Braid is a mediation program designed by the LUMBRE collective, as part of Art Space Unlimited, whose intention is to generate an opening process for La Escocesa so it can be home to communities that currently don’t inhabit it. Braid puts the focus on migrant people from the global south, who are professionally related to contemporary art and culture but who are not part of the city’s scene because of structural inequality.
The proposal is organised in three threads: Fire, Earth and Alliances. These are separate, but also interdependent, and they are woven from and within the Escocesa community, together with a possible community of migrant artists from the south and with our esco-community-city-art environment alliances.
Initially there are three meetings planned:
Immigration grief is a process linked to mental health with specific differentials. We believe that starting from mental health care and migratory grief makes it possible to raise awareness of the structural and systematic differences that make some bodies experience it differently to others.
*The training session will be internal to the Escocesa community, aimed only at the office team, the board and the resident artists.
This beginning of Braid is a moment of coming together between threads and mixing of realities; a moment to look at the community that inhabits the factory, while paying attention and doing to migrant artists who don’t. The three research lines will converge at specific times, in the form of open events, both inside and outside of La Escocesa.
Fire is a collective learning group of migrant artists from the global south that explores survival strategies within the artistic context of Barcelona. It is based on a critical position on the professional success model while seeking to generate knowledge and practical survival tools. A mapping of the professional context, its agents, codes and means will be carried out. Fuego is a process in which knowledge and knowledge are shared, with an active role for the participants.
In the context of the mental health of the migrant and especially the migrant artist from the global south, we relate Earth with the cutting and rebirth of its own roots, the search for water and fertile soil. It seems that the migratory experience is a continuous settling, adapting, adjusting spaces of desire and action to new territories. The Land line of work and research could focus on exploring how the complexities of identity and sense of belonging in the migrant artist come into play in new territories. This approach could delve into how migration experiences, cultural uprooting and linguistic barriers impact the mental health of the individual, but it really seeks to become an exchange of strategies and knowledge, shared ways of doing that can be of comfort and usefulness to others who have recently arrived or are in the process of settling.
The line of alliances crosses the braid transversally and proposes, on the one hand, formations, meetings and devices for the urgent and critical deconstruction of whiteness and for the betrayal of citizen-belonging privilege, with the intention of making, from our small situated space, a place more porous and sensitive to structural differences that allows us to be here while others are there or there, and open horizons of disposition to make real, affective, professional and productive alliances taking into account the differences and caring for them, instead of ignoring them. We propose the care of the migrated difference against the mandatory integration or assimilation of Fortress Europe.
Lumbre, warm events, is a collective formed by Tau Luna Acosta, Diana Rangel and Juan David Galindo, which is put together with the intention of putting powers at the center to generate things together. With a slow and insistent work methodology, as a way to confront the overproduction and overprogramming of the neoliberal logic that manages the field of art.