Making the paralyzing challenges society faces manageable, through art and thought

You describe your organisation as a centre ‘for artistic experimentation and research that challenges the concept of the postnatural’… how do you define ‘postnatural’, or at least, how do you break it down? Nature, technology, culture - how and where do these intertwine in your understanding of IPS’ mission?

For us, postnatural is less a definition than a place: somewhere to stand while we try to understand our relationship with what we call nature, and to ask the questions we think are necessary.

The starting point is simple, even if its consequences aren’t: nature and culture can’t be understood apart. For centuries, nature has been framed as distant, idealized, non-human, exploitable, and that idea built the world we live in, wounds included. Postnature is our way of going back to that framing with other eyes.

From there, we look at how human and non-human, natural and synthetic, visible and invisible forces shape one another, and at how contemporary practices, from artistic interventions to listening technologies, work with those entanglements. That is where IPS stands: in the ecologies that let nature be reinterpreted, culture be practiced, and technology be both questioned and partnered with. And we mean ecologies in a wide sense: relationships, territories, imaginations, networks, pedagogies, worlds yet to be built, the living, the non-living and, why not, the mystical and the hauntological too.

And what does that look like in practice? How do artists and thinkers come to you, and in what way does IPS shape their work in this area, or enable it? Are those you interact with members, collaborators, students? Or perhaps all of these?

Many of our programs speak from philosophy or theory, but everyone who takes part does so from a very personal place. The fears and challenges that come with the climate crisis, and with the moment we are living in can feel paralyzing, too big to understand or to face. They become approachable through things that are personal and specific, even intimate, through each person’s practice, their relations, their own context.

Many people come to IPS looking for a safe space where those questions can be asked out loud, and also for tools that strengthen their practices, like new frameworks, conversations with faculty and a group of peers to think with. They arrive in different ways, through an open call, direct registration, as returning alumni, or through our public program and partnerships. They are a bit of everything: students, collaborators, residents and publics, and often one person may inhabit more than one of those roles over time.

Our community is made up of all of them, and it grows largely through people who recommend IPS to others because they found in it an interesting and safe place to share and to ask.

IPS started in 2020, but what did its early incarnation(s), or the original ideas behind it look like? And how have those grown, changed or developed over those six years?

IPS was founded partly because some of us, after years away, were returning to Madrid and decided to create the space we felt was missing. A bridge, too, between international and local discourses, bringing different perspectives into the conversation.

We imagined something more anchored in Madrid, and IPS still carries the communal and convivial DNA of the city’s independent scene. What we didn’t imagine was how far it would grow, largely influenced by the pandemic. It pushed us to be more hybrid, and connecting with so many people online has made us understand the virtual as something embodied and situated too, only across different locations and time zones. Today IPS works through an international network of agents, institutions and projects, as much as through its own programs, and that network changes every year.

From the beginning, even if we didn’t always know it, we were fairly clear about what we wanted IPS to be, and about what we didn’t want it to be. We wanted to build a para-institution in our own image, shaped the way we see fit, and we wanted to be able to keep our independence while working with institutions, foundations and partners. Maintaining that balance is something we are still working to perfect, and time and experience, with their successes and their missteps, are giving us the tools to define it.

Three interconnected endeavours expand our worlds. IPS’ residency program welcomes voices, practices and questions from diverse geographies, embodiments and digitalities into our Madrid space. Cthulhu Books, our independent editorial arm, amplifies critical voices and carves out space at the forefront of artistic discourse. Tender Radio, our in-house sonic platform, builds an evolving archive of worldmaking, storytelling and interdisciplinary encounters with students, artists, curators and the public.

Education is a major aspect of IPS’ work. Could you speak about your educational programming, the sorts of structures and topics, and how you reach your students, how they find you?

Education is at the core of IPS, and we have structured our academy in three scales. Short online seminars that run for a few weeks, mid-term programs like the Postnatural Independent Program (PIP), and long-term programs like Alternative Ecologies, which run for nine months.

The longer formats came from something we noticed along the way:

Although they gave us the flexibility to adapt to questions and urgencies around the complex present, shorter programs were falling short, and we saw a need for longer programs that allowed more time to debate, to share, and to simply be together. That range also lets people join at the intensity that suits them, and many move from one scale to another over time.

Being independent also gives us a lot of flexibility. We can stay porous to what we feel should be discussed at IPS at any given moment and shape our programs around that, without having to follow a fixed curriculum.

