The Independent Program offered by the Institute for Postnatural Studies (IPS) is a new learning space that offers theoretical tools, embodied learning, and expertise to define and develop projects that examine postnature as a framework for contemporary creation. Its duration is six months (January - June 2025), using a dual methodology incorporating both theory and practice. Based on IPS’ ongoing initiatives, it offers an experimental platform for ecological thinking and cultural initiatives in an expanded virtual campus, approaching the students’ potential from a holistic mentoring perspective. It also brings together established researchers and art institutions that will host working sessions, encounters, and presentations. The program is structured in 3 online modules, accompanied by renowned international thinkers, artists, curators, and philosophers, complemented by two in-person laboratories in Madrid in which students will share their investigation in a community-building environment.

Please visit www.ips-independentprogram.org to know more about the full 2025 program.

 The Postnatural Independent Program (PIP) is addressed to a diversity of profiles in terms of education, experience, and aspirations: students from both art and theoretical practices, artists, curators, theorists, designers, scientists, researchers, educators, or anyone interested in exploring contemporary ecological debates. It is oriented to those with a preconceived context/knowledge of these themes and a project that could benefit from tutoring and guidance toward its better definition and practical steps for its possible materialization.

The idea of a romanticized nature as a background scenario or neutral framework where human activity simply takes place is no longer valid and must be replaced by a broader and more complex reflection. From a critical perspective, we must deepen into the various layers, hybrid codes, and entanglements that compose it. The environment can no longer be read only as a resource to be managed, nor as a set of given circumstances to which we must adapt, but as one of the main cultural-material constructions of modernity. This program will revolve around the concept of postnature, understood as a political arena and subject in conflict. It will function as a debate platform from which to investigate, problematize, discuss and multiply new approaches to artistic and thought practices through political ecologies, post-Darwinist aesthetics, and the creation of more-than-human ethics that contribute to the definitive dissolution of the nature-culture binomial in all its sequels, variants and consequences.

        The program will also navigate concepts such as the Anthropocene or the Chtulhucene in its multiple meanings and implications, ecological parliaments and perspectivism, colonialism and the necropolitics associated with human and non-human “resources”, new materialisms, ecofeminisms, and queer theories. Through practical experience and critical sessions, the goal will be to articulate a change of perspective allowing for the proliferation of voices and points of view regarding the problem of nature in the contemporary moment.

 The PIP will explore different learning formats from an interdisciplinary perspective. Most sessions will be held online through conversations, lectures, and experimental embodied exercises driven by the IPS faculty and guest speakers. Each session has reading materials that will be listed and shared beforehand.

        To favor a community-based experience, we will share moments in common in the form of tutorial laboratories where we will connect with each other and respective practices through individual and collective dialogues, experimental performative methodologies, and theoretical knowledge in a safe environment. We believe in a horizontal approach to learning in which we value not only the information shared but also the bonds and possible futures and kinships that can be germinated during our time together.

  During our time together we have programmed two in-person encounters in Madrid aimed at weaving connections between local initiatives and international agents. These are not mandatory but highly recommended.

       The first will take place mid-course, from March 23rd to March 30th. In this first gathering, we will do field trips, visiting cultural institutions, postnatural places around Madrid to elaborate on and embody the course research through personal relationships and interactions. During this time, there will also be in-person tutorships and workshops in a renowned cultural institution in Madrid.

       The program will end with a second encounter that will take place from June 1st to June 8th. With the guidance of a curatorial professional (to be announced), we will finalize and produce the presentation of projects developed during our time together. This event will be presented at a notable cultural institution in the city of Madrid. The participants will assume the transportation and housing costs to meet during these encounters but our team will gladly help in the organization and arrangement of these matters.

    This program is aimed at the development of research and artistic projects that find themselves at a beginning stage or at a crossroads and would benefit from sharing it in the collective, interdisciplinary context of the PIP. To that end, specific moments will be set aside throughout the semester for students to present their research and discuss it collectively with the rest of the group (LABs) and with members of the faculty. Through different formats and collective methodologies, the work will be put into conversation with the group in order to create a cross-pollination of practices and interests.

