Theatre in Palm Roadshow and LOOP City Screen 2024
Opening: Friday, November 15 at 7:00 p.m.
Performance: 7:30 p.m.
Location: Carrer d’Espronceda 326, nave 5, Barcelona
Additional opening hours by appointment via info@espronceda.net:
Tuesday, November 19 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Friday, November 22 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Learn more about the project here
Cuerpos Errantes is the translation of the Greek ‘plankton’, describing a collection of organisms floating adrift. Their role in aquatic ecosystems, especially marine ecosystems, is essential, as among other things they contribute to oxygen production, carbon absorption and cloud formation. This experimental project, the result of a collaboration between the Marine Sciences Institute (CSIC), Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture, and the Inervo Company, aims to make the invisible visible and explore through different performative audiovisual expressions the interconnection between the human and non-human worlds. The project highlights the need for dialogue between science and art for the creation of new narratives.
This project is framed within the interuniversity program PETRI-MED, which analyzes the impact of this element in its immediate context, and the European project THEATER IN PALM, which promotes international and intercultural collaboration for new performative artistic languages.
Today we live in an ecological and climatic crisis where human actions are causing enormous damage and tremendous impacts on the ecosystem due to a global style of development and growth characterized by a lack of social and environmental justice, with disastrous effects on nature. It is therefore urgent to rethink social, political, and ecological relations beyond the colonial project, promoting new spaces for transdisciplinary action and collaboration that foster the imagination to articulate social and political life and our relationship with nature in a different way.
Starting from this premise, Cuerpos Errantes, an experimental and transdisciplinary project between art and science, considers our broader ethical responsibilities towards the natural environment and the organisms that inhabit it and recognizes the interconnection between the social and environmental spheres.
Inviting us to reflect on a renewed way of conceiving natural goods as common goods that belong to the community and have an intrinsic value that exceeds any price, the works presented propose to create new social imaginaries through the introduction of new narratives that promote forms of knowledge respectful of life.
By fostering a renewed understanding of society and nature, this project aims to reconsider our ethical responsibilities towards the natural world and the organisms that inhabit it.
Alessia Gervasone, Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture
The Cuerpos Errantes project is proposed as a place of group experimentation for the creation of narratives between the symbolic and the real, born from the interdisciplinary dialogue between science and art.
This dialogue, which flows through alternative channels, fluctuating between rigor and poetics, arises from the desire to share visions on marine ecosystems, the relationships established between tiny living beings, between artists and scientists, and between microorganisms and all.
A complex system of relationships and points of view that oscillate between the most rational knowledge and the emotionality of movement takes an unexpected path, opening a space for reflection and contemplation.
We, human beings, coexist with tiny beings inside and outside us, and we share the essence of being wandering bodies—at some point or always—destined to meet physically, but also philosophically. This audiovisual installation is the meeting place of these intertwined gazes, human and nonhuman, that connect us without apparent direction but with the intention of a rapprochement and confluence.
Elisabetta Broglio, Institut de Ciències del Mar (CSIC), Barcelona
THE MICRO, THE MACRO, AND THE HUMAN
Through audiovisual experimentation, this work builds upon archival materials from scientific expeditions at sea to generate a visual language of textures, overlays, and saturations. The piece seeks to provoke reflection on the overlooked role of planktonic organisms in marine ecosystems and the scale of human impact on them. Using a layered aesthetic that conveys both decomposition and urgency for action, it invites viewers to reconsider this microscopic world—a crucial yet vulnerable ecosystem. By merging the micro and the macro, the work becomes a metaphor for interdependence, suggesting that even the smallest organism contributes to the planetary whole.
ASCENT AND DESCENT
This video-dance piece employs the expressive language of the body and the cadence of visual rhythm to transform complex natural processes—such as vertical migration and the carbon absorption-release cycle—into a bodily experience through the dancers. Drawing on principles of biomimicry and vertical dance, the dancers’ movements reflect the cyclical journey of carbon as it rises and falls within the ocean. The video establishes a visual analogy between the urban scientific context and the microscopic processes occurring in the ocean, where a building becomes an architectural extension of marine depths. Through visual effects and AI-assisted post-production, the dancers’ bodies merge with marine organisms, creating a hybrid aesthetic that fuses human and non-human forms. In doing so, the piece also suggests a reinterpretation of human identity and subjectivity—not as isolated entities but as interconnected and fluid with the vital rhythms of all ecosystems.
