A program on postnature, I° Edition

contemporary ecologies, Feb 1st — July 16th, 2023

art and thought practices.
PIP The Independent Program offered by the Institute for Postnatural Studies (IPS) is a new
learning space that offers theoretical tools, embodied learning, and expertise to define
and develop projects that examine postnature as a framework for contemporary
creation. Its duration is of six months (Feb - July 2013), using a dual methodology
incorporating both theory and practice. Based on IPS’s ongoing initiatives, it offers an
experimental platform for ecological thinking and cultural initiatives in an expanded
virtual campus, approaching the students’ potential from a holistic mentoring
perspective. It also brings together established researchers and art institutions that will
host working sessions, encounters and presentations. The program is structured in 3
online modules, accompanied by renowned international thinkers, artists, curators and
philosophers, complemented by two in-person laboratories in Madrid in which students
will share their investigation in a community-building environment.
Concert for plants with Jose Venditti, 2019
Index —For whom
—Topics and structure
—Methodology
—Encounters: In-person gatherings in Madrid
—Research-based practices
—Program
Module 1: Cartographies of Condensed Presents
Genealogies of postnature
Anarcheological thinking
Un(vealing) the Anthropocene: Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Anthrobscene…
Geopolitics and botanics
Ecological awareness: art, criticism, curating
Module 2: More-than-human
De-anthropocentric ontologies and anti-humanism
Affect and coexistence
Phonocene: Ecologies of listening
Perspectivism and non-western cosmologies
Queer worldings and rituals
Module 3: Desirable Futures
Decolonial approaches
Posthumanism and the politics of becoming
Mutualism: towards symbiotic living
Science fictions and speculative narratives
—Faculty
—Calendar
—Practical information
For whom The Postnatural Independent Program (PIP) is addressed to a diversity of profiles in
terms of education, and experience background and aspirations: students from both art
and theoretical practices, artists, curators, theorists, designers, scientists, researchers,
educators, etc., interested in exploring through collective learning the complexities
around contemporary ecological debates. It is oriented to those with a preconceived
context/knowledge of these themes and a project that could benefit from the tutoring
and guidance towards its better definition and practical steps for its possible
materialization.
Topics and The idea of a romanticized nature as a background scenario or neutral framework where
structure human activity simply takes place is no longer valid, and must be replaced by a broader
and more complex reflection. From a critical perspective, we must deepen into the
various layers, hybrid codes and entanglements that compose it. The environment can
no longer be read only as a resource to be managed, nor as a set of given circumstances
to which we must adapt, but as one of the main cultural-material constructions of
modernity. This program will revolve around the concept of postnature, understood as a
political arena and subject in conflict. It will function as a debate platform from which to
investigate, problematize, discuss and multiply new approaches to artistic and thought
practices through political ecologies, post-darwinist aesthetics, and the creation of
more-than human ethics that contribute to the definitive dissolution of the
nature-culture binomial in all its sequels, variants and consequences.

The program will also navigate concepts such as the anthropocene or the chtulhucene in
its multiple meanings and implications, ecological parliaments and perspectivism,
colonialism and the necropolitics associated with human and non-human “resources”,
new materialisms, ecofeminisms and queer theories. Through practical experience and
critical sessions, the goal will be to articulate a change of perspective allowing for the
proliferation of voices and points of view regarding the problem of nature in the
contemporary moment.
Methodology The program will explore different learning formats from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Most sessions will be held online through conversations, lectures and experimental
embodied exercises driven by the IPS faculty and guest speakers. Each session has
reading materials that will be listed and shared beforehand.

To favor a community-based experience, we will share moments in common in the form

