In the second half of June, the INLAND village hosted the participants of the Independent Studies Program (PEI) of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) and the first international meeting of Independent Art Spaces Campo-Ciudad SENDA.
The aim is to exchange and land several of the ideas and discourses with which we work at Inland, at the PEI and at the invited spaces in Latin America, in relation to case studies: the place where we are, the Picos de Europa region, and the other invited spaces, with the objective of thinking about ways of interaction with a social and ecological context, and the challenges that it presents.
Over the course of the week, people with different backgrounds (artists, researchers, curators, representatives of independent art spaces…) and from a variety of backgrounds tried to situate the decolonial perspective in which they usually work in the local context. This process involved reconciling political positions, cultural backgrounds and diverse identities in a space that is not very well known, while at the same time taking into account the multiple paradoxes involved not only in the contemporary rural space itself, but also in the cultural practices themselves, with a sense of emancipation and social transformation. Through this journey from the Latin American continent and from the Mediterranean to the Picos de Europa, through the encounter with the inhabitants of the village and the shepherds in the mountains or reflecting on their previous experiences in diverse rural environments, the meeting allowed to trace analysis on the nostalgias, identities, otherness, clashes between imaginaries and other forms of cultural construction linked to the territories, trying to point the way towards other possible forms of insertion and mediation in the local.