IVAM’s bi-annual programme Ressò offers a space for encounter, recognition, reflection and experimentation for cultural mediators and agents interested in education, cultural mediation and working with audiences both inside and outside institutions.
In dialogue with the IVAM’s educational programme, the Valencian network of cultural mediators and agents, and realities beyond the Valencian Community, Ressò seeks to enable a stimulating time that enriches the practice of the context and generates connections with the outside world. A two-way relationship, in two stages: a conference in October 2025 and a closing conference in April 2026.
This 2025-26 edition, titled Between Gills and Lungs, will explore cultural mediation practices from the poetic and political power of the amphibian. Looking on the IVAM as a big frog, with one leg in the river and the other in the city, this programme will delve into the ecologies of mediation and into environmental mediation. It will bring together and honour practices that have their feet in the mud, in disputed territories and that propose other ways of life and worlds.
The very word mediation resonates with amphibiousness: there is something about being in two worlds, between land and water, between museum and audiences, artists and community, subjects and territories. This idea of “in between” possesses a power for contemporary mediation practices: not placing oneself geometrically in the middle, nor in legal neutrality between two parties, but rather recognizing the middle (social, environmental), recognizing oneself as part of the middle, recognizing our ability to traverse and connect, and from there, unfolding the world.
Through its two dates, 30 October 2025 and 23 April 2026, this new cycle of Ressò will seek to celebrate the wet, the viscous, the metamorphic, those key knowledges and practices for situated cultural mediation. Enabling an environment from which to travel through different geographies using pulmonary respiration and, perhaps also, gill respiration, in the brekekekex ko-ax ko-ax intoned by the chorus of frogs in Aristophanes’ comedy of the same name when Bacchus sets foot in their territory.
Written in lowercase and in constant transformation, hablarenarte is a non-profit organisation based in Madrid that has been working since 2002 in the fields of cultural mediation, expanded curatorial practice, contemporary creation and education. hablarenarte operates as a platform for interdependent and sustainable cultural projects, committed to situated research and immaterial production. Through its own programmes and initiatives developed in collaboration with a wide range of local and international organisations and agents, hablarenarte contributes to contemporary culture by helping to build new imaginaries and by advocating feminist, inclusive and participatory ways of working. hablarenarte promotes research residencies through its Planta Alta space and provides a space for community-based artistic experimentation through its Planta Baja space.
Dates:
Gills. 1st meeting: Thursday 30 October 2025.
Lungs. 2nd meeting: Thursday 23 April 2026.
