Open call 2023: El múcaro a lo lejos

Materia Abierta is pleased to announce the launch of the open call for its 2023 edition. Under the title “El múcaro a lo lejos”, the program is curated by artist Jorge González Santos, and it will take place in Mexico City from July 31 to August 26. The faculty includes Ochy Curiel, Engel Leonardo, Escuela de Oficios, Alessandra Pomarico, Suely Rolnik, Awilda Sterling-Duprey, and Ber Zabalaga

The call will be open from March 29 to April 30, 2023.

Materia Abierta is a summer school on theory, art, and technology. Established in Mexico City as a space to reflect on the political, economic, and epistemic forces that condition knowledge production, the program is reshaped every year provoking new contexts for learning.

This year’s program seeks to interweave ritual practices, memory construction, and material cultures, assembling knowledge from different locations in the Caribbean considered essential to resignifying the political potential of aesthetic instruments and ancestral knowledge. Calling upon the ancient chant of the múcaro, a small bird endemic to Borikén, the program will be a gathering to interiorize and collectivize the act of listening between shared resonance and murmurs.

Materia Abierta’s fourth edition will provide a space for autonomous learning that aims to foster the socialization of knowledge from action, the mobilization of political will, and the ritualization of critical thinking based on collective principles. It is a sustained exercise that acknowledges all the summoned forces to make sharing and learning possible.

Following principles proposed by Escuela de Oficios, a project for learning developed by artist Jorge González Santos in collaboration with various communities, this edition of Materia Abierta will focus on work based on ancestral and collective techniques. Through different theoretical and practical activities, a diverse group of artists, thinkers, healers, and artisans will exchange knowledge related to material trades understood as the intersection of multiple knowledge systems that go beyond the techniques themselves. From there, we will approach the daily politics of materialities as expressions of complicity, by mutually learning different trades and establishing community regeneration processes.

This year’s edition has been planned with the objective to build critical intimacy and inquiring affectivity. Participants will work on an artistic or research project in its early stages of development, which will be a point of departure to amplify personal explorations, instigate collaborations, and generate dialogue within the group.

Materia Abierta is developed with the support of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in coordination with Cultura UNAM, Casa del Lago UNAM, Cátedra Extraordinaria Max Aub, Transdisciplina en Arte y Tecnología, and Museo Tamayo.

Deadline for application: April 30, 2023. For more information visit materiaabierta.com and follow @materiaabierta on Twitter and Instagram.