On Thursday 19, Friday 20 and Saturday 21 October, the 15th edition of the Course on Contemporary Culture will take place, entitled on this occasion "Vulnerability and Artistic Practice", which for the second year running is co-organised by MUSAC and the FCAYC with the collaboration of the University of León through the Cultural Activities Department and the Institute of Humanism and Classical Tradition. The course will include the participation of the artists Laura Sam, Arnau Obiols, Aitana Cordero and José Luis Viñas; the writer Pilar Adón, the independent curator Gabriel Pérez Barreiro and the cultural cooperative LaFundició.
The activity is conceived as a space for an encounter with artistic practices from a multidisciplinary, open and close approach. Through three days of lectures, practical sessions, concerts, poetry and dance recitals, participants will delve into contemporary thinking on vulnerability, a concept that goes beyond the boundaries of human experience, expanding towards a comprehensive understanding that recognises the fragility and uniqueness of the environments we inhabit.
The activities will open on Thursday 19 October at 20:00 in the hall of the University of Philosophy and Letters with "Arde la palabra" (The Word Burns), a show of Spoken word in which the body and the voice rebel to give life to the texts of her book "Incendiaria" [Arrebato, 2019].
The second day will take place at MUSAC and will feature three sessions. Gabriel Pérez Barreiro, director and chief curator of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros between 2008 and 2018, and curator of the 33rd edition of thea Bienal de São Paulo, will focus on the value of curatorship as a formula for building links between institutions, works of art and visitors. The artist José Luis Viñas proposes the encounter "Ruin/Biodiversity/Museum", in which he will focus on the pillars of an artistic practice based on vulnerability. At 7 p.m., the day will culminate with the choreographic piece "Solo...? choreographer, creator, performer and pedagogue Aitana Cordero, which has been shown in institutions such as the Casa Encendida, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Conde Duque, among others.
On Saturday 21 October, the participants will travel to Cerezales del Condado, where the cultural cooperative LaFundició, the writer Pilar Adón and the musician Arnau Obiols will give talks. The author of Of beasts and birds [Galaxia Gutenberg, 2022], a novel that won the Critics' Prize and the Francisco Umbral Book of the Year Award, takes the philosopher Epicurus' dictum "Live hidden" as a refuge from today's culture of hypervisibility. LaFundició will explore in "Who can be vulnerable?" how vulnerability, an inherent feature of life, finds sustenance through cooperation, mutual support and communal resource management. The course will close at 19:00 with "La fortaleza de la fragilidad", a concert by Arnau Obiols in which the musician will present his album MONT CAUin which he proposes a celebration of the fact of living attentively and respectfully with the natural environment.
The course has the possibility of recognition of one ECTS credit for university students, and is aimed at artists, students and anyone interested, without previous knowledge of art being necessary to participate in it.