Contact Zone: Laboratory of Art and Thought

Hito Steyerl, Yayo Herrero, Judith Butler, Banu Cennetoğlu, Remedios Zafra, Guy Standing, Marcelo Expósito

Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma presents Contact Zone: Laboratory of Art and Thought, an annual education and research programme that aims to become a platform for ideas and a space for critical thinking through which to explore the potentialities of artistic practice and cultural production as mechanisms for intervention and social change.

Contact Zone is a pioneering project in the Balearic Islands that understands artistic practice as a territory of confluence of knowledge, multiple stories, disciplines and political or social interventions.

In accordance with the so-called “pedagogical turn” that contemporary art and contemporary art museums around the world have experienced in recent decades, it is born of a conception of the institution as a space for critical, educational and social experimentation, and aims to establish itself as a laboratory of artistic and cultural ideas at the current epicentre of contemporary crises, innovations and flows.

The first edition, which will take place between January and June 2022, raises the need to think about this contemporary complexity, developing its activity through five intertwined conceptual axes—New Institutionalisms, Ecologisms, Work, Feminisms and Borders—made up of activities in various formats, including conferences, screenings, seminars, round tables, research processes and laboratories.

Among the participants of the different modules are key figures of contemporary thought, activism and artistic practices such as Hito Steyerl, Yayo Herrero, Judith Butler, Banu Cennetoğlu, Remedios Zafra, Guy Standing, and Marcelo Expósito, who will give opening lectures at the beginning of each of the project modules, as well as on the closing day.

The faculty is made up of Zdenka Badovinac, Mabel Tapia, Yaiza Hernández, Manuel Segade, Jesús Carrillo, Pau Waelder, Ernest Garcia, Margalida Ramis, Luis González Reyes, Arquitectives, Basurama, Ivan Murray, Suely Rolnik, Brigitte Vasallo, Lucía Mbomío, PSJM, Tonina Matamalas, Neus Tur, Sandro Mezzadra, Tania Adam, Marusia López Cruz, Grigri, Carles Bover, Meritxell Esquirol, Ivan Miró, Ernest Cañada, Daniel G. Andújar, María Ruido, Instituto del Tiempo Suspendido, and Rafael Borràs.

The programme reinforces the Museum’s identity understood as a living organism that generates knowledge from the debate on key issues of the present and is addressed to all those who are interested in the interrelations between art and culture as well as other political and social spheres, people from the fields of the humanities, communications, artistic practice, public politics, cultural production or management, activists, and people linked to social movements, or who are committed to social change.

Prior registration will be carried out following strict order of the arrival of applications via our site, with the deadline for registration for the complete programme being January 16, 2022, and until one month before the start of each module in the case of individual module registrations.

Students have a 40 percent discount, and there is a 50 percent discount for students and teachers of the Escuela Universitaria ADEMA, which also offers academic recognition for participation in an activity at a university level. In addition, Members of Es Baluard Museu will be able to enjoy a 10 percent discount.

On the other hand, the Museum will launch a call for grants to attend the first edition of the programme, with five free registrations: three for residents of the Balearic Islands, and two on an international level. In addition, ADEMA will launch its own call that includes five grants for economically vulnerable students.

Additionally, Contact Zone offers a series of activities open to the public who are not enrolled in the training programme, such as the opening lectures of each module (Hito Steyerl, Yayo Herrero, Judith Butler, Banu Cennetoğlu, Remedios Zafra, Guy Standing, and Marcelo Expósito) and the screenings of the “LAP Screen” audiovisual programme.

The project is directed by Imma Prieto, Director of Es Baluard Museu, with the external collaboration of cultural manager Berta Sureda and coordinated by the Museum’s Education and Public Programmes Department. In co-production with the Ministry of European Funds, University and Culture of the Government of the Balearic Islands, it also has the support of ADEMA Escuela Universitaria and AC Hotels by Marriott.