SOMA Summer 2025

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 four-week duration and conducted in English, SOMA Summer 2025 will gather 25 participants in Mexico City for critical and porous reflection, far from essentialisms and binary thought to foster dialogue and the exchange of different points of view. Participants’ practices or interests should be aligned with the themes explored each summer.

SOMA Summer 2025 “BROTES (OUTBREAKS): Proposals to delay the end of the world”
Every day, new outbreaks emerge from the gaps left open by desolation. Like weeds growing on asphalt, outbreaks are the sudden emergence of a force, a rebellious movement, an intensification of imagination. Outbreaks are provocative networks: they are never born on their own and cannot exist in isolation. They teach us to understand soil as something essentially multitudinous because the life that animates a new outbreak—whether it is a mushroom, an idea, or a social uprising—always comes from other bodies, other lives, other territories. Acts of resistance and transformation are also disseminated as political spores; they are an accumulation of intercrossing times and processes, a seed that might have been waiting several generations before sprouting.

In the midst of the many crises currently shaking the planet (psychic, social, and climatic crises, as well as crises of meaning), there are still outbreaks, even if their stories remain untold because dark times could our abilities to see, for instance, a group of people that rise up to defend a forest; a community radio practicing its autonomy; or a milpa—the traditional Mesoamerican crop system—that is cultivated to keep the urban sprawl at bay. How do these outbreaks manage to grow in lands that seem to exist only for extraction? What forms of organization support them? How can we re-imagine our bonds and the ways in which we disseminate information in forms that do not resemble those used by the corporate media that daily promote our addiction to instantaneity?

Lead by Taniel Morales (artist, Mexico City), Yoshua Okón (artist, Mexico City), Vivian Abenshushan (interdisciplinary writer, Mexico City), and Sara Eliassen (artist and filmmaker, Oslo) the 2025 edition of SOMA Summer is based on the ethical and political orientation proposed by Brazilian indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak: if we are to delay the end of the world we need to cultivate stories that, unlike the capitalist simulation that instrumentalizes resistance movements, are rooted in the vast network of life. We will read the speculative essay “Collective Aesthetics of the Land,” by the Mixe Communal Network that imagines a future for art after the Capitalist Night, a form of co-creation interwoven with mushrooms and mycelia. We will use the essays by Mexican philosopher Sayak Valencia to think through the regime of live streaming and “gore capitalism.” We will further review, various collective forms (and strategies) of organization that have been able to escape media cooption. In hand with the thought of authors such as Paulo Tavares or David Graeber we will follow the routes of ancestral pasts to cultivate different non-instrumental relations with the land and the human and non-human beings that inhabit it.

In these four weeks we want to think together about the complexity of these times of crises but we also want to draw the coordinates for a future cosmopolitics, which implies paying attention to our surroundings, to what is already here. How and with what methods can we shape our collective memories for the worlds to come? We will engage in participatory pedagogies, forest walks, visits to cooperative projects in Mexico City, workshops, seminars, and master classes to create an intense encounter where we can formulate questions on the territories that we inhabit and the urgencies that bring us together so we can organize in the midst of the media, geopolitical and vital chaos.

Apply online: use the online platform to complete your application.
Contact: ssummer [​at​] somamexico.org.
More information about SOMA Summer

SOMA Summer is looking for participants who are engaged with their practice and would like to be part of a space for collective creation and thought from a position of tolerance, and are open to listening to a wide variety of perspectives.

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.