Concomitentes organises the Sustainability Governance Workshop

The meeting will take place on Friday, 14 October from 16.00hrs at the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid.

From Concomitentes we organise the Sustainability Governance Day, which will take place on Friday, 14 October from 16.00hrs at the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid and which seeks to explore the scope for community action in managing or reclaiming ecology. This conference is a space in which to reflect on the way in which decisions are made, and rights and duties are generated when it comes to dealing with the future of our planet. 

In the proposed dialogues, we will ask ourselves: What is the capacity of communities to govern sustainability? How much agency does reclamation bring to sustaining the world? What role does contemporary art have in all this? Or whether, in addition to the reclamation itself and the assumption of renunciations, there is scope for collective decision-making and translation into public policy?. 

This event is co-organised with the UNESCO Chair in Environmental Education and Sustainable Development at UNED, The project, weaving a meeting place between art and science with which to continue thinking about the effects and the ways in which we can confront the climate emergency. And it has the collaboration of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, founding patron of Concomitentes.

Through this proposal we seek to generate a dialogue with agents related to art while at the same time we plot complicities with experts in the defence of the environment, ecocritical thought or social movements. This panel of participants will include the following people Fran Quiroga, Coordinator of Concomitentes, and Maria Novo, The UNESCO Chair in Environmental Education and Sustainable Development (UNED); the biologist and rector of the EAN University in Colombia, Brigitte Baptiste, e Isabelle Le Gallo, Director of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation in Spain; Sören Meschede, Concomitentes‘ mediator in the project 'Living waters’will moderate the round table, which will be completed by the artist Susana Cámara, and the director of the Centre d'Art la Panera, Christian Alonso; The programme will be closed by the researchers and activists Yayo Herrero y Emilio Santiago Muiño, with the moderation of Fran Quiroga.

Interested persons will also have the option of participating in a workshop on genetic biodiversity of seeds given by the education team of the Royal Botanic Garden.

A project between laboratory and artistic production company

Concomitant, is defined as a experimental laboratory and a artistic producer of decision-making between citizen groups and an artist, who participate in the co-creation of a work that responds to a localised social and/or environmental problem. From our own practice - with six concomitances in Madrid, Barcelona, Tenerife, Betanzos (Galicia), La Sobarriba (León, Castilla y León) and Llanos (Cantabria) - we propose new models of governance that deepen democracy, with the communities themselves empowering themselves to carry out their own processes. 

On the other hand, the 2030 Agenda sets the roadmap for Concomitentes. The contemporary art cannot be satisfied with being just a gesture; it is at the service of the generation of new imaginaries, of the empowerment of communities. and also creates protocols for social participation and meeting places to rethink at the micro level how the planet can be sustained.

Here we share with you the full programme of the event:

16:00 - 17:30h I Workshop: Genetic biodiversity of seeds

17:30 - 17:45h I Inauguration

With Fran Quiroga and Maria José Bautista-Cerro

17:45 - 18:30h I Conversation: ‘Nature as a queer entity’.’

Moderated by Isabelle Le Gallo. With Brigitte Baptiste (online)

18:30 - 19:30h I Conversation: ‘The capacity to produce governance’.’

Moderated by Sören Meschede. With Susana Cámara and Christian Alonso

19:30 - 20:30h I Conversation: ‘Communities and Redistribution’.’

Moderated by Fran Quiroga. With Yayo Herrero and Emilio Santiago

We invite you to participate in this space to reflect on the way in which decisions are made and rights and duties are generated when dealing with the future of our planet.

To follow the day in streaming click here.

Reservations are essential here.

For full details of the programme click on here.