Silvia Federici

Astrida Neimanis

Jussi Parikka

Laura Tripaldi

Helen Hester

Báyò Akómoláfé

Institute of Queer Ecology

Coco Fusco

Barbara Santos

Luciana Parisi

Silvia Federici

    Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, writer, and a teacher. In 1972 she was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Wages For Housework campaign internationally. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti–death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and educational systems. From 1987 to 2005 she taught international studies, women studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons.

Astrida Neimanis

    A key figure in the Environmental Humanities, Astrida Neimanis writes about water, weather, and bodies at the intersection of feminism and environmental crisis. Their formative book Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017) is a study of the cultural and philosophical implications of water – the element that most intimately ties humans to their surroundings – recognising our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world. How to Weather Together: Feminist Practice for Climate Change, co-authored with longtime collaborator Jennifer Mae Hamilton, will be published in 2025. Neimanis is currently the director of The FEELed Lab and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at University of British Columbia Okanagan, on the unceded lands of the syilx people.

Laura Tripaldi

    Laura Tripaldi is a writer and researcher working at the intersection of science, technology and contemporary humanities. Her research revolves around the notion of materiality in its cultural and political implications. After obtaining her PhD in Materials Science and Nanotechnology, she has taught courses, seminars, and workshops at several prestigious cultural and academic institutions worldwide. Her book Parallel Minds. Discovering the Intelligence of Materials was first published in 2020 and translated into multiple languages.

Jussi Parikka

    Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark where he directs the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC). He is also visiting professor at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019-2023, funded by the Czech Science Foundation). In 2021 he was elected as a member of Academia Europaea. His published books include Insect Media (2010), Digital Contagions (2007/2016), A Geology of Media (2015), and A Slow, Contemporary Violence (2016). Recently, he co-edited Photography Off the Scale (2021) and is the co-author of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022). His book Operational Images was published in May 2023. Parikka’s books have been translated into 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Czech, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. He has also worked as curator, including as part of the curatorial team of transmediale 2023 and Helsinki Biennial 2023, as well as the co-curator of the forthcoming Motores del Clima (Laboral, Gijon, 2023). 

Coco Fusco

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Latinx Art Award, a Fulbright fellowship and a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, the Imperial War Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is the author of four books and a Professor of Art at Cooper Union. Tomorrow I Will Become an Island, a solo retrospective of Fusco’s opened at Berlin’s KW Institute of Contemporary Art in 2023.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe

    Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia).

    In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural Special Fellow of the Schumacher Centre for New Economics, the Inaugural Scholar in Residence for the Aspen Institute, the inaugural Special Fellow for the Council of an Uncertain Human Future, as well as Visiting Scholar to Clark University, Massachusetts, USA (2024). He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023). He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022. In a ceremony in July 2023, the City of Portland (Maine, USA) awarded Dr. Akomolafe with the symbolic ‘Key to the City’ in recognition of his planet-wide work and achievements. Dr. Akomolafe is a Member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow for the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance.

The Institute of Queer Ecology

    Lee Pivnik is a Miami-based artist, working predominantly in sculpture, video and social practice. In 2018 he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Sculpture and a concentration in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies, and in 2022 he attended the Immersion Program at The School of Architecture (TSOA) at Arcosanti. Nic Baird is a biologist, artist, writer, and dancer living in New York City. Baird served as co-director for the Institute of Queer Ecology since 2017 and is currently working on a doctorate in paleobiology.

    In 2017 Pivnik started the Institute of Queer Ecology, a collaborative organism that works to imagine and realize an equitable multispecies future. He has continued to run the project alongside artist and evolutionary biologist Nicolas Baird. IQECO builds on the theoretical framework of Queer Ecology, an adaptive practice concerned with interconnectivity, intimacy, and multispecies relationality. Guided by queer and feminist theory and decolonial thinking, they work to undo dangerously destructive human-centric hierarchies—or even flip them—to look at the critical importance of things happening invisibly; underground and out of sight.

