Todo por la Praxis joins Secuelas Energéticas
colectivo Todo por la PraxisThe artistic collective, based in Madrid, has been selected by the patrons of Barruelo de Santullán.
The mediation process with the residents of Barruelo de Santullán began in January 2025, holding face-to-face meetings throughout these months, mainly in the town's Municipal Library, and walking through different parts of the town so that the participants could reflect on the territory they inhabit in person.
Despite the years of closure of the mine, the history of the miners runs through the whole place and the personal stories of the participants, provoking great affection in each of the work sessions. But it does so from the silenced stories, past and present, of the local women. Women who were wives, mothers or daughters of the miners and who over the years built a network of sisterhood in order to be able to sustain themselves in a context in which machismo permeated everything.
With the closure of the mining operations, the public sphere that until then had belonged to men began to turn and it is mainly women who are now reclaiming it in order to try to give visibility and a voice to all the neighbours, but mainly to the women of the past and to those who now live in Barruelo de Santullán.
They feel abandoned, like the mine, since after a very intense period of mineral extractivism, now neither the dump (which has been re-naturalised in a process that has not involved local experts) represents them as a people. They and their stories are perceived as rubble, but they know that a large part of Barruelo de Santullán was built on this rubble and, in an exercise of resilience, they want to be reborn from it.
Their main desire is to generate a “place” for advocacy and restorative justice in their immediate environment, in order to move up the ladder to the places where decisions that affect them personally and socially are made.
After this period of mediation, the artistic collective chosen to materialise the communal desire they have imagined is Todo por la praxis (TxP).
The main focus of their themes is citizen activism in public and common spaces as an alternative to the neoliberal city. Now their interests are amplified, focusing on the extractivisms of the global north and on dissidence as political forms of resistance that construct other possible imaginaries. They are moving from lines of action positioned in collaborative practices as a response to the needs of the communities, towards collaborative practices that seek to install spaces for critical thinking. Allowing the activation of new transcultural subjectivities, as forms of emancipation and decolonisation of dominant thought, based on processes of research/production/action in both geographical and symbolic territories.
They use agitprop, counter-advertising and visibilisation or guerrilla communication to question models of place-making and their consequences, such as gentrification, evictions, segregation, touristification and social control; today they are spreading as critical devices that seek to challenge these and other narratives from aesthetic/political counter-narratives.