of tutorial laboratories where we will connect with each other and respective practices
through individual and collective dialogues, experimental performative methodologies,
and theoretical knowledge in a safe environment. In order to submit to the program we
ask for a project that is in development or in its beginning stages that could benefit from
the tutorship laboratories with our faculty and invited guests. We believe in a horizontal
approach to learning in which we value not only the information shared but the bonds
and possible futures and kinships that can be germinated during our time together.
Master class at HEAD Geneva, 2022
Encounters: During our time together we have programmed two presential encounters in Madrid
In-person aimed at weaving connections between local initiatives and international agents. These
gatherings in are not mandatory but highly recommended. The first will take place mid-course, from
Madrid April 22nd to April 26th. In this first gathering, Portuguese curator Filipa Ramos will take
us on unexpected field trips around Madrid to elaborate on and embody her research
about human-animal relationships and interactions. During this time, there will also be
in-person tutorships and workshops in a renowned cultural institution in Madrid. The
program will end with a second encounter that will take place from July 10th to July 16th.
With the guidance of a curatorial professional (to be announced), we will finalize and
produce the presentation of the projects developed during our time together. This
presentation will be presented at a notable cultural institution in the city of Madrid. The
participants will assume the transportation and housing costs to meet during these
encounters but our team will gladly help in the organization and arrangement of these
matters.
Research-based This program is aimed at the development of research and artistic projects that find
practices themselves at a beginning stage or at a crossroads, and would benefit from sharing it in
the collective, interdisciplinary context of the PIP. To that end, specific moments will be
set aside throughout the semester for students to present their research and discuss it
collectively with the rest of the group (LAB 1 & 2) and with members of the faculty
(continued tutorships).

The research can be presented in a variety of formats: academic, performative, filmic,

curatorial, plastic, installative,among others. The final presentation will take place in July
2023.
About us The Institute for Postnatural Studies is a center for artistic experimentation from which
to explore and problematize postnature as a framework for contemporary creation.
Founded in 2020, it is conceived as a platform for critical thinking, a network that brings
together artists and researchers concerned about the issues of the global ecological
crisis through experimental formats of exchange and production of open knowledge.
From a multidisciplinary approach, the Institute develops long-term research focused on
issues such as ecology, coexistence, politics and territories. These lines of investigation
take different shapes and formats, including seminars, exhibitions and residencies as
spaces for academic and artistic experimentation.

The Institute works at the intersection between Spain and international practices and
debates. From its headquarters in Madrid, a 300m2 warehouse with a workshop,
residency spaces and shared workspaces, invites artists, researchers and cultural agents
to create dialogues with alumni and the broader public.

In parallel, the Institute has created the publishing platform Cthulhu Books.
Un lago d ejade verde, CentroCentro Madrid, 2021
Module 1: In the moment of the collapse of systems, of the end of binary categorisations and
Cartographies of enormous ecological and sociopolitical crisis, we could say that the present is
Condensed disappearing; almost as if the past and the future were blending with each other. This
Presents module is about celebrating this new conception of time, while mourning its deadly
context, through connecting past and future and looking at the past remains, at what is
there --in short, matter-- not as a collection of given facts but as a collection of
possibilities, in the same way that we generally look into the future.
Genealogies of postnature
Against human exceptionalism, that is, against the belief in the superiority of "Man" over an
essentialized and romatized wilderness, we must destabilize the nature-culture binomial, in any
of its variants, and generate a new, more complex fabric that does not reduce the intricate
network of dynamic interactions that constantly blur and refigure it. To do so, we will change
places and move slightly in time, tracing non-linear paths through certain key events and
locations in order to establish their post-natural genealogies, driven by a radical skepticism
towards both anthropocentrism and objectivity.

Anarcheological thinking
The an-archaeological approach, even more than the archaeological methodology from
which it departs, is useful to dismantle the inherited idea of nature and to understand history as
an agglomerate based on intermingled perspectives and interests that leave out alternative
globalizations. It aims to reconstruct a genealogy of natural-artificial and human-non-human
relations and tensions, understanding them as unstable aggregations, and also including the
political, economic, ethical and aesthetic layers implicit in every cultural and artistic process, as
well as the different levels of agency involved and their infinite relations.

Un(vealing) the Anthropocene: Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Anthrobscene…

In the context of the ecological debate that so many theories, names and viewpoints is
awakening, there is no doubt that we must rethink the mobilizations of the technological and
Module 1: precedes them, that is, as part of the perpetual stratifications and de-stratifications (human,
Cartographies of non-human, more-than-human) of matter. But, as the idea of the Chtulhucene suggests, we
Condensed must also understand these processes as a kind of "strati-fiction": a hybrid sedimentation of
Presents human narratives, desires, longings, myths, denials and figurations that demand the generation
of alternative ways of narrating the past, the present and the future.

