SOMA Summer is an intensive residency program for artistic inquiry that welcomes a cohort of international artists, curators, critics, and art historians interested in collaborative pedagogical models. Each SOMA Summer is organized around a different theme that provides a compelling conceptual framework for research and creative work.
Titled Yet to Come, SOMA Summer 2021 will be framed around a series of questions about time, labor, land, and living. Held for the first time in collaboration with Fundación Casa Proal, the program’s activities and lodging will take place in San Rafael, Veracruz, Mexico.
SOMA Summer 2021 is structured around the idea of working together in an isolated location. With the support and the collaboration of Fundación Casa Proal, the program’s location will not only allow us to be together, but as a site with complex historical layers it will inform and influence our work and encourage non-linear thinking. One of the intentions is to learn from the place.
The three-week program that is built around a series of activities (seminars, workshops, group critiques, site visits, etc.) will be led by a group of renowned Mexican and international artists and researchers.
All program activities are in English.
Yet to come
We are living in a moment of uncertainty. We can no longer rely on the future as a common horizon for thought or action. In this time of crisis, a politics of futurity is being questioned. But can we use this moment to reimagine our relationship to time? How can we make use of the concept of temporality to critique dominant narratives of progress, of (im)possibility that have been made unquestionable by neoliberalism? To think against the organization of time in ways that (re)produce exploitation and exclusion? In this time “out of joint,” is there the possibility for us to think about what is to come in ways that do not imply just moving forward and backwards, but also to the side and up and down, round and round?
We have been in various forms of isolation for more than a year now. We are worn down by a permanent state of alarm, anxiety and loss. We are mutating into something that we don’t yet know or understand. The structures that were meant to sustain us have collapsed and the world we inhabit has repeatedly shown its limits, injustices and impossibilities. Can we, in these ruins, imagine other forms of being? Should we embrace uncertainty and precarity in our politics? What potential might they hold for what is to come? What are the possibilities for artistic practice to engage in this project? What can art do to open/call/imagine other temporalities?
Mentors: Helena Chavez Mac Gregor (researcher/Mexico); Obrera Centro: Marcos Castro (artist/Mexico), and Mauro Giaconi (artist/Argentina), Alejandra Labastida (curator/Mexico), Prishani Naidoo (sociologist-activist/South Africa), Yoshua Okón (artist/Mexico), Teatro Ojo (artist collective/Mexico) and Melanie Smith (artist/UK).
Applications
Use the online platform to complete your application with the following:
–Short biography
–Curriculum vitae
–Artist’s statement
–Letter of interest
–Portfolio
–Contact information for three references
More information about SOMA Summer.
Apply online.
Contact.
SOMA Summer 2021 is under the Academic Direction of Helena Chávez Mac Gregor, resercher IIE-UNAM.
SOMA Summer is part of SOMA—an experimental pedagogical project launched in 2009, conceived as a platform for reconsideration and reflection, where participants have the opportunity to critically analyze their proposals and where revisiting creative processes is encouraged. For the past 11 years, SOMA has provided a counterpoint to the dynamics of art schools, museums, and galleries.
SOMA
Calle 13 #25, San Pedro de los Pinos
03800, Benito Juárez
CDMX, Mexico
