Campo Research Studio 2023


Artistas en Residencia_ septiembre 2023

CAMPO RESEARCH STUDIO (Roxana Pérez-Méndez y Mario Marzán)

El colectivo ha sido seleccionado para realizar una residencia artística en PACA (Gijón, Asturias, España) dentro de nuestro programa anual de residencias artísticas internacionales. Hemos reconocido en su práctica artística líneas de trabajo e inquietudes ecosóficas afines, practicantes de lo que ellos denominan landscape empathy, concepto que define también nuestro propio caminar: en línea de continuidad y compromiso con el paisaje del que formamos parte, real o imaginado, físico y mental.


La residencia artística en PACA tendrá una duración de 2 semanas del 17 al 30 DE SEPTIEMBRE 2023.

_

Campo Research Studio is an artistic collaborative that uses walking as a method towards research, socially engaged performance and education. We are interested in migratory aesthetics, landscapes as a form of mapping and the performance of walking as a way to generate new relationships with the environment. Campo engages in experimental long-distance walks and pilgrimages that address the cultural and aesthetic gestures of immersive, inquiry-based methods of experiential learning and aesthetic production.

Since Hurricane Maria’s catastrophic blow to Puerto Rico in 2017, Campo Research Studio (Campo) has produced walking art performances, curated walks and artist led pilgrimages that serve as instruments for cultivating empathy and ethical, ecological citizenship. As a social art practice, Campo invites the audience to explore together the ways wilderness is used under colonialism and systems of power–land ownership and development, natural and human resource extraction, political and cultural barriers that serve to separate us from the land and Nature. The patterns or routes that are expressly designed to be walked by the material body of the performer become a form of cartography and a tool for perception, calibrating the human scale against the world.

They work in collaboration with the land, the architecture upon it and the public, following a “Leave No Trace” philosophy.
This takes our work into the ephemeral, transgressive in its liminality, and transformative in its medium.


This year we are working on a project focused on Intersectionality, from the “oldest colony in the modern world” to the vestiges of our ancestry found upon the Asturian terrain.
In intersection [n. : a place or area where two or more things intersect. 2. the operation of finding the intersection of two or more sets. Each notation—photograph, video, installation, etc. in documentation is merely a fraction of the experience, one that draws upon the viewer like an invisible hand upon the page] and in immersion, we find that new landscapes gives us new points for inflection within our artistic practice. We want to stay to do our work in and with PACA, a furtive environment where art is synonymous with experimentation + community.

This work will serve as basis for our essay titled, 1 “Campo Research Studio: A Field Guide to Empathy” that will be featured in Empathic Engagements: Studies in Art History and Practice, published by Palgrave Macmillan.