March 20 // Conference

This presentation focuses on my master thesis “Towards a Care-full Constituent Museum”. This research is a practice of imagining, unlearning and re-learning the institutional sector. It hopes to bring practices of embodied care to (art)institutions, ones that for so long have been complicit in the process of harming and excluding bodies, of stealing and sanitising bodies: of separation.

Written and developed during the pandemic, this research explores how the sense of touch can be deployed in museums’ exhibitions as a transformative tool to bring people together, especially in times of crises and capitalist isolation.

Embodied experiences have the potential to dismantle the colonial authority placed on the gaze as the primary sense to experience art, rebelling against the deadening of corporal experiences.

Cultural institutions are places where collective care can be practiced, where people can envision new ways of living together otherwise. Becoming Care-full Constituent Institutions.

Carolina Calgaro (she/her) is researching and experimenting with alternative curatorial practices within institutions, which make use of notions of care, decoloniality, and disability to collectively (re)imagine the future of such hostile spaces.  She recently graduated from the Dual MA Curating Art and Cultures at the UvA and VU and worked as assistant curator at the Van Abbemuseum. Her work includes the current collection presentation Dwarsverbanden and The Space Between Us.  In her free time, she crochets colorful creations as a practical way of dreaming and interrelating ever-changing possible outcomes.

Like my dear friend Pom RA Walden, I also understand world-building as an embodied methodology for the now, not a visionary tool for an imagined future. During the forty-five-minute session, we will playfully explore the modelling of sensory aids, grounding tactics, and mobility tools out of vegan wax. The resulting form will be a collectively conceived physical chain of auxiliary agents. 

Elio J Carranza (they/them) is a transdisciplinary artist working with experimental moving image, techniques of play, text, and sculpture. In their practice, they synthesize material technologies, collective fiction storytelling, and image production software to develop (play) ecologies that visualize and complexify queer, trans*feminist, crip, and more-than-human dissident intimacies. Furthermore, they are passionate about critical pedagogy and are invested in matters around autonomous healthcare. They work as a tutor in the Fine Arts Department at the Sandberg Instituut. 

https://eliojcarranza.hotglue.me/

Drawing on years of writing through (Soma)tic rituals, CAConrad will discuss their latest, titled "First Light," which is a meditation on sunrise and how that moment of returning light feeds cells, warms bodies, and illuminates the day and also how the impacts of greed have turned the best qualities of our planet's star against the most vulnerable.

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. Their latest book is Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return (Wave Books / UK Penguin 2024). They received the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, and a Lambda Award. The Book of Frank is now available in 9 different languages. They exhibit poems as art objects with recent solo shows in Spain and Portugal, and their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by the artist Augusto Cascales. Visit them at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88

Romany Dear will share a series of “spillings” from her own writings, readings from others and access-led offerings. Opening some windows into her transdisciplinary artistic practice. Sharing from her own lived experiences and positionality, (with spoonfuls of critique and compassion). Romany will speak about her current body of research called: constellations of together-mess - that centers on support structures, reciprocal trios, a love for gravity, the horizontal plane and timeless - time spent on the floor. 

Romany and Grace Turtle will then speak about their role as co-directors of the new temporary masters program at Sandberg: Monstrous Futurties, practices in (un)learning, (un)making and (un)worlding. They will talk about how the program situates itself in dialogue with crip pedagogies, crip theory and crip practice - speaking specifically to crip time and temporalities and speculations within education. See: https://sandberg.nl/temporary-program-monstrous-futurities

Romany Dear (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, researcher and access worker. Romany defines her practice as a “spilling” - out and across diverse containers of access, arts, dance, education, and community organising at the edges of agriculture. Her spilling’s encompass speculative and critical performance practices, poems, planting beans and lots of time moving from and on the floor. Her work is grounded in dance as a practice of collective and social action, using “translation” as a method towards anti-ableist ways of moving and of being moved. Romany has been an invited lecturer and facilitator at the Glasgow School of Art & The Royal Conservatoire of Performing Arts (Scotland), HZT (Berlin) and The National Universities of Bogota and Barranquilla (Colombia). She has over 12 years of experience working with integrated dance companies such as AXIS, Con-Cuerpos and Indepen-dance, and is one of the co-founders of Glasgow Open Dance School.. Romany has performed and worked internationally including with: La Compañía, Fundación Organizmo & La Casa de Meira (Colombia), Germinal (Bolivia), The Judson Church & The Movement Research Centre, (NYC), Galerie Wedding & The Volksbuhne Theatre (Berlin), Siobhan Davies Studies & The Swiss Church (London) and The CCA (Glasgow.) She has a MA in Interdisciplinary Live Arts, Crip Theory and Feminist Cartographies, (UNAL Colombia). 

Grace Turtle (they/them) is a Colombian-Australian designer, artist, and re-searcher, intersecting AI, Strategic and Critical Design and Foresight from a mes-tiza, queer and transfeminist lens. They are a Marie-Curie PhD Fellow at TU Delft (DCODE Network, 2025), queering AI, ethics, aesthetics and politics in designing for co-predictive relations—using experimental approaches spanning perfor-mance, game design, simulation modelling, and worldbuilding to examine human AI, world-model entanglements. Previously, as Design Futures Lead at Deloitte Digital, they supported diverse organisations in leading transition and place-based initiatives. Their work has been featured internationally at the Porto Design Biennale, Telefonica Foundation Madrid, PRIMER New York, the World Futures Congress in Mexico City, and TEDx in Sydney.