UNITED AND INTERCONNECTED
Positioned at the meeting point between sky and sea, the performers embody a liminal presence, floating in this transitional space where clouds drift and dissolve. The work encourages a temporal deceleration, guiding us to embody the natural rhythms of cloud formation and marine life. This shared experience serves as a metaphor that recalls the concept of the “oceanic feeling” described by Romain Rolland in his correspondence with Sigmund Freud—a profound sense of boundless connection that transcends personal autonomy and invokes unity between the self and the external world. This feeling represents an almost sublime experience in which the boundaries of the self dissolve, identity becomes fluid, and existence is perceived as an interconnected continuum—an archipelagic vision of being. Delicately exploring our ties to the microorganisms that generate the oxygen we breathe, the work functions as both meditation and invocation: an invitation to experience the ocean as a space of fluid connection and to reflect on our inherent link to the living ecosystems that sustain us. Revisiting the concept of “ecological thought” developed by Timothy Morton, the piece dissolves individual and subjective boundaries, proposing an identity inseparable from the relational fabric of natural ecosystems. It invites us to physically and symbolically immerse ourselves in the dynamic cycles of water and air, becoming one with the ecosystem.
LUZ LÍQUIDA LABORATORY
Contemporary artistic and scientific practices play a fundamental role in raising awareness in this context of ecosocial transition. Beyond pure aesthetics, they have the power to challenge dominant narratives, question unsustainable practices, and stimulate new connections that foster collaborations toward a more equitable and sustainable future.
Following this perspective, we can highlight how the collaboration between artistic, scientific, philosophical, and political research serves as a catalyst for awareness and change, helping us envision a future where the rights of all living beings—natural and non-natural—are included in key decision-making processes to protect the ecosystems we share.
LUZ LÍQUIDA is the name of the interdisciplinary laboratory that took place in May 2024. Cuerpos Errantes emerged spontaneously from this initial collaboration between Espronceda, the Instituto de Ciencias del Mar (CSIC), and the dance company Inervo, carrying forward some of the ideas and artists from that experience to further its evolution.
Artistic Direction
Benjamín Slavutzky
Carlotta Storelli
Curated by
Alessia Gervasone
Elisabetta Broglio
Dancers
Carlotta Storelli
Fabiana Paisani
Lluvia Roja
Sandra Barroso Mancera
Performers
Alexandra Anastasiadou
Carlotta Storelli
Elisabetta Broglio
Marta Fernandez Bessa
Nathalie Rey
Voiceover Artists
Fabiana Paisani
Lluvia Roja
Marta Fernandez Bessa
Sandra Barroso Mancera
Sara Broto
Editing and Montage
Sara Broto
Teddy Chang
Sound Editing and Soundtrack
Maribel Tafur
Sara Broto
Interactive Video
Natalia Gima
Camera
Benjamín Slavutzky
Dario Cottafava
Elisabetta Broglio
Alessia Gervasone
Teddy Chang
Vitor Schietti
Drone Pilot
Marco Talone
Communication
Malena Vinay
Maria Rúbies Vistuer
Graphics and Production
Liza Adamchuk
Production
Espronceda, Institute of Art and Culture
Institute of Marine Sciences (CSIC)
Acknowledgements
SouLivre, Denise Bragueto, Magda Vila, Vanessa Balagué Año, Liza Adamchuk, Malena Vinay, Césarine Wisline Lafontant, Ciara MoOom, Cristina Dezi, David Mediel (Feroce), Eléonore Ozanne, Esther Sanchez Sosa, Fredo Landaveri, Javiera Gazitua Charnes, Natalia Cabrera, Paula Vicente Puiggros, Verónica Peña, Xavier Muñoz