    To date, the Institute of Queer Ecology has worked with over 120 different artists to present interdisciplinary programming that oscillates between curating exhibitions and directly producing artworks/projects. IQECO has presented projects with the Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami, Florida), the Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf, Germany), the Medellín Museum of Modern Art (Medellín, Colombia), the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade (Serbia), ASAKUSA (Tokyo, Japan), the Biennale of Sydney (Australia), Prairie (Chicago, IL), Bas Fisher Invitational (Miami, FL) Gas Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), among others.

Helen Hester    Helen Hester (b. 1983, she/her) is Professor of Gender, Technology and Cultural Politics at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction. Her recent publications include: After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (with Nick Srnicek, Verso, 2023),  Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018) and Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014). Her latest book, Post-Work: What it is, why it matters, and how we get there (with Will Stronge) will be out with Bloomsbury later this year.

Barbara Santos 

    Barbara Santos (1977) is a visual artist and independent researcher. Her work focuses on making transformation processes visible using the conjunction between art and technology under the guidance of ancestral knowledge in the Amazon. She has significant experience in the jungles since 2005 in the Vaupés and Putumayo regions (Colombian Amazon) and is the author of the book ‘La curación como tecnología’ (Healing as Technology, idartes, 2019). Co-editor El libro Jaguares de Yuruparí (ACAIPI - GAIA, 2015) and Seed Mothers (ACAIPI 2024). Co-creator Bosquesinas campesinas online exhibit (Comuccom - UE 2021). Her long-term collective projects are interwoven with the intention of questioning traditional structures and contemporary art formats through the strengthening of aesthetic ruptures that can come from the encounters of complex cultures.

Luciana Parisi

    Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Studies and Director of the PhD programme at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London. Her research focuses on philosophy and science to investigate potential conditions for ontological and epistemological change in culture, aesthetic and politics. Specifically engaging with cybernetics, information theories, and evolutionary theories, her work analyses the radical transformations of the body, nature, matter and thought led by the technocapitalist development of biotechnologies and computation. In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum). She has also written within the field of media philosophy and analysed the bionic transformation of the perceptive sensorium triggered by digital media, the advancement of new techno-ecologies of control, and the nanoengineering of matter. She has published articles on the cybernetic re-wiring of memory and perception in the context of a non-phenomenological critique of computational media vis a vis strategies of branding and marketing. Her interest in interactive media has also led her research to engage more closely with computation, cognition, and algorithmic aesthetics. In 2013, she published Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and the Control of Space (MIT Press).

Gabriel Alonso

        Based and born in Madrid, Gabriel Alonso is a visual artist and researcher formed between the ETSAM (Madrid), the Technische Universität (Berlin), and Columbia University in New York at the MS-CCCP, where he graduated with honors with his research thesis An Archaeology of Containment. In his works, through various formats such as installation, sculpture, photography or video, he investigates contemporary relationships between fiction and materiality, in order to blur binomials between the natural and the artificial, the human and the non-human, understanding nature as a complex cultural construct. Represented by Pradiauto Gallery (Madrid), his work has been exhibited in different galleries and international exhibitions, such as Nordés Galería (Santiago de Compostela), CaixaForum (Barcelona), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), CA2M (Madrid), Centro-Centro (Madrid), Fundación La Caixa (Barcelona), Matadero (Madrid), John Doe Gallery (New York), IIAF (New York), Poor Media Leuven (Belgium), Mila Gallery (Berlin) among others. He has been assistant professor at Barnard College of the University of Columbia (NYC) and at the Master of Advanced Architecture of the ETSAM, and has given many lectures, talks and workshops in different international institutions, museums and universities. In 2020, he received the Creation Grant from the Madrid City Council, and in 2016 he received the FAD award for his publication Desierto and was awarded one of the prestigious grants from the Graham Foundation for the Fine Arts. In 2020, he founded the Institute for Postnatural Studies. In parallel to his academic experimentation, research and curatorial practice, he develops an editorial practice through the platform Cthulhu books.