END OF RESIDENCY WEBZINE

Diego Gutierrez Valladares

I am an artist, researcher and educator; I live in Wroclaw, Poland and was born in Costa Rica. I'm a PhD candidate in art (practice based) program at the Academy of art and design in Wroclaw. I am interested in practices that create warmth, nourish diversity, collective ways of learning and critical thinking. My research is trying to explore notions of care and porosity towards art practices based on collaboration.

For the residency I want to experiment with the concept of the Milpa as a metaphor and model for collaborative practices. The milpa was the aztec technique of agriculture based on collaboration, entanglement and concatenation between different plant species and social groups.

https://diegogutierrez-valladares.net

- a moment of realisation, change and/or disruption

The practical experimentation at the Church of Szczytnicki was a moment of realization where MILPA had the chance to physically engage with a specific site and collectively design and offer a program of collaborative actions to the public and develop as a group by sharing this experience.

I feel that each week there was moment of change, each week left new questions. The recent meeting/presentation by Pyramid created a change in me, it raised questions that are making me rethink learning and accesibility. At this moment, MILPA has the chance to engage with an educational institution and it is an important chance to reflect on the self-referential ways of knowledge production and language specially within universities and how to open and engage deeper towards diversity, exchange and offer better.



- a moment of connection

The time at Cittadellarte Intensive week was definitely a moment of connection at many levels, sharing our practices and reflecting with other residents, mentors, Unidee team and the place and surroundings (the river). It was a time to connect with movement and pleasure towards creativity. Refueling.



- any tools / methods / resources to share

Trying to know better the motivations and engagement each collaborator has. I’m learning how to delegate roles among collaborators to avoid overdoing, distributing weight.

I feel very comfortable in how MILPA can change its ways of making each time it changes of camp/site, how this unfolds towards unpredictability and rethinking its own ways of operating by entering in specific relation with each place and new collaborators.



- a question you are left with

How to develop diversity and vitality? How to collectively imagine/design learning environments? How to challenge barriers and increase porosity/accessibility? How to collectively chose and negotiate limits?



- something you will carry forward

I hope to keep thinking along the metaphor of the Milpa, exploring diversity and collaboration, spaces/ times for creativity and vitality. I am very excited about collectively imagining learning environments as temporal utopias.