Resolution to the open call direction 2021
From La Escocesa we are very happy to announce that Alba Colomo is the new director of the creative factory!
Alba Colomo is a cultural worker, co-founder of the collective and in(ter)dependent space La Sala. She is currently investigating the possibilities of permaculture as a methodology in contemporary art, as part of the Jerwood Arts 2020 creation support programme. During 2021-22 she is developing the project fantasmas que circulan as part of the NO EXPO programme at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. In 2019 she was part of the curatorial team of FotoNoviembre'19 at TEA, Tenerife, where she developed the programme #Ahora, working with Silvia Federici, Yayo Herrero and Laurence Rassel, among others. Between 2015 and 2018 she was curator of the Public Programmes and Research department at Nottingham Contemporary (UK), where she initiated cross-cutting collective processes around institutional analysis, ecology and mental health.
Her proposal for La Escocesa is based on a series of urgencies and questions that affect us all as a society and that are therefore inherent to the functioning (present and future) of an institution and community such as the ones in this creative factory. The institutions have to exercise their 'response-ability' in the restoration of the new normality that is opening up. The main task of institutional management today is the mutual cultivation of the 'ability to respond' to the ecosocial collapse and the war against the living, imagining and acting out worlds that make sense, that pay attention to inequity and practices of care and justice, deciding what future we want to create and what our role is in the process.
This project for La Escocesa prioritises giving support to the processes already underway, attending to the needs and rhythms of the present so that the institutional model is consolidated and reinforced. Imagining, prototyping and successfully practising new institutional models is no easy task, and for this reason, generating a transparent, accessible and open model that can be replicated by similar organisations in other contexts is one of the central points of this new stage.
By understanding the institution as an ecosystem, permaculture is proposed as a methodology, based on its principles and ethics for the implementation of a critical, ecofeminist and horizontal management in line with the functioning of La Escocesa. Institutional psychotherapy is another of the central methodologies of the project, which will pay special attention to the visibility of the reproductive and care tasks that take place for a centre like La Escocesa to function. From the institution we must take charge, not only of art, but also of the land and bodies, as the only way to face the current eco-social collapse and the future to come.
The selection process has been complex, due to the large number and high level of the applications. It was carried out in two phases, a first one in which the intents were briefly demonstrated and, after a pre-selection, a second round in which the designated persons, after visits to the centre, were able to present a preliminary project with their proposals for the management and coordination of La Escocesa. The process and the interviews carried out were followed by a jury composed of: Montserrat Moliner, artist and cultural manager, member of the collective La Vuelta from the neighbourhood of San Narciso (Girona) and president of the Plataforma Asamblearia de Artistas de Cataluña (PAAC); Nancy Garín Guzmán, independent journalist, art researcher and curator working on projects related to critical thinking, new pedagogies, archives, memory and decolonialism; Marcos García Cristóbal, cultural manager, head of programming and director of Medialab-Prado until 2021; Conxita Oliver Cabestany, representative of the Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat de Catalunya; Rosa Gibert as representative of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona; and two people from the board of l'Associació d'Idees EMA, Marina Rubio Marco and Valentina Alvarado Matos.