Seeds of futurity: In the Shadow of Gaza
In 2023 at the Dubai climate summit, Colombian President Gustavo Petro linked the climate crisis to the genocide in Gaza, warning that Gaza had become "a mirror of the immediate future." What is unfolding there concentrates intensified colonial violence, the erosion of international law, struggles over fossil-fuel power, and ecological destruction. Gaza appears not as an exception but as a symptom of a wider geopolitical and environmental breakdown. The US attack on Venezuela on January 3 seemed to confirm Petro's warning, signaling a normalization of unilateral violence. Impunity in Palestine has helped inaugurate a new world order that, as Chris Hedges argues, solidifies the role of the United States as a "gangster state" in "a world without laws, a world of failed states, warlords, rogue imperial powers and perpetual violence and chaos".
The conversation between Emily Jacir, Palestinian artist and founder of Dar Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem, and T. J. Demos, founder and director of the Centre for Creative Ecologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will explore the inseparability of coloniality, genocide, and ecocide. Above all, their dialogue focuses on the role of artistic practice in this context: how can art and research serve as spaces to imagine and work toward a future other than the one Gaza now foreshadows-but which is not inevitable? How can art be a seed of futurity, still, and in spite of it all?
*The conversations will be held in English and subtitled in Catalan
T.J. Demos
T.J. Demos is one of the leading scholars in contemporary art and theory. He is a professor in the Department of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and founder and director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He is the author of The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (2013), where he examines the ways in which contemporary artists have reinvented documentary practices in their representations of mobile lives: refugees, migrants, stateless people, and the politically dispossessed.
Emily Jacir
Emily Jacir's (born Mediterranean; lives and works between Bethlehem and Rome) interdisciplinary practice spans film, photography, installation, performance, sound, and text. Her work explores both personal and collective movement through time and public space, examining its implications on the physical and social experience of trans-mediterranean geographies and temporalities. Through rigorous historical and archival research, Jacir's layered and resonant body of work is rooted in gathering, community, and in social affiliations. For the last twenty years, she has been working in southern Italy, primarily in Salento but also in Basilicata and Sicily. Her most recent work, We Ate the Wind, features a large cinematic installation that combines new and archival material, addressing questions of visibility and invisibility, proximity and distance, hospitality and exclusion, exploring specific migration policies and their consequences on individuals and communities.
Orne Cabrita
Orne Cabrita (Caracas, Venezuela) is a word juggler, a speculator of gentler futures. Their texts have been published in El Salto Diario, ViceVersa, and Panfleto Negro. They are the author of the book Trampa de Luces, published as part of Barcelona Producció 2025 at the La Capella Art Center. With a text commissioned by Virginie Despentes, they participated in the Despentes Convergence festival (Emmetrop, 2017). Curated by Johan Mijail, they collaborated on the publication: Yo en cursiva/ Imaginarios para la desobediencia (Ediciones Catinga, 2020). In 2025, their essay, De las sal en la lengua, was selected for the OCEAN/UNI: bárawa program, a digital initiative of TBA21-Academy (Thyssen-Bornemisza). They have participated in talks, workshops, and performance readings commissioned by Archivo Hamaca (Arts Santa Monica, 2023) (Centro de Arte La Capella 2025), Rasssin (Day of critical thinking about fashion. Hangar 2025) and Colectivo DU.DA ("Esto también pasará" Days about Finitude, La escocesa 2025) .
Duration
1 hour 30 minutes
Dates
Sunday 8 February 2026 from 11 am to 12.30 pm
Price
Advance tickets
Morning sessions (Seeds of futurity + Love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris): 4€, reduced 3€ (library card or Friends of the Fundació)
Afternoon session (All this global dysphoria): 4€, reduced 3€
Full day with lunch included: 9€
Tickets at the door
Morning sessions (Seeds of futurity + Love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris): 5€, reduced 4€
Afternoon session (All this global dysphoria): 5€, reduced 4€
