Autumn/winter program

fluent is excited to announce its program for the season ahead, which presents a constellation of projects assembled around the potentiality of creating intimate infrastructures. Presenting a series of new commissions, work re-enactments, exhibitions and research methods, this six–month program is a space of reformulating knowledge transactions, born and raised through artistic voices. 

Infrastructural intimacy is a sign of closeness, but also a form of structural agency from which social dynamics can be altered, operating from a space of undefinition that collapses institutional power. While paying attention to the infrastructures that frame contemporary realities, fluent’s long–term interest in socio–natural ecologies is very much confronted with absences, obstacles, impossibilities —and everything that belongs to the oppressive mechanisms of living—that we need to consider in order to be transcended.

A rural death 
September 10–October 22

With: Birke Gorm, Derek Jarman, Inland Campo Adentro, Javier Arce, La Bardal and Out of the Woods.

A rural death is an exhibition and discursive program bringing together artists, theorists, writers and activists who examine non–urban–centric forms of death.

The imposition of one way of thinking and making death visible during the current health crisis, erases the presence of those bodies and practices that escape the channels of urban interconnection and contact. The idea of the countryside becomes reduced to an escapist image, rooted in the romantic imagination and in the contemporary dispossession of indigenous and peasant cultures. Through bio-political regimes in which the very definition of life is controlled through the bodies, images and legal structures that choreograph our movements, A rural death delves into contemporary forms of power and distributed mortality as a metaphor of our time.

Exploring death as a social form, the exhibition proposes alternative thresholds that consider the elderly in rurality, life–death cosmologies as non–binary entities, agricultural extractivism as contagion, as well as the loss of biodiversity and collective mournings for the current multiple processes of massive extinctions. Through a series of formal languages that address these material conditions, A rural death questions the legislations, liturgies, ontologies, beliefs and codes that expand our imaginary of individual and collective perenniality.

The exhibition features a series of activations, including:

Friday, October 1
Ideologies of Nature: Notes for a Sonic Anthropology of the Rural Decline: 
A radio session hosted by Inland Campo Adentro, confronting ideologies and notations of nature and silence, slow processes of annihilation, (in)visibility, hauntologies and disappearance of the commons. With Fernando García Dory, David Prieto, Blanca Pujals and Luigi Coppola.

Saturday, October 16
Comida popular hosted by La Bardal. Please RSVP at hello@fluentfluent.org 

Ibon Aranberri 
October 29–December 10

Ibon Aranberri responds to the architectural materials present at fluent’s glass and metal pavillion through a series of technical drawings developed in professional training schools. Unfolding a specific installation which reinforces the material culture from the architecture itself, the project references a vocabulary of geometric forms that has remained the same throughout the shifts from manual to machine to robotic labour. As the production of industrial labour evolved into an omnipresent technical knowledge, the formal vocabulary and methods of manufacture stayed the same, but with different outcomes, emphasizing the educational infrastructures and channels that shape our material and inmaterial realities. 

Mariana Silva: Tele–bio–socio–graphies
December 17–February 28

Tele–bio–socio–graphies is an exhibition on techniques of wildlife notation, and the media that ensure bios can also exist as data. Through a new series of works developed for fluent, tele–bio–socio–graphies questions how and when, for both biologists and documentary filmmakers, notation becomes audiovisual for the human eye and ear. A series of interviews with experts and nonexperts will be published online alongside the physical display. 

Director: Alejandro Alonso Díaz.
Editorial and production assistants: Candela Lejárraga & Guillermo de Foucault.

*Due to the current situation, dates are subjected to change. For updates, please visit our website.