SOMA
SOMA Summer is a unique intensive program for international artists, curators, critics, and art historians interested in developing collaborative pedagogical models, stimulating creative work, and engaging in an open dialogue with their peers.
With a three-week duration and conducted in English, SOMA Summer 2024 will gather 25 participants in Mexico City to foster critical thought and artistic reflection through a series of workshops, seminars, field visits, critique sessions, and other special sessions guided by local and international artists and specialists.
SOMA Summer 2024
Entanglements / And what if skin was the center of our body and not its limit?
We are plural beings who inhabit an inherited reality. Each object, each concept, each action has its own histories and involves work that came before us. We are our bonds; we are our relations to people, animals, plants, and microorganisms: to the biosphere as a whole. The meaning of our deeds, thoughts, and feelings germinates from those relations. Chains of relations bind us to the planet as a whole. In that sense, individual work is a fiction: no one invents something from scratch, all creations are collective. Gutenberg’s printing press would have been impossible without Chinese technologies, without wine presses, without migrations, without minerals and grapevines. How can we live and create under that assumption?
Art is a social agreement, a constantly changing field involving bonds and built through agreements and disagreements. Perhaps, the latter—antagonism—is the motor that propels change in our ideas about art and the world.
For three intensive weeks we will deal with entanglement as our object of study: entanglement between persons, processes, media, methodologies, fields of knowledge, cultures, and worlds. With the academic support of Taniel Morales (artist, Mexico City), Fabiola Iza (curator, Mexico City), and Yoshua Okón (artist, Mexico City), among others, SOMA Summer will be structured after Argentinean decolonial philosopher Enrique Dussel’s subject-subject relation categories: the political relation (centered on building agreements and working through disagreements), the pedagogical relation (that has personal and collective transformation as its points of arrival), and the erotic relation (the creative relation).
We will engage in participatory dynamics and critical methodologies to reach positions regarding obediential power and autonomy, while also exploring ways of thinking about the body, work, identity, and bonds seen from the perspective of paradigms and movements located outside contemporary hegemonic thought. As part of our sessions, we will be discussing Lynn Margulis’s notions of symbiogenesis and Gaia theory, Anna Tsing’s ideas, and the thought of authors such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui.
SOMA Summer will take place in Mexico City, a monster city inhabited by a large number of cultures, life forms and cooperative projects such as the FAROs [Arts and Crafts Factories], the Asamblea Comunitaria Miravalle [Miravalle Community Assembly], and the Escuela Campesina [Farmer School], which will be some of our case studies. As a social laboratory, this centuries-old multicultural metropoli will be the central space that will allow us to undertake a personal and collective review of the way in which we work.
Apply online: use the online platform to complete your application / Contact: ssummer [at] somamexico.org. More information about SOMA Summer.
SOMA Summer invites participants who are eager to reflect on their practice and are not primarily focused on preparing work for exhibitions or have previous commitments with impending deadlines.
SOMA Summer is part of SOMA: an experimental pedagogical project, conceived as a platform for reconsideration and reflection where revisiting creative processes is encouraged. The program might be subject to change.
