From Friday July 10th, every Friday at 7 p.m., dialogues in virtual mode through a dynamic platform with the participation of the most relevant voices of arts and sciences, in an ideation and transdisciplinary dialogue practice on the relations that we establish with the territory we inhabit in times of biological crisis, to articulate other dimensions and continue thinking and acting from culture.

Friday 10/07

LABORATORY 1: Hunter-gatherers

Diana Wechsler talks with Pablo La Padula and Diego Bianchi about how artists hunt and collect, from both urban and natural space, the objects and ideas with which they build the body of their work.

Friday 17/07

LABORATORY 2: Journey to the stars

Pablo La Padula talks with Piroska Csúri, Erica Bohm and Julián Terán 

How can we see to think about the invisible of the cosmos? The knowledge of space is built from a fluid dialogue between abstract mathematical information obtained from the deep celestial field and its translation into figurative visual language. In Star Trek we will analyze how we approach the darkness of stellar space in order to think about it, imagine it and see it socially.

Friday 24th

LABORATORY 3: Plant power

Pablo La Padula talks with Dr. Marcelo Wagner, director of the Pharmacobotany Museum of the Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry of the UBA.

Plants do not know about agriculture or botany. It is the human aspect that makes them a plant culture. At the third meeting of the Laboratory of Ideas we will talk about the stories of plants whose power shaped the geopolitics of Modernity. We will see how, throughout history, this dialogue with nature has acquired different cultural voices: from shamanic plants of power and healing, which later became witchcraft and heretical charlatanism, to the lysergic chemical pharmacopoeia, leading to the current crushing monoculture and its expected transgenic horizon.

Friday 31st

LABORATORY 4: Double body

Pablo La Padula in a dialogue with Vivi Tellas, director of Performing Arts at Teatro Sarmiento.

Science, as a mirror of nature, tries to reflect something it does not know. But through this almost impossible action it gives life to an unimagined Golem. How, through the transmutation of the staging, of a possible story or intuition of the world, does it duplicate itself embodied in the living of a cultural fabric?

Friday 7th

LABORATORY 5: Haunted plants

Pablo La Padula will talk with Leonardo Anconatani, a pharmacist-ethnobotanist from the UBA, and the visual artist Fernando Brizuela, about haunted plants.

Cultural frameworks determine specific meanings with their surrounding natural world. Thus nature can become a magical devotional being in the original cultures or a rationalisable object under the perception of the urban exact sciences; but art builds bridges. In Plantas embrujadas, Haunted Plants, mounted on the history of Argentina’s medicinal flora, we will analyze how these became pharmacology, witchcraft or works of art.

Friday 14/8

LABORATORY 6: The living matter of art

Pablo La Padula talks to Gabriela Siracusano, art historian and researcher at CONICET.  

“Lazy beings who think of nothing and meek copyists without intention…”, was part of the intellectual conclusion that the colonists made of the Native Americans in the centuries of the conquest. However, current research into the physical-chemical materiality of the works of art produced in colonial America refutes this passive vision of the locals. In The Living Matter of Art we will see how, through an intelligent geology of American works, an active and relevant cultural hybridisation is evident, which is reflected in a hybridisation of local materials and iconographies with European art.

Friday 21/8

LABORATORY 7: The drawing of memory

Pablo La Padula will dialogue with visual artist Eduardo Stupia on the production, use and circulation of images as a cultural event in itself and the role that science and contemporary art play in it today. Since the dawn of humanity, human beings have articulated drawing as a way of relating to their environment. Sometimes magical, other times rationalist, images have traced.

Friday 28/8

LABORATORY 8: Back to the future

Over the last few centuries, science has had such an impact on society that we can say that today we live in a scientifically-based culture. In a new meeting of the Pablo La Padula Laboratory of Ideas, he will analyze, together with the artists Mariela Yeregui and Juan Sorrentino, how this cultural transformation has popularized a technological view of the world and has favored, from the field of contemporary art, the search for poetics of high-tech and robotics, to a Lo-Fi return to nature.

Friday 11/09 SPECIAL TIME 7.30 pm

LABORATORY 9: From the cave to the atomic bomb

In the beginning it was all fire, science, art and hunting. The glow of that first Paleolithic fire permeated thousands of years later into the darkness of atoms and the darkness of deep space. In the 9th meeting of the LABORATORY OF IDEAS we will analyze how, from that spark of original thought, in the distant cave, an art of transforming matter began that would forever mutate the horizon of what is possible for humans.

Friday 18/09 

LABORATORY 10: In search of the lost moment

Pablo La Padula talks with Silvia Rivas and Charlie Nijensohn

More than 200 years ago the systematic search for the laws of dynamics and process of life began in biology. To do so, work was performed on the fixation of the movement of what is alive and fluid, capturing the instant of change. In this way, biology transferred nature to the experimental model. In the Laboratory of Ideas, we will see how contemporary artists, in a return to the wild, seek to capture that fleeting instant of change of state in the complex web of biological emotion, from the subtle fluttering of a fly around us, to the dramatic fleeting encounter of the human footprint in the immeasurable of a timeless landscape.

Free activity via Zoom with prior registration at muntrefarteynaturaleza@untref.edu.ar (Limited places).