Guest Speakers Bios - Seminario Permanente

Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher based in Los Angeles. Since 2009 she has been a program manager at The Center of Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research and education organization interested in understanding the nature and scope of human interaction with the earth's surface, and in finding new meaning in the intentional and incidental forms we create individually and collectively. From 2011 to 2015 she was managing director of High Desert Test Sites. Previously she worked in art and research organizations, such as the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute. She has taught at Otis College of Art and Design and the University of Southern California School of Architecture, is a senior lecturer at the Southland Institute and serves on the board of Common Field.
www.auroratang.net / www.clui.org

Jennifer Teets is a curator, writer, and occasional performer. Her research combines inquiry, sciences studies, philosophy, and ficto-critique, and performs as an interrogative springboard for her curatorial practice. She is curator of The World in Which We Occur, an event series taking place over the telephone, and formulated around the history of materiality and flux as well as pertinent politically enmeshed scientific affairs shaping our world today.
www.jenniferteets.com / www.twwwo.org

Lorenzo Cirrincione is a philosopher, curator, and artist. Doctor in history of science, he is currently writing on early modern scientific collections – how they challenge us and stretch beyond obsolete ideas of artistic privilege and appropriation. As an artist his work investigates new ways of exhibiting and performing knowledge, mirroring the social and cultural games in the rich history of trade relations and cultural transfers. From 2004 to 2015, Lorenzo Cirrincione co-directed France Fiction, an artistic and curatorial entity that has organized over eighty exhibitions in France and abroad.

Jennifer Teets and Lorenzo Cirrincione will introduce their project titled Elusive Earths, an ongoing in situ work, process, and dialogue that looks to the elusiveness of rare clays, soils, and earths with forgotten origins. Over time this research has involved different forms of replication, extraction, and multiplication of processes and their distribution as “clay narratives."

Michel Leung is an artist/designer, urban farmer and visiting lecturer, born in London and now living in Hong Kong. He arrived at HK in 2009 to complete a Master's degree in Design and started practicing urban apiculture. This was his entry point into local agricultural issues and has since evolved into his PhD research to Insurrectionary Agricultural Milieux. He teaches social practice (MA) at Hong Kong Baptist University. One of his recent essays entitled "Part-Time Pedagogies" reflects on his teaching methodology, which includes participation and work on the land. Creative practices are often fortuitous, but they also take on the urgency when faced with land injustice. He also writes and shares practices at anthropology and alternative geography conferences. At the end of a year-long residency at the Spring Workshop, HK Farm (a group of which he is a member) together with a group of collaborators created and distributed 100 boxes containing the HK FARMers Almanac 2014-2015. After the Almanac, his practice has focused on Insurrectional Agricultural Milieux, emancipatory agricultural practices in the global neoliberal era.

Michael's social practice and research have included: the production of publications related to a land occupation in Ma Shi Po village (Hong Kong, 2016); the joint organization of three jackfruit festivals with Wang Chau villagers and the Wang Chau Green Belt Concern Group (Hong Kong, 2017-Present); farming with the homeless community who were previously evicted from Miyashita Park (Tokyo, 2017); critical cartography and sharing of organic seeds with tribals in Aarey Forest, partly under development for the new subway line (Mumbai, 2018); visiting and sharing publications at Grow Heathrow, an occupation that resists the third runway (London, 2018); and participating wherever possible at the ZAD (Zone à Défendre) a self-sufficient farmland (Notre-Dame-des-Landes, 2018).

Minghao Cao y JianJun Chen are an artistic duo who studied art at the Jilin College of the Arts in 2005. Since 2009, they have been teaching art. In 2009, they started the Chengdu artistic practice organization "Art Praxis". They currently live and work in Chengdu, China.

They focus mainly on "Socially Engaged Art", and have initiated the collaborative art project Village Politics Being Watched (2010), the art project A New Way to Explore Liangshan Village (2012) and the planned interaction program Gazing from the Top Floor. Their collaborative art project Village Politics Being Watched has won the HUGO BOSS Asia Art Award for Emerging Chinese Artists: 2013 Educational Project "Underconstruction and Reconctruction" and have participated in Transeuropa Festival at MACRO, Rome and at the Little Si Theatre in Bologna. Their works have been presented at Times Museum (Guangzhou), UCCA (Beijing), OrganHaus (Chongqing), A4 Contemporary Art Center (Chengdu), A Thousand Plateaus Art Space (Chengdu), Sichuan University Art Museum (Chengdu), etc. Mentions related to their works have been published in Urban China, RTCO Journal, ON | OFF: Collective Practice in China 2002-2012, Leap, etc. In addition, they have been invited to forums, conferences, workshops, etc. by many institutions (universities/museums/art centers).

