OPP
bibi calderaro
projects links to the world cv / press contact
MinusSpace
Gallery representation in New York.
MS-tags
Project participation, filed in the Minus Space website.
Where to? Steps towards the future of Walking Arts Symposium
In recent years walking as an aesthetic pursuit has changed its scale –it has unleashed itself from other performative acts and claims its own genre altogether. This move responds to current needs to evolve from representational modes of understanding and relating to the world.
In the constant search for a richer understanding of human-nature relationality, walking has turned into a quasi-perfect medium that integrates external and internal elements such as human geography, different environmental aspects and phenomenology.
Walking in this context is the non-verbal narrative that can contribute answers to this need. Integrating body-mind, space and time, place and temporality, walking induces connections with the self and the world in particular and complex ways. Because land is itself a narrative upon which walking is performed, and walking is a doubly dialectical narrating act —in walking we both read and write landscape, creating and finding meaning in it while walking— the analysis of its cognitive and affective possibilities would render a meta-narrative that couples the performative with thought and landscape in a dynamic embodied reciprocity.
My particular interest is challenging this relationship beyond a purely aesthetic and poetic pursuit, with the intention to facilitate an experience with the overall delivering goal to act as ontological shifter. This goal aims at the expansion of conceptual and phenomenological categories and boundaries, including human consciousness. Walking can produce a different level of discernment to build more robust configurations of how knowledge and ethical values are generated, enacted and communicated.
What are ways to integrate cognitive and phenomenological inquiry modes with walking in nature? What would it require in order for it to become a pedagogical model as generative field where ethical values may be enacted and communicated?
I will put together a glossary for a conceptually based walking gesture, one that follows a goal yet has no map.
Out of Time Conference -SLSA 2017
“Walking as Ontological Shifter” bifurcates from an aesthetic social practice, tending towards pedagogy and healing. Walking as intentional performatic act is forwarded as medium to research how the virtual is actualized and returned to virtuality. It engages parallelisms and contact points between the time-based, neuroscientific concept of Reentry (Edelman and Tononi) and a Deleuzian speculative philosophy whereby the possibilities of difference from repetition are explored. I critically explore how the body is site of integration of the epistemological (cognitive and pre-language affective processes) and the ontological (being and becoming), while it is site of the transduction between ‘self’ and ‘world.’ Complex relationships between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are explored from a post-thermodynamics, neo-cybernetics perspective, via physical immersion in ‘green,’ ‘natural’ spaces where the conditions of possibility for these meetings to occur at a slower speed and softer touch are maximized. New conceptualizations of a dynamic understanding of subjectivity as it pertains to human and more-than-human relationalities are examined under the hypothesis that epistemic shifts about different concepts of time may be reflected ontologically—as embodied cognitive and affective processes, in non-hierarchical, non-anthropocentric relationalities.
This is a speculative model for difference that engages the spiritual/individual as it inhabits the political, and vice-versa. Walking is a medium that counters the speed and turbulence of today’s human-environment relationalities by instilling a slower pace grounded on the materiality of absorbent matter as found in ‘nature.’ The conditions for these processes to occur softly are here maximized, challenging pathological/volatile temporalities produced by today’s big data environments.
Knowledge/Culture/Ecologies Conference
The art collective Coastal Reading Group hosts collaborators from different coasts (Bibi Calderaro-NYC/Margaretha Haughwout-San Francisco) troubling the subjects of wilderness, speciation, humanness and ways of knowing through engagements with (non)humans.

In 2016, we conducted a socially-engaged project that explored how to grieve the loss of non-human species and ecological habitats that are passing away during this historic, geologic, cultural moment, and indeed if this is possible, considering late capitalism prevents a reckoning with relational ecologies beyond-the-human. Collected natural materials implicated in the adoption of sedentary agriculture and settler-colonization became documents of ecological transformation. Participants were invited to handle them while telling stories of connection and disconnection. At dawn, we buried our materials.
For Knowledge/Culture/Ecologies, we propose an experimental video that expands ideas around historic natures, grief and the more-than-human, the temporalities of living, dying, yet-to-live -- weaving footage, text and images from our event.
Research
A link to full papers.
Librioteca Pineal
Librioteca Pineal is a time-based piece now housed at CIA Centro in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The artist will expand the sets and lists of titles during an indeterminate period of time, as well as invite other thinkers to contribute to the expansion.
Peripatetics as knowledge
This collaborative performance revolved around the reactivation of texts selected from Librioteca Pineal, currently housed at Center for Artistic Research in Bs. As. Argentina. LP is a growing library commissioned by CIA to the artist in 2010.

Exquisite Corpus: the Maize
process blog for the exhibition Exquisite Corpus: The Maize, curated by Holes in the Wall.
We Weave and Heft by the River
We Weave and Heft by the River is an all night communal event that explores the role of grief in our time. The event is part of Schumacher College's Language, Landscape and the Sublime Symposium .
CoastalReadingGroup
from different coastal locations, we read, discuss and project.
The Institute for Wishful Thinking
As self-declared Artists in Residence for the US Government, the Institute for Wishful Thinking (IWT) believes that the community of artists and designers possesses untapped creative and conceptual resources that could be applied to solving social problems. With this in mind we invite proposals from artists, architects and designers for residencies at government organizations and agencies at all levels.
www.morethanhumanresearch.com
expanded socialities and non-representational inquiries
(c) BIBI CALDERARO