Geopolitics and botanics

The history of botany, gardens, and greenhouses has always established hierarchies
between plant species and genres. From a political standpoint, these taxonomies manifest the
human capacity to colonize and exploit the wealth of others, ranking certain species as more
productive, more beautiful or more exotic than others, and importing them from all corners of
the world. The Plantiatocene invites us to explore the relations between such control and power
devices and the ideas of progress and time they entail: for colonial time is the time of
simplification for the extraction of value, of distribution in a hierarchical fashion, coupled with
mass genocides of both people and other creatures. Geopolitics can help us understand the
hidden complexity behind the movements of bodies and seeds which are always linked to
economic and aesthetic interests, while also revealing the power relations between different
states and territories.

Ecological awareness: art, criticism, curating

The problem of the Anthropocene confronts us with a context where it is difficult to situate
ourselves, as it involves as much myth as science, oscillating between fatal statistics,
misinformation, and the mysticism of associated narratives. As thinkers, as artists, as cultural
workers we must ask ourselves what does it mean, and how does it make us feel, to be human
today, on this planet. In an age challenged by the events of a global crisis that we ourselves have
contributed to create, with its slow violence -Rob Nixon-, its strange Hyperobjects and viscous
materialities -Timothy Morton-, in times of barbarism -Isabelle Stengers-, of dystopias, of
atomic energy and accelerationism. In short, to be human in times of an absence of futures, at
best, and an absence of presents, at worst. And how to move on from here.
Module 2: Within the framework of the phonocene, described by Donna Haraway and Vinciane
More-than-human Despret as a possible era of sound, we will explore how active listening allows us to
Ecologies and access new ways of inhabiting the territory and create new modes of care and kinship
Coexistence among critters, human or not. Through the lens of queer ecology and non-western
cosmologies, we will explore different topics that promote new ways to rethink our
relationship with non-human entities and ecosystems in order to generate new
possibilities for the recomposition of terrestrial ecological communities. These types of
non-binary thinking and embodiment function as tools to break the taboos of
coexistence and social constructions that come with inhabiting human cultures.

De-anthropocentric ontologies and anti-humanism

Decentering the anthropos is not enough to overcome the lethal ideals of humanism and
build a genuinely solidary multispecies alliance based on the productive and immanent force of
all human and non-human life on Earth. What is crucial, moreover, is a profound
reconceptualization of subjectivity that does not confuse it with rational and conscious human
autonomy or with neoliberal, self-referential and self-indulgent individualism, but recognizes our
historical, material and situated embeddedness with non-human agents as always already
constitutive of our dynamic identities. We need to visualize the subject as a transversal entity
encompassing the human (including the millions of symbiotic microorganisms that compose it),
animals, fungi, plants, bacteria and the planet as a whole.

Affect and coexistence

The politics of affect and interrelation traced from some of the most far-reaching
contemporary feminisms are indispensable to destabilize the socio-political layers implicit in the
inherited image of the natural that we are constantly trying to destabilize. In a context presided
over by genetically rigid and techno-directed subjectivities, we need to foster new theoretical
frameworks from which to reclaim radical imagination and artistic or cultural creation as an
engine for envisioning new ways of co-inhabiting and co-existing on a severely damaged planet.
Module 2: We must open our sensibilities to difference and establish post-Darwinist and feminist ethics as
More-than-human tools to rewrite the history of that which escapes the norm as another of the histories necessary
Ecologies and to understand the cartographies and genealogies of the present.
Coexistence
Phonocene: Ecologies of listening
The temporality of non-ocular sensories can sensitize us to other forms of care and kinship
that we are not so used to, culturally. Within the framework of the phonocene, described by
Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret as a possible era of sound, listening and sound are
reclaimed as vehicles to access new ways of inhabiting the territory and the current ecological
crisis. From this perspective, the first act and the basis for the implementation of coexisting
ecologies lies in actively listening to the voices of those who surround us, humans and
non-humans, artificial and organic, imagined and real. Field recording research and sound art
thus emerge as important performative and artistic practices for the dissolution of the
human/animal binomial. By switching away from the supremacy of the visual, they can generate
empathy, care, and sensibility towards “otherhood”.

