IASPIS 30: common acts for grounded futures

As IASPIS enters the year of its 30th anniversary, the programme launches common acts for grounded futures, bringing together artistic and curatorial practices attentive to the conditions shaping art today—embodied histories, shifting ecologies, infrastructures of care and control, and the politics that influence how life is sensed and lived. From its position as an international platform, IASPIS asks how exchange can be rooted in practices of solidarity, reciprocity, and decolonial attention that support sustained and meaningful encounters.

Initiated by Corina Oprea, IASPIS Guest Curator, the programme considers how artistic methodologies emerge from these conditions and how they cultivate forms of relation, responsibility, and imagination capable of opening new trajectories. Rather than assembling a retrospective narrative, the series creates a space where earlier institutional pathways meet contemporary urgencies—encounters that refract inherited histories, unsettle positions of power, and invite reorientation.

Across 2025–2026, common acts for grounded futures unfolds as a dispersed and evolving ecology of gatherings, conversations, performances, sound-based works, and dialogical formats. It reflects on how artistic practices negotiate fragility, resistance, and interdependence; how attention can become a method; and how new forms of being-together might emerge through minor gestures and shared acts.

The first gathering on Friday, 5 December 2025 brings together María Berríos, Goldin+Senneby, Santiago Mostyn, and Roxy Farhat—artists and curators working across performative, sonic, narrative, and discursive fields. Their contributions consider how stories and images circulate, how technologies shape experience, how activism and artistic method intersect, and how practices of listening and repair can create shared grounds within conditions of uncertainty.

This opening marks an invitation to inhabit the tensions, vulnerabilities, and possibilities that arise when artistic practices meet the pressures of the present. Through this unfolding process, IASPIS becomes a site for learning and unlearning, for returning and redirecting, and for cultivating conditions through which grounded futures may be sensed, assembled, and sustained collectively.

Graphic design: Jonas Williamsson. Referencing IASPIS work by Andreas and Fredrika, Martin Frostner, Mattias Givell, Konst & Teknik, Johanna Lewengard, Mu AB and Åbäke through letterforms from three decades of practice.

PROGRAMME

5:30 – 6 PM
Goldin+Senneby — Swallow Image
A performance-lecture exploring how images, technologies, and extractive systems shape the body’s relation to wider infrastructures.

6 – 6:10 PM
Short break

6:10 – 6:40 PM
María Berríos — Opening lecture: Machetes and Smoking Mountains in Solidarity. Stories to tell one another
Curator, researcher and Director of Research and Curatorial Practice at MACBA, Barcelona, and co-curator of the 11th Berlin Biennale, María Berríos reflects on how connecting histories of struggle, solidarity and situated knowledges can ground artistic and institutional practices today.

6:45 – 7:10 PM
Santiago Mostyn — Artistic presentation
Starting with declassified military photographs and sounds linked to the revolutionary movement in 1970s Grenada, Santiago Mostyn examines how artistic methods can unsettle dominant narratives and reshape our understanding of political power.

7:10 – 7:30 PM
Roxy Farhat — Artistic presentation
A reflection on the intersections between artistic practice, climate activism, and civil disobedience, attending to the urgencies and responsibilities of working within ecological and political crisis.

7:30 – 8:00 PM
Panel conversation
with María Berríos, Goldin+Senneby, Santiago Mostyn and Roxy Farhat
Moderated by Corina Oprea

Doors open at 5 PM with a screening of Language against Identity by Santiago Mostyn, presented in the IASPIS Archive Room. Language Against Identity is a film essay that traces the effects of geographic and cultural displacement by focusing on two case studies of animals that were forcibly taken from southern Africa and put on display in northern Europe. The work contrasts the beauty of local flora and fauna with the lasting effects of colonialism, before precipitating a collapse in cinematic narrative.

PARTICIPANTS

María Berríos is a Chilean ex-sociologist, writer, educator, mother, and curator. Her work explores art, culture, and politics in Latin America and beyond. Her research has delved into stories of experimental counterinformation strategies, collective experiments in radical pedagogies, and internationalist artistic solidarity movements, with a special interest in their exhibition formats. She has been a professor and guest tutor at several universities and art academies in Europe and Latin America, and has published her work extensively. Berríos was one of four curators of the 11th Berlin Biennale, The Crack Begins Within (2019–2020), and is currently the Director of Curatorial Programs and Research at Museo d’ Arte Contemporani  Barcelona (MACBA), where she leads the tenth edition of the museum’s Independent Study Programme (PEI), “Sol y dar y dad”. Collective Learning for an Inadmissible Present.

Goldin+Senneby (since 2004) is an artist duo whose work has explored how economic structures shape our society. In recent years, their practice has increasingly shifted towards questions of care, ecology and the politics of diagnosis. Goldin+Senneby has exhibited at the biennials in São Paulo, Istanbul and Gwangju; held solo exhibitions at The Power Plant in Toronto, Kadist in Paris, e-flux in New York, Accelerator in Stockholm, and MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Mass. Their works are included in the collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art; and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Santiago Mostyn (b. Turtle Island) is an artist whose practice foregrounds narrative entanglements in pursuit of new understandings of place, with works manifesting as films, texts, exhibitions, and curatorial projects. Mostyn was a 2024-25 fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Roxy Farhat is an artist and climate activist based in Stockholm. Born in Tehran, Iran, and raised in Sweden, she was educated in both Sweden and the United States. Her practice primarily centres on video and performance, drawing on personal experience to address themes such as capitalism’s influence on public and private space, social prejudice, and the role of art as a political force. Her works are characterised by an absurd, kitschy humour underpinned by political conviction. Since 2023, she has been one of the spokespersons for the climate movement Återställ Våtmarker (Restore the Wetlands).