This special session will be organised in collaboration with the Art.Lab of the Instituto Galego de Física de Altas Enerxías based on its exhibition Instrumentos de Visión by artist Armin Linke and curated by Mónica Bello from the Arts at CERN. The activity will include the participation of the director of IFGAE, theoretical physicist Carlos Salgado; the head of Scientific Culture of the CSIC-Galicia, Luísa Martínez; and the artist and sound researcher Xoán-Xil. The conversation will start with the work exhibited by Linke to make an analogy between the instruments of scientific vision and the tools of vision and filming and, from there, delve into the analogies and divergences between the methods of artistic and scientific research.  

In recent years, the IGFAE has promoted the ArtLab programme, a space for dialogue between art and science developed in this research centre, encouraging interactions between both knowledge areas. In this framework, and stemming from the recent exhibition organised by the IGFAE, the centre joins the Curtocircuito programme to explore the analogies between the instruments of scientific vision and the filming tools and to delve into the links and divergences between scientific and artistic research methods.

First session 12:00. Second session 13:30.

A walk through the streets of the city for tourism. A drift from ethnography, listening and play. Mass tourism is a global problem that plagues many cities. Santiago de Compostela is one of the places with the highest pressure in Spain. In 2023, 95,691 tourists visited a town with 98,179 inhabitants. Faced with this situation of saturation, Curtocircuíto has been carrying out activities such as #OutraCompostela or Artistic Residencies for almost a decade, which aim to portray and question this stress between tourists and neighbors. In this Metaturistic Expedition, the festival leaves its venues to explore its own city in search of those places of citizen friction with the intention of rethinking the public and contributing a grain of sand to the construction of new urban and social imaginaries for Compostela.

Valeria Mata is a social anthropologist. She writes and researches the intersections between artistic practices and anthropology, the political and cultural dimension of food, and the social imaginaries of travel. She has shared workshops and organised study and exploration groups around these themes. She published Plagiarize, Copy, Manipulate, Steal, Rewrite this Book (2018) and Todo lo que se mueve (2020).

Marcos PTT (Lugo, 1977) has always been dedicated to stage creation as a performer or director. After experimenting with object theatre with his company "El retrete de Dorian Gray", he has immersed himself in the format of sound walks, where he conceives the territory as a poetic object. To make the audience not only a spectator but also a creative agent. Sometimes, he succeeds. Since 2017, he has been part of Galiza Emocional, a collective formed by cultural and social workers. Using emotional cartographies, photography and sound art as tools, it aims to activate creative and participatory experiences that transform spaces and strengthen community ties. Sometimes, they also succeed.

The Internet is made up of a series of materials, constructions and interventions that are hidden from the naked eye, from nondescript buildings in the centre of our cities to urban beaches where the submarine cables that connect countries and continents are buried under the sand. Mario Santamaría proposes a drift following our data on the global telecommunications infrastructure.

This session ends with the screening of Deep Down Tidal (Tabita Rezaire, 2017)

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*English conference.

The seafloors hold many stories, and their futures still need to be told. For their 2023-2024 TBA21 Ocean-Archive.org Digital Residency, Mae Lubetkin mediated science and fiction on the seafloor through a practice-led investigation of the deep sea as digital. Drawing on critical media studies, database aesthetics, deep ocean exploration technologies, blue degrowth, and anti-extractive activism, Mae invited communities to imagine Seafloor Futures by submerging them into 3D models of deep-sea habitats. In solidarity with the seabed, the resulting series of three 3D animated vignettes—of hydrothermal vents, cold-water corals, and polymetallic nodule abyssal plains— represent the streams of stories and speculated futures co-imagined for these seafloor worlds. Realised through workshops, co-makings, 3D reconstruction, animation, sound design, written works, and a dissolving 3D database of deep-sea habitats, the Seafloor Futures project ocers counter-narratives and submerged imaginaries to reconsider our relation to deep ocean worlds and propose anti-extractive futures. Mae will unfold the stories and studies within the Seafloor Futures project, reorienting us to act with seafloors now.

Mae Lubetkin is an ocean scientist, writer, and artist. Their practice-led research remaps our relations to bodies of water using investigation, counter-narrative, speculation, and memory. Often at-sea, with a background in marine geology and subsea imaging, their work is both in dialogue and tension with Science. Guided by field studies and thinking with the more-than-human, they approach making and writing through queer, anti-extractive, and decolonial frameworks. Their core practice is in solidarity with submerged, ancient, transient, and imaginary environments.