Open call 2024: Phreatic Fury, waters uprising

Materia Abierta is pleased to announce the launch of the open call for its 2024 edition. Under the title “Phreatic Fury, waters uprising”, the fifth edition of Materia Abierta is curated by Camila Marambio and takes place in Mexico City July 29 through August 24. The faculty includes Cocina Colaboratorio, GeoBrujas, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures, Patricia Gualinga, Vivien Sansour, Zara Monrroy and Brenda Cabrera.

The call will be open until April 7, 2024, at 11:59 pm (CDT).

Materia Abierta is a summer school on theory, art, and technology taking place in Mexico City with the intent of mobilizing critical thinking and political will. Each new edition of the program generates new contexts for learning based on principles of collectivity.

This year’s program gathers a group of artists, lawyers, organizers, sorceresses, and scientists to energize the movements that contemplate, effectively care for, and conserve the freedom of planetary waters. Conjoining imaginaries, the group will denounce water abuse and articulate healing languages for and complicities with the elemental entities and principles of water. 

With the desire to strengthen alliances between movements for the rights of nature and queer ecologies, this year’s iteration of Materia Abierta aims to proliferate escape routes from modernity and give rise to wild processes of hydro-justice in a geo-choreographic fury that responds to the clamor of the waters of the Anáhuac Valley and beyond, toward the surrounding atmosphere. This will require new interspecies agreements, the recognition of the traditional knowledge practices that maintain and restore the health of all waters, and the articulation of complex cosmo-political fabrics—collectivities that fight ecocide, cultivate food sovereignty, share sacred technologies, and speak in hydro-poetics. 

“Phreatic Fury, waters uprising” will perform scenarios for abandoning the imprisonment of nature as a “resource,” thereby restoring links to spiral time and voluntarily retiring from the failed “commons” into more complex articulations of the overflowing. We will sow contention; we will sow water. 

The 2024 edition will be an intensive four-week study program. It includes seminars, public talks, and group discussions as well as anti-cartographic drifts around the city. Participants will take as a starting point an artistic or research project in its early stages of development in order to expand personal explorations and generate collaborations. It is a space for the construction of critical intimacy, dedicated to people who seek to redirect their practices toward political will through collective listening.

The program is developed with the support of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in coordination with Cultura UNAM, through Casa del Lago UNAM, Cátedra Extraordinaria Max Aub, and Museo Tamayo.

For more information visit materiaabierta.com and follow @materiaabierta on social media. Twitter / Instagram.