Perspectivism and non-western cosmologies

Viveiros de Castro and Adolfo Chaparro describe the ritualistic anthropophagus act of
amerindian societies as leading to an incessant proliferation of subject positions in perpetual
becoming that endowed with meaning a social whole including various types of deities and
spirits, and excluding neither nonhuman forms of life nor the dead. For these cultures, which
took war as a primordial metaphysical fact, all beings (alive or dead, human, vegetal, spiritual or
animal...) were conceived as integral parts of a cosmic reality in which they could potentially be
devoured by others, thus participating in the interspecific –and never exclusively material–
exchange of creation-predation. Thus, humans did not hold a master position: they took part in
an eco-cosmological complex of which they temporarily incarnated just one of the many
possible perspectives. Being human depended on the point of view.
Module 2: Queer worldings and rituals
More-than-human Recent theoretical-critical and scientific interest in queer ecologies and animalities
Ecologies and demonstrates the connection between the control of sexuality and the increasing destruction of
Coexistence non-human life forms, as well as the way in which these kinds of queer attachments and
becomings, far from undermining the reproduction and continuity of species, help to strengthen
them: the more diverse the species, the more resistant it is to external threats and disease.
Moreover, according to these approaches, queer exuberance –broadly understood– would be the
main engine of life, since it is precisely this form of desire and existence that generates the
experimental, co-adaptive and symbiotic conditions that constitute evolution.
Module 3: In the union between species and the activation of different senses and sensibilities, we
Desirable Futures can research, learn and speculate about a world of coexistence. In the process of
creating desirable futures and collaborative healing, we may find unexpected joys that
unite us in the contemporary ecological crisis. The relationship between human beings
and nature is present in our daily lives in the form of stories that define our way of
inhabiting the planet. In this module, we will try and understand ourselves as part of the
ecosystem and not as a regulator, curator, or submissive extractor, in its multiple
meanings. Art and critical thinking are inherent to the comprehension of the global
landscape, analyzing territories, geopolitics, sustainability, bodies, new spiritualities and
ecologies through new academic approaches.

Decolonial approaches
Colonialism is the underlying logic of the foundation and development of western
civilization, and it is therefore essential to delve into decolonial theory in order to propose critical
methodologies for contemporary ecology and research. In order to overcome such perspectives,
based on extractivism, violence, objectivity and a constant hierarchization of the world, it is
important to attend to subaltern corpus of knowledge and thinking, and their diverse forms of
critical theory, articulated by plural forms of liberating epistemes. From perspectivism to the
ontological turns of the global south, postcolonial theory invites to overcome a social (and
cosmopolitical) discrimination codified as racial, ethnic or anthropological.

Posthumanism and the politics of becoming

Posthuman subjectivity lives in a simultaneous state of singularity-plurality, harboring
within itself the unknown and the in-human, more-than-human and other-than-human; a living
nexus of multiple interconnections and radical immanence. But if posthumanism demands a
redefinition of subjectivity, it certainly also demands a reconsideration of kinship and the
imagination of less invasive and less destructive ways of becoming-together with other beings
Module 3: on earth. Becoming, as a material-theoretical tool, is not about resemblance or imitation, but
Desirable Futures about deploying a network of forces, intensities and encounters to bring us closer to those
"others" that have been excluded from discourse, creating a new affective proximity that
generates different types of relationship and care.

Mutualism: towards symbiotic living

If, at the scale of the individual, queerness manifests itself as mutability, as the power of
transformation (of shapeshifting, code-switching, mimicry, flamboyance, fluidity…) that
characterizes most species on Earth, at the scale of the ecosystem, queerness becomes
mutualism, for it is symbiotic, in-contact, affective, and relational. It brings forth a space of
eccentric economies and mutual support; of found families and utopian dreams; of
communality, cooperation, care and connection. A queer world is a world shaped by cooperation,
by symbiogenesis as an evolutionary force, by the net benefits that different species and
different life kingdoms gift one another, constantly and everywhere, at all times and at all scales.
On a rapidly changing planet, queer mutualism can guides us toward adaptation and survival.
Only through it (and only perhaps) will we be able to restore the shelters for the survival of
human and other-than-human mortal "critters" that are not yet irreversibly damaged or lost.

