, very specific communities, as well as critiques of certain medical positions related to their diagnosis and treatment, were increasingly on the table, overflowing traditional legitimising spaces.

Mental health and its connection to neurodivergence are part of an often tense dialogue with treatment methods and curative principles, as well as with denial strategies used against collective causes. Particularly critical areas such as grassroots activist movements and artistic practice claim embodied positions and denounce the violence and stigmatisation of much psychiatric practice. At the same time, ‘over-diagnosis’ is prone to critique, among other things, because it excludes the most socially marginalised groups, making them invisible.

Artistic and activist practices propose definitions and approaches to mental health that focus on more intimate, affective aspects of mental health, as well as the vindication of visions read as neurodivergent and the importance of networks for overcoming collective discomfort. These spaces and feelings built around the idea of community self-management of mental health find in creation a tool for healing, but also for protest.

We are looking for papers that reflect on this framework from the artistic and cultural sphere, based on practical work and/or theoretical research (either in progress or complete), with which to build a collective roadmap around the relationship between art and mental health.

Some suggested topics and themes include the following:

• Artistic narratives and genealogies of madness and mental health.

• Intersectional perspectives: feminism, anti-ableism, anti-racism, etc.

• Alliances from art and activism. Strategies of collectivisation of discomfort, stigma and pathologisation of neurodivergence.

• Artistic practices and trauma.

• Ethics in artistic work and the participation of audiences and communities around mental health.

• Anti-psychiatry histories and practices.

• Pathologisation and de-pathologisation of dissidence.

• Political and affective approaches to illness and pain.

• Repressive spaces and mental health: prisons, IDCs, psychiatric hospitals…

Submissions should include:

• The application form (downloadable HERE), including a summary of the message (250 words)

• Brief project dossier (pdf, doc, docx) with a maximum size of 10 MB

All documentation should be sent to the following e-mail address: ca2m@madrid.org. If you choose to include attachments, please follow the instructions outlined on the application form. Communication will be in Spanish.

NB: Those selected will be specifically notified of the time and date they will be participating; regardless, we recommend that you have the availability to attend the three days of the conference, namely 16th, 17th and 18th of November. Each selected person will receive 300 euros following the end of the conference and submission of an invoice, to which the relevant deductions must be applied. Selected participants will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation arrangements.

This conference is being organised by Inés Plasencia, Patricia Mayayo and Noemí de Haro within the framework of the project ‘The audiences of contemporary art and visual culture in Spain: new forms of collective artistic experience since the 1960s’ (PID2019-105800GB-I00, Agencia Estatal de Investigación).

With the collaboration of:

Welcome to Una Vibración Casi Imperceptible (‘An Almost Imperceptible Vibration’), a positional, performed visit that uses the audio guide as a tool to explore the exhibition put together by the artist Jon Mikel Euba, Animals That Bear the Weight of Mysterious Loads in Settings Created by Opposing Forces.

We invite you to enter a choreographed landscape that comes into existence as we walk through it and asks: where does your body end and this landscape begin? An experience to relive the past, time to hear, see and perceive what is vibrating and not visible to the naked eye, to stop before a reflection or an impulse, to ask ourselves: what is this landscape doing to us?

The body has no eyelids; it is a porous membrane that absorbs sensory stimuli and turns them into experience and knowledge. Shall we go for a walk? Bring your headphones.

Activating impulses, working from the experiential, promoting critical attitudes through action, involving the body in the learning processes and questioning social institutions. The CA2M Museum’s Department of Education and Public Activities is developing a line of work aimed at putting together themed visits in which artists and creatives are invited to bring the exhibitions closer to the visitors through their own artistic practices. This allows us to eschew the presumption of objectivity in the narratives put forward by the exhibitions by offering a break with hegemonic discourses. A space for research in which to encourage one’s own readings of the image and story, resulting in the creation of new archetypes.

Paulina Chamorro. I am a researcher, creative, performer and cultural manager. I work in the field of the performing arts in Latin America and Spain. I continuously collaborate with artists, collectives and institutions on projects that promote research and the creation of transdisciplinary dramatic languages engaged with contemporary issues.

REGISTRATION: By telephone on 91 276 02 21, by e-mail at ca2m@madrid.org or in person at the museum reception.

Various authors, whether from the perspective of science fiction literature, like Octavia E. Butler, or contemporary feminist theory, like Donna J. Haraway, advocate the need to overcome certain concepts that condition our contemporary understanding of the world, such as the Anthropocene, and to propose other alternatives, like the Chthulucene, in order to rethink a relationship between species that leaves behind the primacy of the human being as the centre and measure of all things and explores the potential of this relationship to generate new ways of life and possible new more sustainable and solidarity worlds for all species that inhabit it, that allow us to survive the current situation of climatic emergency. From Haraway’s notion of “companion species”, this film season wishes to examine how cinema—understood as a popular manifestation of contemporary anxieties—explores the relationship between species and the human being’s relationship with their environs from various optics; some more catastrophic and others more hopeful, in consonance with Haraway’s vision.

