Wednesday 28th June 2023 at 16.00 to 17.30 BST / 11am to 12.30pm EDT.
Online (Zoom); booking via Eventbrite.
This presentation by Lorenzo Galgó and Maria Morata takes illness and disability as tools for a critical reading of the Anthropocene as well as ecological politics, establishing a relationship between sick bodies and sick landscapes. The classical version of ecology is built on the sick/healthy binomial that refers to a romantic vision of nature and perpetuates the enabling structures of neoliberal societies. How do crip theory and ecological thinking support each other? How can we use illness and disability to interpret the landscape and rethink hyperproduction, extractivism, as well as the aesthetic, cultural and identity values of the territory?
Galgó and Morata’s methodology is based on translating and expanding the practice of the access rider from the interests of diseased landscapes. The access rider is a document used for communication between people with disabilities and art institutions, which includes the accessibility needs of the former to ensure an equal working relationship. Through this exercise Galgó and Morata question the definition of illness both in the framework of an ecosystem and a cis-system, reflecting on how our relations with nature are articulated through medicine and therapy, how restorative practices and cures can be exercises of violence that refer to the ableist structure from which they are applied. They explore practices of listening, attention and care of landscapes from the limits of our inevitable human condition. They reintroduce notions of pain, eugenics and death, which are often absent in conversations about postnature and which they / we, as aching bodies sharing vulnerability, find fundamental to rethinking their / our relationship to the external.
The format of this presentation will transition the research from a body of essayistic text to a performed and embodied interpretation. Permeating text-body-landscape, Galgó and Morata will underline illness and disability as scenes that give light to the relational: a crutch that supports another crutch, it is in this interdependent stage where they generate their research and artistic practice.
About Lorenzo Galgó and Maria Morata:
Lorenzo Galgó and Maria Morata met when they were invited by Yuri Tuma, member of the Institute for Postnatural Studies (IPS) to have an epistolary conversation that will be published under the name A orillas del pantano crip (By the Shores of the Crip Swamp) in the volume Compost Reader 2, Editorial Cthulhu Books (Madrid & New York) at the end of 2022. Both live with chronic health conditions, caring for each other in order to continue thinking and collaborating on future projects that explore supports and interdependencies between corporealities and diseased ecologies. They recently formed the artistic collective cripxcess.
Lorenzo Galgó (she/he/they) was born in 2002 in Valdepeñas, a town in Castilla-La Mancha, in the center of the Iberian Peninsula. Born after 9/11, after the peseta disappeared, growing up with a single, unemployed mother in the 2008 crisis, living in a landscape that has been desertified for 20 years, more than she has been on this earth. Her conversation with illness began in 2019 when an STD left her one-eyed. The stigma of the dirty homosexual, a traumatized child who shuns her sex, shuns sex. Turning 18 in the midst of a global pandemic. Looking at the watersheds of the landscape where I was born, is called Los ojos del Guadiana (The eyes of the Guadiana river), which are now dry and one-eyed like me. All this could be Lorenzo.
Maria Morata (she/her) is a white, cultural agent working as freelance curator, researcher, and lecturer. She was born in Madrid and has lived in Paris and since 1999 in Berlin. She left the sunny south places where she grew up in 1996 and has missed them very much since. In 2002 her daughter Nadja was born. She has recently started a long- life process of learning to live with chronic pain, which allows her to work again but with a much-reduced capacity. She aims to bring behind her issues of productivity, excellence and competitiveness which have been leading her professional practice for years, before she started to have health issues in 2015.
Confabulations 