Science fictions and speculative narratives

In the era of the cultural fall of Humanism, it is necessary to create new narratives that
subvert the hegemonic discourses of white patriarchal supremacy, obsessed with antagonism
and separation, with the dominion over alterity, and rearticulate the complex relations of the
post-natural environment in which we, earth critters, co-exist. Female and racialized voices in
science fiction have proven to be crucial for this task, for they are able, more than other
perspectives and other strata of discourse, to imagine alternatives worlds while condemning
political and epistemological gaps in this one, not only in order to criticize the current problems
of subaltern subjectivities and project them towards invented futures and lands, but also to
revisit, question and rewrite the events of the past. In a sense, it is therefore a way to bridge the
future with the past in order to help reinvent the experience of people in the present.
Faculty: Gabriel Alonso
Institute for Based and born in Madrid, Gabriel Alonso is a visual artist and researcher formed between
Postnatural Studies the ETSAM (Madrid), the Technische Universität (Berlin), and Columbia University in New York at
faculty members the MS-CCCP, where he graduated with honors with his research thesis An Archaeology of
Containment. In his works, through various formats such as installation, sculpture, photography
or video, he investigates contemporary relationships between fiction and materiality, in order to
blur binomials between the natural and the artificial, the human and the non-human,
understanding nature as a complex cultural construct. Represented by Pradiauto Gallery
(Madrid), his work has been exhibited in different galleries and international exhibitions, such as
Nordés Galería (Santiago de Compostela), CaixaForum (Barcelona), La Casa Encendida
(Madrid), CA2M (Madrid), Centro-Centro (Madrid), Fundación La Caixa (Barcelona), Matadero
(Madrid), John Doe Gallery (New York), IIAF (New York), Poor Media Leuven (Belgium), Mila
Gallery (Berlin) among others. He has been assistant professor at Barnard College of the
University of Columbia (NYC) and at the Master of Advanced Architecture of the ETSAM, and
has given many lectures, talks and workshops in different international institutions, museums
and universities. In 2020, he received the Creation Grant from the Madrid City Council, and in
2016 he received the FAD award for his publication Desierto and was awarded one of the
prestigious grants from the Graham Foundation for the Fine Arts. In 2020, he founded the
Institute for Postnatural Studies. In parallel to his academic experimentation, research and
curatorial practice, he develops an editorial practice through the platform Cthulhu books.

Yuri Tuma
Yuri Tuma is a multidisciplinary Brazilian artist who focuses on the investigation of
contemporary narratives related to diverse ecologies through sound art, installation, and
performance as a way to address and reevaluate the human/animal binomial imposed by science
and Western thinking. More actively, in addition to academic programming and development, he
coordinates the Institute's publishing project, Cthulhu Books, to become a showcase for the
political potential of imagining new worlds and possible futures for the planet through academic
and artistic research. Starting in 2021, in addition to participating in residencies and
coordinating workshops around interspecies thinking, Tuma works with educational and
mediation programs through sound art and performance at Spanish institutions such as Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Matadero, La Casa Encendida, INLAND, among others.
Faculty: Clara Benito
Institute for Clara Benito is an independent researcher based in Madrid, currently working at the
Postnatural Studies Institute for Postnatural Studies as a researcher, assistant in workshops and seminars, as well as
faculty members co-editor, writer and proofreader within the Institute's publishing house of critical thought and
ecology Cthulhu Books. With a background in philosophy and visual arts, Clara is currently
pursuing the research master's degree rMA Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and
has been part of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA) since 2018. Her research,
interdisciplinary in nature but with a strong influence from philosophy, touches on topics such as
posthumanism, animal studies, queer theory and feminist and gender studies, decolonial theory
and environmental humanities.
Faculty: Karen Barad
Confirmed Karen Barad is a Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness
Lecturers and Tutors at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and
quantum field theory.
Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more
interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics
and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous
articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and
feminist theory. Barad's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the
Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the
National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad is the Co-Director of the Science & Justice
Graduate Training Program at UCSC.

Filipa Ramos
Filipa Ramos, born in Lisbon, is a writer, teacher and curator. Her research focuses on the
relationships between contemporary art and film, how moving images address environmental
and ecological issues and, in particular, the ways in which artists' films foster interspecies
relationships between humans, non-humans and machines. She teaches on the MRes Arts at
Central Saint Martins (London) and in the MA program at the Institute of Arts, Hochschule für
Gestaltung und Kunst, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (Basel). Ramos is the founding curator
of Vdrome, a program of film screenings by visual artists and filmmakers that she runs with
Andrea Lissoni. She is the curator of the symposia series "The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a
Fish" with Lucia Pietroiusti for the Serpentine Galleries, London.

