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April 7, 2024
Soma Summer
- Submission Deadline: April 7, 2024
- Entry Fee: Tuition is $38,500 Mexican Pesos and covers all academic expenses . However, it does not include accommodation, per diem, or transportation. The payment must be made in Mexican pesos (daily exchange rates applying). Tuition can be paid in three installments during May, June, and July. $2,500 USD is a reasonable budget for a three-week stay in Mexico City – including housing, food, recreation, and daily commute. Limited financial aid is available for candidates with significant financial need. Please contact us for more information.
- Award Info: The three week program includes two seminars, five master classes, several collective working sessions, and five field visits. As part of the latter we will be talking a walk following the perimeter of the ancient City of Tenochtitlan, visiting the National Museum of Anthropology, and going to a chinampa still devoted to agricultural production in Xochimilco. We will also visit the National Park La Marquesa - where we will follow water sources to be able to trace the connections between the environment, society, and ancestral cultures-, as well as the Colectivo de Cine Yerbabuena, a grassroots project in the periphery of Mexico City working on community filmmaking. In our sessions we will explore relationships between intellectual and embodied experiences, engage in consensus building exercises, and explore the ways in which individuals and collectives interact with each other. All these discussions on the plasticity of social configurations and expanded creative pedagogies will be framed by Mexico City, a place that is already, in and of itself, an exquisite and irreplaceable hybrid.
- Type: Residency
- Eligibility: International
- Categories: Craft/Traditional Arts, Photography, Drawing, Film/Video/New Media, Mixed-Media/Multi-Discipline, Painting, Sculpture
- Location: Col. San Pedro de los Pinos, Mexico City 03800, Mexico
SOMA Summer is an intensive three-week academic program in Mexico for artistic inquiry that welcomes a cohort of international artists, curators, critics, and art historians interested in collaborative pedagogical models. Each SOMA Summer is organized around a different theme that provides a compelling conceptual framework for research and creative work.
In its 2024 edition, SOMA Summer will be structured after Argentinean decolonial philosopher Enrique Dussel's subject-subject relation categories to deal with entanglement as our object of study.
In its 2024 edition, and with the academic support of Taniel Morales (artist, Mexico City), Vivian Abenshushan (artist, Mexico City), and Yoshua Okón (artist, Mexico City), along with a group of renowned Mexican and international artists and curators.
Entanglements
And what if skin was the center of our body and not its limit?
We are plural beings, entities constituted as part of an intricate biological-cultural-somatic system. The world we live in was here before we arrived. Each object, each concept, each event already had a history of its own. The labor involved in their becoming is not ours to claim. We are nothing but bonds, relations to other people; to plants and animals; to microorganisms; to the biosphere as a whole. Those bonds are the seeds that allow our thoughts, thoughts, and feelings to flourish. Complex causal chains bind us to the planet as a whole. Individual creation is a fiction: nothing is invented from scratch. All creations are collective. Gutenberg's printing press would have been impossible without Chinese technologies, without wine presses, without migrations, without minerals and grapevines. How can we live and create under that assumption?
Led by Taniel Morales (artist, Mexico City), Vivian Abenshushan (artist, Mexico City), and Yoshua Okón (artist, Mexico City), SOMA Summer 2024 will follow the methods of Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy. In this edition, participants will acquire and share knowledge through facilitated workshops and participatory sessions. This pedagogical approach is meant to counter the prevailing individualism and reductionist worldviews. Centering the program on different intersections between individuals, authorship, disciplines, knowledge, territories, and worldviews will enable the creation of exquisite irreplaceable hybrids.