22 April, 2023

Location: Llobregat's Delta
Organizer: Quo Artis & Joaquín Jara, environmental sculptor.

An invitation to expand and re-sacralise our relationship with nature and the environment.

In the framework of the Creative Europe project A Sea Change, and the day after the interdisciplinary symposium Troubled Blue, Quo Artis organizes a workshop with environmental sculptor from Barcelona Joaquín Jara.

The work of the environmental sculptor Joaquín Jara restores our gaze towards our environment with attentive, critical and ephemeral interventions that generate emotional connections with the different communities that inhabit it.

With this workshop, the artist invites participants to start making artistic interventions in natural environments with an ecological, patrimonial and sustainable perspective from the marshes of Prat de Llobregat (El Remolar) and to analyse the subaquatic soundscape of the coast in collaboration with artist Robertina Šebjanič .

This ecological perspective on sculptural practice will make us aware of the fragility of the natural environment and the delicate biological balances that compose it. By also applying a patrimonial approach to the process, we will again become aware of the global identity of the environment, which is presented as a subject (not as an object) with not only biological and eco-systemic characteristics, but also historical, social, political and aesthetic ones.

From his artistic practice, Joaquín Jara will share his experience as an environmental sculptor in different natural environments where he generates interventions that portray, piece by piece, the different socio-political, aesthetic and affective layers that escape our anthropocentric eye. The artist proposes to return to nature the notion of the sacred and thus expose different ways of understanding the nature-sanctuary binomial: the anthropological and primitive vision of the sanctuary as a sacred place, and the contemporary vision of sanctuary as a specific natural environment that protects its integrity against human exploitation.

The workshop will be divided into two parts:

1.  A lecture where tools will be presented that will allow participants to create a conceptual archive of a site and sketch its portrait, understanding the environment as a subject with eco-systemic, historical, geographical and cultural characteristics.
2. Perceptive cartographic exercises with the artist in the Prat del Llobregat Natural Park (El Remolar), where what has been learnt in the lecture will be put into practice.