Previous to this, Morandeira has held notable institutional positions as Director of KADIST Paris (2023-2024), curator of Post-Academic Program and member of the Executive Team at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (2021-23); co-director of the escuelita department at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo—CA2M (2016-2020), a research organism operating as the digestive system of the institution; curator of the Thought Programme at the Teatros del Canal (2019-2020), a debate and knowledge production arena on dance and theatre, its culture and politics, its community and scene; ARCO Madrid's Opening section curator for the 2021-22-23 editions; mediator for the Concomitentes (Nouveaux Commanditaires/New Patrons, 2016-ongoing) project; or a member of the visual arts counselling board of PICE grants at Acción Cultural Española (2019-2020), amongst others.
In the academic and para-academic fields, she has been lecturer and coordinator of the course Social and Ecological Activism in the Visual Arts at Leiden University; COOP and theory tutor at the Dutch Art Institute MA program (2019-23); faculty of the post-master Collective Practices Research Course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. In collaboration with KEM collective, Krytyka Polityczna and Kasia Sloboda, she developped How to touch movement? Body Materialities, Social Choreographies and Queer Feminisms: an informal school program delving on expanded choreography and feminisms, opened in 2021 in Warsaw; a professor at SUR school’s MA program at the Círculo de Bellas Artes / Carlos III University (2019-2021), where she taught research politics, amongst others.
Morandeira lectures and publishes extensively on the intersections of critical theory, cultural studies, artistic and educational practices, and has also acted as a consultant to diverse pedagogical and cultural structures and programs. She holds a degree in Humanities from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and an MA in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College.
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julia.morandeira@gmail.com
Texts, Articles, Essays, Publications
Interviews
Projects Documentation
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Her practice is articulated in long-standing projects of curatorial research, which materialise in different formats and gestures.
The escuelita at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo—CA2M is a research organism operating as the digestive system of the institution. The department is devoted to collective study and experimental research, serving as a laboratory where to speculate and test the center’s future programming. Two seasons and three symposia have been developed so far: Speculative Infrastructures with the XXIV Image Symposium Glitch Futures, both together with Margarida Mendes; and Social Choreographies. Nobody knows yet what a body is capable of, with the XXV Image Symposium Worlding the World (co-curated with David Bestué) and the XXVI Image Symposium For Which Bodies, For What Histories (curated by Isabel de Naverán).
With Canibalia, she has researched the figure of the cannibal and cannibalism as a colonial construction of modernity, as a device of the political imagination, and as well a visceral ecosystem from where to reposition our relation with the world (Canibalia, Kadist Paris, 2015; Canibalia redux, 2017, Hangar Lisboa; ‘Cannibal Affinities’ course, ArtCenter/South Florida, 2016, and presentations at Savvy or Kunstcenter Bergen). The problematisation of the epistemological foundations of eurocentric modernity through the body, the footnote, the sea, the stomach, or other minor and contaminated experiences constitute an important framework of her practice: The Sea is History. Towards a Marine Ontology (2019 & 2017, fluent), ATLAS of the ruins OF EUROPE (2016, CentroCentro Madrid, co-curated with José Riello), Poetics of the Sign and Détour (2017, MACBA), We are Sycorax’s daughters (TEA, 2017), Provincialising Spain (Kyiv Biennial, 2015), Until Lions Have their Own Historians (with Magnetic Declination, Matadero Madrid, 2013), Les Aliments Refusés (with Pepi de Boissieu, Matadero Madrid, 2014), Twin (MACBA, 2013) and Twin Tastes & Tongues. Miralda (Barcelona Pavillion, 9th Shanghai Biennale, 2012), or State Fiction (FRAC Basse Normandie, 2013).
Another line is centred in the imagination and activation of forms of institutionality, affective economies and feminist methodologies, which inaugurate promiscuous forms of sensibility and knowledge, as well as generating structures of support, self care debates and peligrosity tactics. This line of work, named Be careful with each other so we can be dangerous together, includes a publication and the event “Affective Coalitions: ACT UP Puerto Rico”, both produced at Beta Local, Puerto Rico (2016); the performance night Selfcare is Warfare (Ocaña Barcelona - Sant Andreu Contemporani, 2017); and the ongoing conversation-contagion “Touch, do not dominate” with artist Diego del Pozo.
More recent lines of research are Nothing is true, Everything is alive on the displacement of scientific paradigms, sympoiesis and toxicity (Peryton, Copenhagen, 2018); and Night Studies, which explores the potentials of nocturnality (CA2M 2018 and 2022, DAI 2021-2022).
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Morandeira has lectured at numerous places such as the Leiden University (Leiden and The Hague), De Appel Curatorial Program (Amsterdam), the Dutch Art Institute (ArTEZ University, Arnhem), Curatorial Laboratory at the CCE La Paz (Bolivia), Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona), University of the Basque Country-EHU (Bilbao), Goldsmiths College (London), Notre Dame University (Indiana, USA), SomethingYouShouldKnow (Paris), Nottingham Contemporary, Serpentine Gallery (London), Tabakalera (Donostia-San Sebastián), Jeu de Paume (Paris) or TEOR/Ética (San José, Costa Rica), among others.
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