During her residency at La Escocesa, Nafsika Hadjichristou has been exploring how we can imagine collective futures beyond climate collapse through exercises of collective imagination, alongside engagement with living practices in the city of Barcelona. Moving between workshops and research, she has connected with social spaces and community gardens that experiment with alternative ways of living, creating, and repairing relationships with the world around us, in community. Through a series of workshops, she invited participants to reflect on their relationship with deep time and the earth, exploring different methods to activate collective imagination. The residency concluded with an experimental creative laboratory for stop-motion collage animation, bringing together participants from diverse backgrounds to collectively imagine and materialise possible futures. She is now working towards an audiovisual collage that weaves together imaginations and lived realities emerging from these shared experiences and conversations.

Hannah Taylor has focused on learning through direct engagement with the landscapes and materials found in Barcelona and the wider region. Through walks and informal gatherings she collected overlooked materials from marginal spaces or “Third Landscapes”, ecologically and culturally significant neglected spaces where many of the plants she works with grow. During the second part of the residency she volunteered with syntropic agriculture projects in the mountains and spent time at an urban garden run by intercultural growers. These encounters offered different perspectives on cultivation, ecological knowledge, and the ways communities adapt to changing environmental conditions, while also highlighting how shared practices of growing and tending can become forms of collective care. Another strand of the research involved exploring urban systems of reuse through contact with chatarreros, whose work recovering discarded metals and objects reveals a deep familiarity with the material flows of the city. Their activities suggest a form of urban foraging that operates within the infrastructures of waste and circulation, challenging dominant ideas about value and disposal. Her fieldwork is informed by anthropologist Tim Ingold’s understanding of knowledge as something that develops through what he calls an “education of attention” — a process of learning to notice, respond to, and work with the world through movement, practice, and skilled engagement with materials. Through making, and conversation, the project explores how these moments and locations can become sites for renewed relationships with materials, landscapes, and one another.

Find out more about the residency HERE.