Curtain Up: En boca de artista 3

En boca de artista returns—a series that shines a spotlight on creators and their creative processes. On this occasion, the conversations will focus on the research currently being developed at the CRA by the Art and Environment residents. This first session will explore botany, the language used to classify flowers, and natural history, intersecting these concepts with speculative fiction and archaeologies of the future.

The first session will take place on October 29 and will be divided into two parts:

• Part One:

  Ignacio García Sánchez and Ana Robles Pérez will begin the session with a conversation alongside artist, educator, and researcher Bárbara Fluxá.

  Immersed in contemporary speculative narratives, Ignacio and Ana use imagination as a critical tool to raise questions about today's ecosystemic crisis. They propose alternative futures, technologies, societies, and potential political or ecological scenarios to contrast with the catastrophic outcomes often presented as inevitable. By imagining these other worlds through a kind of archaeology of the future, their works allow us to interrogate the material, historical, and political boundaries of our own.

• Part Two:

  Gelen Jeleton and Mauricio Freyre will then join curator and professor Claudia Rodríguez Ponga for a conversation.

  Gelen Jeleton and Mauricio Freyre share a line of reflection that scales up from a seed, a herb, a habit, or a consumer narrative. In Mauricio's case, it moves from a cinchona seed to its use as an anti-malarial treatment in colonial expansion expeditions, spanning a spectrum of legends and extractive practices. In Gelen's case, it ranges from natural botanical remedies to their pharmacological exploitation, with all its shades of light and shadow. Moving from the micro to the macro, the work of both artists explores the ambivalence between healing and abuse.