Son[i]a #315 Laagencia

For the Columbian collective Laagencia, mediation and education are indistinguishable from artistic practice. Laagencia first opened its doors in 2010 in the Chapinero district of Bogotá, as an office for art projects with an exhibition space, run by Mariana Murcia, Diego García, Santiago Pinyol, Mónica Zamudio and Sebastián Cruz. Five years later it was rebooted as a collective thinking and study group open to methodological experimentation and informality, always looking for ways to organise new forms of “doing with others”.

One of their common ventures is the “Garage School” open programme: an informal, ensemble research and education project that implements alternative forms of production and circulation of knowledge. A Garage School can take many forms: talks, curatorships, artistic residencies, shared reading, collective writing, self-publishing exercises, outdoor assemblies, banquets... with all the frictions, affects, and unlearning that they entail.

In this ensemble podcast, we talk with Mariana Murcia, Diego García and Santiago Pinyol about these ten years of "extitution". We explore Gerald Raunig’s notion of “instituent practices” by way of Irit Rogoff, read out here by the agents. We talk about art that is decentralised from financial centres, about participation versus representation, about mediation and public programmes in collaboration. We also talk about collective writing in the cloud and the performative coefficient, about decolonial gestures and a new Cubeo museum by the Cubeo people in the Vaupés River basin, and about other fragilities and strengths of possible art worlds.