Seminar with Pablo Martinez started in online mode in April and continued in physical encounter in May during the WHW Akademija Summer School. During the seminar, Pablo Martínez formed a chorus of voices with the participants of WHW Akademija Summer School to activate a kind of living, embodied archive of working conditions in art. Through writing, listening, storytelling and sound experimentation, they approached the forms of production in the field of contemporary art. This set of practices aimed to reveal some of the procedures of institutional mechanics and their violence against workers. Throughout the workshops, the participants experimented with the voices and sounds of violence and dispossession, but also embraced and imagined possible alternatives for imagining a more democratic, plural and vitally sustainable creative landscape. The participants were instructed to go into public space and record sounds and voices, contemplating on the conditions of cultural workers and their own personal experiences as young artists. The seminar was focused on the question of what art can do in relation to the eco-social crisis. One of the results of the workshops held by Pablo Martínez were four group sound recordings which were edited into short audio works presented on the last day of the seminar.
During WHW Akademija Summer School, visiting professor Adelita Husni Bey held a workshop titled Call and Response: critical theory and embodied pedagogy. Almost like a choir, this module was structured and centered around participants’ ‘Calls’, and what emerges from their individual practice that can be shared and gathered around. How will we collectively respond to each other’s ‘calls’? How will we listen deeply? The first session included an introduction to embodied pedagogy tools and methodologies, such as Image Theater, structured around the concerns that emerge within the group. In this process-based workshop, readings, screenings and feedback were offered between the participants which enriched and challenged each other’s ways of working. Adelita Husni-Bey discussed some mayor topics with the participants, offering readings on / of infrastructures (health, logistics, education, sovereign food systems), surplus labor and abolitionist politics, historical materialist, eco-feminist, psychoanalytic and decolonial analyses and interventions on life.
Pablo Martínez holds a PhD in art history, for which he carried out an investigation into the images of the crowds taken at the funeral of Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti. He works with a postdoctoral contract at the Institute of History of CSIC, the Spanish National Research Council. Over the last decade, his institutional work has sought to challenge the limits of the museum in order to imagine an eco-social institutionality. He was Director of Programmes at MACBA (2016–2021), and prior to this he was Head of Education and Public Activities at CA2M (2009–2016). Between 2012 and 2015 he worked as an associate professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He has edited books, curated performances, activated collective processes of creation, accompanied artists in residence and curated exhibitions. He has also negotiated with neighbours, protested against the extension of the MACBA building, moved chairs, placed bottles of water, made applications and danced until sunset. His current research and practice is oriented towards the ecological crisis and the role of art in the construction of a new hegemony that might enable a less violent and more just transition.
Adelita Husni Bey is an artist and pedagogue invested in anarcho-collectivism, theater, and critical legal studies. She organizes workshops and produces publications, broadcasts, and exhibition work using noncompetitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. Involving activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, spoken-word poets, actors, urbanists, physical therapists, students, and teachers, her work consists of making sites in which to practice collectively. She was part of the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017 with a video installation foregrounding anti-extractivist struggles and tarot reading as a pedagogical practice. She is a 2020–2022 Vera List Center Fellow with a project centered on the radical changes in social relations brought about by responses to past and current pandemics.