The Stones Speak: Affective Geologies

Workshop with Juana Guerrero and Gabriela Alcayaga
21 October 4–7 pm, followed by dinner
Flutgraben e.V. / Project Space
Am Flutgraben 3, 12435 Berlin
Languages: Spanish and English

Please register until 20 October at sh@district-berlin.com

We invite you to explore relationships as layers of living matter: bodies, lands, and technologies that sediment, erode, and resist. A laboratory for activating connections, exploring how minerals permeate us, sustain us, and also exhaust us.

In this experience, we will open the records gathered during the first stage of residency with DISTRICT and D’EST in Flutgraben—images, sounds, writings—to intervene and transform them collectively through performance, video, poetry, and collage.

We will ask ourselves: How does the mineral manifest itself in our bodies, in the objects we inhabit, in the networks that connect and consume us? What forms of reciprocity and care are possible in a world that has forgotten to listen to the earth? A space to think and feel alongside matter, to open new correspondences between the human and the mineral. A call to insubordination: to let the earth—in all its forms—speak to us.

Juana Guerrero and Gabriela Alcayaga work collaboratively in performance, video art, poetry, and collage. They explore the body as a political and affective territory, where memory, desire, and resistance intersect. Self-taught, they develop their practice outside the academy, in dialogue with communities and landscapes of northern Chile. Their works have been presented in museums, contemporary art spaces, and independent platforms in Chile and abroad, including the National Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, MAC Quinta Normal, and MARKK in Hamburg.

Interconexiones Minerales is an artistic research and residency program. It connects mining and post-extraction ecologies in Tarapaca and East Germany through  transdisciplinary collaborations between artists, researchers, activists and local communities. In different ecologies, archives and institutions, in joint journeys, conversations and ceremonies, Interconexiones Minerales interacts with wounded landscapes, toxic residues and invisibilized memory of extraction cultures and environments. A particular focus is on embodiment at the crossings of social and ecological spheres: How do earth, rocks, and minerals such as lignite, uranium, saltpeter, copper, and lithium pass through collective and individual bodies and are deposited in them? How is their extraction, processing, and use expressed in emotional and psychosocial dimensions?

A program initiated by Juana Guerrero, Gabriela Alcayaga and Suza Husse with District * School without Center, Berlin, D’EST and Flutgraben e.V.