Claire Colebrook
Claire Colebrook (Australia, 1965) is a cultural theorist who is currently an English teacher
at the Pennsylvania State University. She graduated from a Bachelor of Arts in 1987 at University
of Melbourne, a Bachelor of Arts at the Australian National University in 1989, and she is a
Doctor of philosophy graduated from the University of Edinburgh, 1993. She is known for her
several publications regarding themes such as queer theory, cultural studies, poetry, Gilles
Deleuze and film studies.
Faculty: Cary Wolfe
Confirmed Cary Wolfe (USA, 1959) is the founding director of the Center for Critical and Cultural
Lecturers and Tutors Theory Rice University and founding editor of the series Posthumanities at the University of
Minnesota Press, which publishes works by known authors such as Donna Haraway, Jaques
Derrida, Roberto Esposito, Michel Serres, Isabelle Stengers and Vilem Flusser. He graduated
with Highest Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1984 with a Bachelor
of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies in English, Philosophy, and Comparative Literature. He also
has a Master of Arts degree in the Department of English, University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, 1986, and a Ph.D, Department of English, Duke University, 1990. He has published books
and several articles and essays, including Animal Rites:American Culture, The Discourse of
Species, Posthumanist Theory, and two multi-authored philosophical collections: Philosophy
and Animal Life with Cora Diamond, Ian Hacking, Stanley Cavell, and John McDowell, and The
Death of the Animal: A Dialogue with philosophers Paola Cavalieri, Peter Singer, Harlan Miller,
Matthew Calarco, and novelist J. M. Coetzee.

The Institute of Queer Ecology

Lee Pivnik (b. 1995) is a Miami-based artist, working predominantly in sculpture, video and
social practice. In 2018 he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in
Sculpture and a concentration in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies, and in 2022 he attended
the Immersion Program at The School of Architecture (TSOA) at Arcosanti. Nic Baird is a
biologist, artist, writer, and dancer living in New York City. Baird served as co-director for the
Institute of Queer Ecology since 2017 and is currently working on a doctorate in paleobiology.
In 2017 Pivnik started the Institute of Queer Ecology, a collaborative organism that works
to imagine and realize an equitable multispecies future. He has continued to run the project
alongside artist and evolutionary biologist Nicolas Baird. IQECO builds on the theoretical
framework of Queer Ecology, an adaptive practice concerned with interconnectivity, intimacy,
and multispecies relationality. Guided by queer and feminist theory and decolonial thinking, they
work to undo dangerously destructive human-centric hierarchies—or even flip them—to look at
the critical importance of things happening invisibly; underground and out of sight.
To date, the Institute of Queer Ecology has worked with over 120 different artists to present
interdisciplinary programming that oscillates between curating exhibitions and directly
producing artworks/projects. IQECO has presented projects with the Guggenheim Museum
(New York, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami, Florida), the Julia Stoschek Collection
(Düsseldorf, Germany), the Medellín Museum of Modern Art (Medellín, Colombia), the Museum
Faculty: of Contemporary Art Belgrade (Serbia), ASAKUSA (Tokyo, Japan), the Biennale of Sydney
Confirmed (Australia), Prairie (Chicago, IL), Bas Fisher Invitational (Miami, FL) Gas Gallery (Los Angeles,
Lecturers and Tutors CA), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), among others.

Stacy Alaimo
Stacy Alaimo is a teacher and researcher that addresses environmental humanities,
anthropocene feminisms, gender theory, science studies, animal studies, material ecocriticism,
critical theory, materialist theory. She especially focuses on developing models of new
materialism, material feminisms, environmental justice, and, most recently, the blue (oceanic)
humanities. Her work also explores the intersections between literary, artistic, political, and
philosophical approaches to environmentalism along with the practices and experiences of
everyday life.
Dr. Alaimo has published more than 60 scholarly articles and chapters, has won numerous
teaching and graduate mentoring awards and has also worked to develop campus sustainability
and academic programs in environmental studies. Her concept of “transcorporeality” has been
widely taken up in the arts, humanities, and sciences-- featured, for example, as a topic in The
Posthuman Glossary.

Mary Maggic
Mary Maggic (b. Los Angeles, '91) is a nonbinary artist working at the intersection of
hormones, body and gender politics, and ecological alienations. Maggic frequently uses
“biohacking” as a xeno-feminist practice of care that holds the potential to demystify invisible
systems of molecular biopower. Completing their Masters in the Design Fiction group at MIT
Media Lab, Maggic is a current member of the global network Hackteria - Open Source
Biological Art, the tactical theater collective Aliens in Green, the Asian feminist group Mai Ling
Vienna, as well as a contributor to the radical syllabus project Pirate Care and to the online
Cyberfeminism Index.

