This project proposes the creation of a framework and a community of experimental research for artistic production, the development of research-creation methodologies and the genealogical study of experimental practices in the field of the living arts and other expanded artistic practices, with special attention to experimental writing, paracinema and site-specific.

The terms artes vivas (living arts) and expanded practices refer both to a disciplinary fluidity (incorporating the inter- and trans-disciplinary) and to a dissolution of boundaries (made more flexible in theory, but still rigid in practice and academic studies) between an art inscribed in the realm of high culture and a multitude of practices that do not originally correspond to the “modern” concept of art. We are interested in redefining the experimental in relation to the popular, the vernacular, crafts and rituals. We will work on the tension between delocalised artistic practices in the global scene, dominated by the experience of the big cities, and site-specific practices, including the potential of a new experience of the rural. And we will pay attention to highlight, both through creation and critical study, dimensions of poetic experience excluded by Western rationality: the oneiric, the magical, the intimate and the spiritual.

This project proposes the organisation of an experimental community with a physical headquarters in Cuenca and itinerant venues linked to the work spaces of the members of the team, as well as other spaces with which research-creation collaborations will be maintained. It is articulated through the constitution of three laboratories, with emphasis on three formats: 1) expanded cinema, 2) expanded writing, 3) site specific and rurality. These three laboratories will generate creative projects, experimental workshops and methodological proposals. They are conceived as permeable spaces and will work actively to achieve transfers and collaborations. In parallel, a study group will be articulated, with a priority focus on the establishment of theoretical frameworks and genealogical proposals.

We defend the power of artistic practice (scenic, cinematographic, literary, visual and conceptual) and experimental methods to produce knowledge in the field of practice based artistic research and its methodologies. Today’s experimentality is a situated experimentality, nourished by feminist thought, environmentalism and new materialisms. It can take the form of experimentation with gender, modes of communication and the articulation of communities, or of inscription in ecosystems in which new relations between human subjectivities, life and matter are tested.

But the making of the present and its understanding are only possible in relation to other presents that we now consider the past. In the recovery of these past presents we will resort to a genealogical method, coherent with the centrality of the idea of life, which defines the framework of this research. And we will try out formats that are not exclusively textual: diagrammatic, oral, visual or performative. Making the past present through these genealogies may also be another mode of experimental practice. Experimental community for research in the living arts: creation, intervention, genealogy.