I have the opportunity to participate and collaborate in -Making Milpa- international workshop held in Mutant letterpress, a space created by Dagmara Świętek dedicated to preserving the spiritual and material pattern of traditional printing located in the heart of the Nadodrze neighborhood in Wrocław. Continuing the work of previous artists from all over the world, we left a co-creative trace – the effect of individual sensitivity & mindfulness and collective action. In the first session we walked around the neighborhood elaborating sound and haptic mapping, to later create collective cartographies, printing and drawings.
Participants: Dagmara Świętek, Varvara Tokareva, Emilia Gręziak, Ivan Juarez, Vinicius Libardoni
The workshop was conducted by Diego Gutierrez Valladares
«The Milpa was the aztec way of agriculture and common in Central America based on collaboration, entanglement and concatenation between different plant species and social groups. It’s a technique that stands for sustainability and diversity providing food and multiple harvests throughout the year without degrading the soil as opposed to the extractionist and capitalist-colonial forms of monoculture. The milpa consists on a small parcel of land with mixed and entangled crops of corn, beans and pumpkin that grow together creating specific forms of collaboration based on its particularities and allowing other species to join producing further interrelations. One on/for/along/with/towards each other. It is through these prepositional forms that this proposal invites us to think-with-and-along forms of care, micropolitics and nourishing improbability.»
Mutant Letterpress, Wrocław, Poland
October 8-10, 2020