The cult film Phase IV, a canonical example of the apocalyptic sci-fi movie, introduces us to a dystopia in which ants develop a group mind and consciousness of their power and take over control of the Erath, forcing human beings to adapt to the new civilization in which both species have to live together. On the other hand, Soylent Green, another classic sci-fi movie, and a visionary example of the destructive effects of climate emergency, takes a look at the capacity of the human being to destroy the environment in which the Earth must survive.

From a less catastrophic, although no less unsettling perspective, Little Joe reflects on the capacity of science to force this collaboration between species through genetic manipulation and how its form of perverting the course of nature means that it does not always serve human purposes in the way it was intended. The purported supremacy of the human species is brought into question when the modified plants overturn the relationship of power and find ways of surviving that make use of the needs of the people who created them.

Meanwhile, The Shape of Water, Border and Gunda offer gazes that anticipate a less-human oriented future with more interspecies collaborations. Gunda borrows the narrative and formal structures of the documentary to follow the daily life of a pig, two cows, and a one-legged chicken, reminding us that we share the world with millions of different species that deserve to be taken into account and appreciated by us within their own environs, with their own everyday routines and with the same compassion with which we observe ourselves. Border takes a look at how we construct a non-human identity in contemporary Finland and how to develop networks and structures for coexistence between two species—humans and trolls—despite their shared disturbing past. Finally, Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a melodrama telling the love story between a woman and an amphibian man, opening the door to a relationship between species like those told by Octavia E. Butler in her sci-fi stories. In conclusion, this film season wishes to offer and explore ways in which film imagines us, how it thinks of other species and our relationship with them and thus anticipate the various worlds in which we will have to live.

Curated by Jara Fernández Meneses and Estrella Serrano Tovar.

Jara Fernández Meneses has curated film seasons for institutions like MNCARS and Cruce, and formed part of the programming team for Cineteca for four years and is a former member of the selection committees for the Documenta and Animario international festivals. She has written film reviews for Cahiers du Cinema. España/Caimán. Cuadernos de cine, cultural reviews for Serie B and has taught film classes in Kent and Exeter universities in the UK and at the Carlos III university in Madrid. In her free time, she likes to deejay vinyl records of black music and to play dominoes.

Estrella Serrano Tovar has worked in institutions like MNCARS, AECID and the Cervantes Institute. Naturally curious, she enjoys learning new ways of interacting with culture and art, understanding relationships with neighbouring communities as a key part of her work and trying to connect with people with shared interests to undertake new projects. She is the head of the Education and Activities department at Museo CA2M since 2020.

Obituary is a live monologue performed by the artist which falls apart and eats itself.

Combining characters and motifs from past work, the performance acts as a parody of Plato’s cave and an expansion of the language found in Matt Copson’s animation and installation work.

This is his first fully-fledged performance with live soundtrack by long-time collaborator felicita.

MATT COPSON

Matt Copson was born in 1992 in Oxford, England. His work uses theatrical devices and artistic tropes to create existential dramas of contemporaneity, abstraction, eternal recurrence and the uncanny.
His shown exhibitions and projects at CLEARING (Brussels) Swiss Institute (New York), Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris), Mönchehaus Museum (Goslar) and Serpentine Sackler Gallery (London). In 2022, he will premiere ‘Last Days’, his first opera as a librettist and director, at the Royal Opera House, London.

Even if we wanted to, we cannot kill our dead. There are certain tasks that the dead summon us to do. And so, we carry them with us in our day to day lives, in small gestures or flashes of very intense emotion. How to share the losses, that which remains bound to us, the strange impermanence, that eagerness to bury our hearts, the confusing and incessant buzzing blue pain? Mourning is a political task, it builds community, it is a ritual of caring that reproduces life. Mourning unites us. I often talk to my friends about this, I believe that our grandmothers were the last ones to truly understand that death was part of life. They knew how to reconnect with the soil, and now perhaps it is time for us to create other rituals, other ways of being, of living and of dying.

Between January and June 2021, Marta Echaves carried out extensive research into mourning, its representations, politics and rituals. She was accompanied by the choreographer Esther Rodriguez Barbero, the artist Julia Montilla and the researcher Maria Rosón. From that series of meetings and conversations emerge certain questions and approaches which have shaped the programme of public activities That Blue Buzzing Sound.

Understanding research as a way of accompanying other projects that also address our contemporary relationship to death and grieving, That Blue Buzzing Sound focuses on sharing practices and poetics that make it possible to grasp experiences when language fails us and the end is centre-stage.

Marta Echaves. She is the coordinator of activities in Spain for the publishing house Caja Negra. She has written for artists' catalogues and publications and is, alongside María Ruido and Antonio Gomez Villar, the editor of Working Dead. Post-work scenarios (La virreina at the Centre of the Image). Interested in writing and historical research, her projects aim to revisit images and metaphors by focusing on intimate experiences and anecdotes as detonators of poetic memory devices. “La Contrarrevolución de los Caballos” was an investigation into heroin and HIV in the context of Spanish neoliberalism, which took on various formats and was shown in places such as Can Felipa, MACBA, MNCARS, ARCO... More recently, she presented her research into post-dictatorship paranormal memory with the conference "De las Acechanzas" (On the Hauntings) at the Domingo Festival.