Theo Reeves-Evison is a Leverhulme Early Career researcher at the Birmingham School of Art, where he is working on a funded research project entitled 'Speculative Natures': Contemporary Art and Interventionist Ecology'. The project investigates how speculative processes and storytelling have the capacity to organize environmental activities around imaginary futures, and will manifest itself in various events, presentations and publications over the next three years.

Before assuming this research position, his teaching experience covered various levels and subject areas from the Master's in Cultural Theory to the Art and Design Foundation. He holds a B.A. in Fine Arts, an M.A. in Critical Theory, and a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College. He is the editor, with Jon K. Shaw, of Fiction as Method (Sternberg, 2017), and has published recent articles in magazines and newspapers such as Frieze, Paragrana and Parallax. In January 2018 he edited a special issue of the Third Text magazine with Mark Rainey on the theme of 'ethical-aesthetic reparations', and his monograph After Transgression: Ethics of Contemporary Art will be published in 2019 by the Bloomsbury Academic Press.

David Prieto has a degree in Sociology from the University of Salamanca and a Masters in Sociology of Territory, Population and Migration from the Complutense University of Madrid. He is a member of the editorial team and the editorial board of Encrucijadas, a critical journal in social sciences. He dedicates his work to researching the relationship between society and territory. He is also a member of the study group Ecologies, New Territories and Landscapes in Contemporary Culture, initiated in 2013 as a moment for evaluation and self-reflection to guide future steps in this field.

Cristóbal Gómez Benito has a degree in Philosophy and Language Studies with a doctorate in Sociology. He was a facultative technician in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food between 1978 and 1981 and a professor of Sociology at UNED between 1991 and 2014. He has taught in General Sociology, Rural Sociology and Human Ecology and his preferred research areas in addition to these are History of Agrarian Social Thought, Environmental Sociology and Food Sociology.

Rafael SM Paniagua (Madrid, 1979) is an artist, teacher and researcher. He studied dramaturgy (RESAD), fine arts (UCLM) and philosophy (UNED), a field in which he is a Doctor of Aesthetics with a thesis on the notion of childhood. He taught for eight years the subject of Form Analysis at the former Faculty of Architecture of the UPSAM. He has also taught at the Faculty of BBAA and the Universidad de los Mayores of the UCM and at the Fundación Ortega y Gasset-Gregorio Marañón in Toledo. He is currently a visiting professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese culture at Princeton University.

As an artist he has worked both alone and in collaboration with many people. He was part of groups such as Luddotek. He has shown or shared his work in institutions such as Liquidación Total, Documenta XII, La Casa Encendida, Matadero-Intermediae, Espai D'Art Contemporani de Castelló, DentroFuera, Tabacalera de Lavapiés, MUSAC, Centro Huarte, Steirischer Herbst, Urbanacción, Walden 3, Elevate Festival, La Lenta, Artium, Seminario Euraca, Centro Centro, La Trasera de BBAA, Programa Sin Créditos, ABM Confecciones, 33 Bienal de São Paulo, Tabakalera... He has published in Concinnitas, Cairón, Buah!, Nolens Volens, Diagonal, Re-Visiones, Interferencias, El Estado Mental, Alexia, Ctxt, FronteraD .

He currently works on issues related to aesthetic and religious experience, the minor arts and popular culture. He lives in Cercedilla.
rrafaell.es

Fernando García-Dory is an artist and an agro-ecologist. His work deals specifically with the relationship between contemporary culture and nature as it is manifested in multiple contexts, from the landscape and the rural, to the desires and expectations related to identity, crisis, utopia and the potential for social change. He studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology, and is currently preparing his PhD in Agroecology. Interested in the harmonic complexity of biological forms and processes, his work addresses connections and cooperation, from microorganisms to social systems, and from traditional artistic languages, such as drawing, to projects, actions and collaborative agro-ecological cooperatives. His work has been exhibited at Tensta Konsthall (Stockholm), Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid), SFMOMA (San Francisco). He has participated in Biennials in Athens, Lisbon, Gwangju and Jeju and at Documenta 13. In 2012 he received the Creative Time New York Annenberg Award for Socially Engaged Art and was a Rolex Award finalist. He is a member of the Conseil des Formes (Paris) and member of the board of directors of World Alliance of Nomadic Pastoralists. Since 2009 he has been developing INLAND.