Paloma Contreras
Paloma Contreras (Mexico City, 1991) approaches different topics related to gender,
structure and political heritage, violence, post-colonialism and class segregation through
drawing, sculpture, performance, writing and installations. She lives and works in Mexico City
and reaches certain communities to build affective bondings and address her themes of interest.
She studied Visual Artes at La Esmeralda and participated on Programa Educativo SOMA and
Faculty: has been granted an award by FONCA. Her work has been shown in many renowned places in
Confirmed Mexico City, Paris and Puerto Rico such as Museo Tamayo, Galerìa Lobos, MUCA Roma, Biquini
Lecturers and Tutors Wax, Palais de Tokio, Galeria Agustina Ferreyra, Lille 3000 Eldorado, amongst others.

Uriel Fogué
PhD in architecture from the UPM (outstanding doctoral thesis prize, academic year
2014-15; doctoral thesis finalist at the X Bienal Iberoamericana de Arquitectura y Urbanismo,
2016). His professional practice extends to the field of teaching (Escuela Técnica Superior de
Arquitectura de Madrid, visiting teacher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne,
EPFL) and research (co-director of the Political Fictions Crisis Cabinet and collaborator of the
Institute For Postnatural Studies and the Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives). He is
co-curator of the thought group Encounters At The Edge (IPS, 2021-22). Since 2006, he
co-directs the architecture office elii, which was part in the Spanish Pavilion at the 15th Venice
Architecture Biennale (awarded the 2016 Golden Lion), and that has, among other national and
international recognitions, two works selected for the European Union Prize For Contemporary
Architecture Mies Van Der Rohe Award (2015 and 2019). Their work Yojigen Poketto was
selected as one of the 20 visionary domestic spaces of the last 100 years in the exhibition ‘Home
Stories 100 Years, 20 Visionary Interiors’, at the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein (2020). Elii
won the FAD Award (2020) and FAD Opinion Award (2005), and were finalist and shortlisted
FAD Award (2017, 2018 and 2020). They won the First Prize from the Madrid College of
Architects (2017) and have been recognized on other 5 occasions with the COAM Award (2018,
2016, 2013, 2011, 2006). Fogué is author of the book The architectures of the end of the world
(Puente editors, 2022). Along with the members of elii, Fogué is co-author of the books: Super
Petites Maisons (EPFL, 2022), Beyond The Limits (CentroCentro, 2020) and What is Home
Without a Mother (HIAP – MataderoMadrid, 2015), awarded at the XIII Bienal Española de
Arquitectura y Urbanismo 2015, and Beyond the Limits. He is co-editor of the book: Planos de
intersección: materiales para un diálogo entre filosofía y arquitectura (Lampreave, 2011, with
Luis Arenas) and co-editor of the publication UHF, listed in the Archivo de Creadores de Madrid.
His article “Technifying Public Space and Publicizing Infrastructures: Exploring New Urban
Political Ecologies through the Square of General Vara del Rey”, published in the International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR, 2013), together with Fernando Domínguez
Rubio, was highlighted as one of the most relevant texts in the last 40 years of this scientific
publication.
Faculty: Bayo Akomolafe
Confirmed Author, speaker, lecturer, renegade academic, ethnopsychotherapeutic researcher, and
Lecturers and Tutors proud diaper-changer, Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), is globally recognized for his poetic,
unconventional, and counter-intuitive take on global crisis, civic action, and social change. He is
Executive Director and Initiating / Co-ordinating Curator for the Emergence Network. Bayo has
authored two books: ‘We Will Tell Our Own Story’ and ‘These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters
To My Daughter on Humanity’s Search For Home’ and has penned forewords for many others.
Bayo is visiting professor at Middlebury College, Vermont, and has taught in universities around
the world (including Sonoma State University California, Simon Frasier University Vancouver,
Schumacher College Devon, Harvard University, and Covenant University Nigeria – among
others). He is a consultant with UNESCO, leading efforts for the Imagining Africa’s Future (IAF)
project. He speaks and teaches about his experiences around the world, and then returns to his
adopted home in Chennai, India – “where the occasional whiff of cow dung dancing in the air is
another invitation to explore the vitality of a world that is never still and always surprising.” He
considers his most sacred work to be learning how to be with his daughter and son – Alethea
Aanya and Kyah Jayden – and their mother, his wife, and “life-nectar”, Ijeoma.

