Ressò. Between gills and lungs: amphibious cultural mediation encounter

IVAM, València

Ressò offers a space for encounter, recognition, reflection, and experimentation for cultural mediators and agents interested in education, cultural mediation, and working with audiences both within and outside of institutions.

In dialogue with the IVAM's educational program, the Valencian network of cultural mediators and agents, and realities beyond the Valencian Community, Ressò seeks to enable a stimulating time that enriches the practice of the context and generates connections with the outside world. A two-way relationship, in two stages: a conference in October 2025 and a closing conference in April 2026.

In this 25/26 edition, entitled Between Gills and Lungs, cultural mediation practices will be explored from the poetic and political power of the amphibian. Seeing the IVAM as a large frog, with one leg in the river and the other in the city, this program will seek to delve into the ecologies of mediation and into environmental mediation. It will bring together and honor practices that have their feet in the mud, in disputed territories, and that propose other ways of life and worlds.

The very word mediation resonates with amphibiousness: there is something about being in two worlds, between land and water, between museum and audiences, artist and community, subjects and territories. This idea of “middle” holds a power for contemporary mediation practices: not placing oneself in the geometric middle, nor in legal neutrality between two parties, but rather recognizing the middle (social, environmental), recognizing oneself as part of the middle, recognizing our ability to traverse and connect, and from there, unfolding the world.

Through its two dates, October 30 2025 and April 23 2026, this new cycle of Ressò will seek to celebrate the wet, the viscous, the metamorphic, those key knowledges and practices for situated cultural mediation. Enabling an environment from which to travel through different geographies using pulmonary respiration and, perhaps also, gill respiration, in the brekekekex ko-ax ko-ax intoned by the chorus of frogs in Aristophanes' comedy of the same name when Bacchus sets foot on their territory.

Between Gills and Lungs is a program curated by hablarenarte together with the IVAM educational team.

PROGRAM

1st Meeting: Gills

Thursday, October 30, 2025.
10:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Guests at the workshops

La Querencia, a cultural mediation collective made up of Ana Escariz Pérez and Ana Moure Rosende. They develop projects at the intersection of art, place, and community. They are currently mediators for the Os contos de leite project in A Ulloa (Lugo), which advocates for untangling the naturocultures linked to milk and defending the territory from extractivist threats such as Altri.

LaFundició, a cooperative that promotes processes aimed at collectively establishing material and symbolic practices, forms of relationship and knowledge, understood as common resources for sustaining and caring for a good life for all. In 2013, it opened a physical space in the Bellvitge neighborhood (L'Hospitalet) from which it deploys these processes in a networked, collective, and horizontal manner.

Juan Pablo Pacheco, a Colombian artist, writer, and educator who investigates the encounters between ecology, technology, and spirituality. With extensive research on water ecologies, digital infrastructures, telepathy, and fermentation, he has developed audiovisual, edible, editorial, and pedagogical projects, often in collaboration with other agents, seeking to amplify sensitive technologies beyond extraction.

AVALEM (Valencian Association for Education and Mediation in Museums and Heritage), founded in 2012, brings together professionals dedicated to arts education and cultural mediation in museums and heritage sites, with the aim of raising awareness and strengthening their training and professional development. At the national level, AVALEM is part of Almazuela.

Scientific agent: Jaime Bosch Pérez Senior scientist at the CSIC and head of the monitoring programs of the Spanish Herpetological Association. Expert in amphibian behavior and acoustic communication. Member of the SOS Amphibians project.

El Menú de la ciutat rural is a collective that uses cooking as a creative tool to connect with social activism and critical research, while also expressing itself in an aesthetic and poetic way.

The day will be structured as an amphibian choir made up of all the participants in Ressò. Through this croak of diverse voices, we will share experiences, moments of meditation, and joint experimentation.

Registration here.

Image credits: Zlatan Hadžifejzović, Works from work, 2019