More to be confirmed…
Calendar: The course will run from February 2023 to July 2023 and has a duration of approximately 150
hours divided into 4 modules. All classes will be held online and scheduled on Mondays and
Wednesdays at 6 PM GMT+1. There will be tutoring sessions in between modules, and two
optional, but encouraged in-person gatherings in Madrid (April and July).

Presentation:
Feb. 1st

Module 1: Cartographies of Condensed Presents

Feb. 6th to March 1st
Lecturers and Tutors: Karen Barad, Claire Colebrook, Uriel Fogué

LAB 1: Online Project Presentations and Tutorships

March 6th to March 8th

Module 2: More-than-human Ecologies and Coexistence

March 13th to April 15th
Lecturers and Tutors: Stacey Alaimo, Filipa Ramos, Cary Wolfe

Encounter 1, In-person gathering in Madrid:

Apr. 28th to May 3rd 2023
Invited tutor: Filipa Ramos.
A five day presential programming which includes workshops, field trips and tutorships.

Module 3: Desirable Futures

May 8th to Jun. 19th
Lecturers and Tutors: The Institute of Queer Ecology, M. Maggic, P. Contreras, B. Akomolafe

LAB 2: Online Project Presentations and Tutorships

July 3rd to July 5th

Encounter 2 - FINAL PRESENTATIONS

In-person gathering in Madrid
July 10th to July 16th
Practical Duration:
Information: February 1st to July 16th, 2023

Format:
—Two online sessions per week, Mondays and Wednesdays at 6 pm (CET).
—Two in-person gatherings in Madrid: Apr. 28th to May 3rd 2023 and July 10th-16th.
—All sessions and lectures will always be available online for reference or in case of absence.
—There will be access to digital folders of study materials, and individual mentorships.
—All sessions will be in English.

Participants:
Approximately 20 participants will be selected based on their profiles and projects. There
are no age or previous education requirements, although profiles with a certain life, academic or
professional background that can contribute with their experience to the rest of the group will be
valued. The selection will be thus based on experience and intent, and its adequacy with the
main lines of the program. Group diversity and coherence will be attempted in this process. It is
advisable to have a medium level of English, oral and written.

Submission of applications:
Interested applicants must submit the following documentation through the online form:
— Abstract of the research or project proposal to be developed during the program
(artistic, theoretical, scientific, pedagogical...) with a maximum length of 500 words. It can be an
ongoing or new project.
—Motivation letter, with a maximum length of 500 words.
—Curriculum vitae.

Optionally, the following documentation may be submitted:

—Letters of recommendation, maximum two.
—Research or artistic portfolio
Practical Fees:
Information: The fee for the academic program is 2.000€ per participant, which includes registration,
tutorials, online bibliography, and study materials. Travel and accommodation expenses for the
Encounters: In-person gatherings in Madrid are not included.

The fee can be paid in a lump sum or in need-based installments. The first 50% should be paid
before the beginning of the course, and the remaining difference in the first two months through
direct debit.

Grants:
We understand that the cost to attend is a barrier to entry for some who may be interested
in joining. For that reason, the IPS offers a series of full grants and half grants in specific cases. If
you want to apply for one, please send an email to: pip@instituteforpostnaturalstudies.org
explaining your situation. The aim of this scholarship offer is to address the specific systemic
barriers that some attendees may face. We ask that you evaluate your level of need before
requesting this support, as we will not be asking for any kind of proof of your financial situation.
We will not share any information you provide here publicly, this is strictly for our team and
anything submitted will remain confidential.

Awarded Qualification:
End-of-course projects will be presented publicly at a renowned institution in Madrid. IPS
Faculty and tutors will give written feedback on the working process and all participants will
receive a certificate signed by the Institute for Postnatural Studies and all invited tutors and
guests. As an independent program, no official qualifications or diplomas are awarded.

Inquiries:
pip@instituteforpostnaturalstudies.org
A program on postnature, I° Edition
contemporary ecologies, Feb 1st — July 16th, 2023
art and thought practices.