Our educational program centers artistic research and collectivity. We encourage individuals from across disciplines to embrace new ways of listening and seeing, and new frameworks and parameters to pursue their own production of knowledge, and to do it together, learning from the group as much as from the faculty. We are heavily interested in artistic processes, in marinations and meditations, and in diversity and access to our programs.

How people find us has a lot to do with how we communicate. We have always taken the communication of what we do very seriously. Because some of our subjects are theoretical or complex, IPS can give the impression of being less approachable than it really is, so communicating it in a close and clear way matters a lot to us, and we think, to some extent, it has worked. Still, word of mouth is what we value most. Many people arrive because someone they trust told them about us.

Our courses have covered topics ranging from Animal Architecture or Cyberfeminism, to Queer Ecologies (asking: What’s the Unnatural?), Blue Ecologies relating to bodies of water, Postnatural Gardening, Sound Ecologies and more. Our educational program centers artistic research by encouraging individuals from across disciplines to embrace new ways of listening and seeing, new frameworks and parameters to pursue their own production of knowledge.

Programming and research are other pillars of your work. Can you explain how they function a little, and also how this multi-format, multi-layered approach to your work is beneficial? Do you, for example, find that these streams of work inform and shape each other? How fluid is the movement of people, ideas, and theories between them all?

One of the founding pillars of IPS was to understand it as a shared platform where different practices can meet, become visible, and be nourished by everyone who passes through. That idea has a physical form. IPS lives in a warehouse in Madrid with a workshop, residency accommodation and shared workspaces, a place of mutual support and care as much as of creation, where our residencies, workshops and open activities take place.

Research at IPS has a long trajectory and takes different forms. An interest can start as a short text and, over time, become a deeper investigation that takes shape as an open call, an exhibition, a seminar, an installation, a publication or a public program. In this way, the subjects we work on cross through different formats as they develop.

That makes the movement between all these streams quite fluid. A residency of six or seven weeks ends up in a publication and on the radio. A research project with a long bibliography becomes an exhibition. A mentorship season with emerging architects becomes a participatory public program.

What is IPS’ outlook on our present ecological and social situation, as it relates to your mission? And how would you define your goals in light of that?

We try to approach the present with openness, and with a clear sense of where we stand within the messy realities of culture-making, technological development and political polarization. Ecological breakdown, war, displacement and the speed of developments in AI are not only subjects for our programs, they are the conditions we work in.

We see the climate crisis less as an unwanted side effect and more as the coherent result of a way of relating to the Earth built on extraction and on the separation of nature and culture. Its effects fall unevenly. We constantly come back to the idea that while many learning and culture-making environments, especially in Western Europe and North America, prepare to face “the end of the world,” for many people, artists and communities in other geographies some worlds have already ended.

For us this is also a crisis of imagination. Much contemporary creation ends up reproducing the same binary between futurism and nostalgia, so we have started to explore the idea of an expanded present, in which the living coexists with the dead, the human with the non-human, and the imaginations we have about crises coexist with their material manifestations.

It also makes us ask what an institution can be today. We have been researching this through the idea of the para-institution, one that doesn’t need to settle what it is before acting, that lets itself be affected by what happens around it, and that stays in formation.

So our goal is to keep IPS a safe space to ask the questions our times require, even when they have no answer yet. A place to think about what is coming, to stay with what has already happened, and to imagine together what we are willing to let go of.

What do you see as the core challenges facing those you work to educate, support and empower, and how do you hope your work will help to overcome those challenges?

The people we work with face challenges that are structural, and others that come with the moment each finds themselves in. The world is vast and so are its inequalities, and where one lives, through economies, time zones and borders, still decides a lot about which opportunities are within reach. On top of that, it is particularly hard to build a sustainable way of working in the arts without falling into precarity, especially for emerging artists and for those who work far from established circuits. Many of the people who come to us are looking for connections, for tools that strengthen their practice and their discourse, and for ways to make their work visible.

And the moment we are living in adds to the pressure. Several political currents that are gaining ground seek to roll back rights that were hard-earned by civil society, and the interests of a few powerful tech players seem to outweigh those of experts and citizen organizers attending to the climate crisis.

For us, access to our programs is essential, so scholarships are built into how IPS works, and cost and geography shouldn’t decide who gets to take part. When travel is the obstacle, we help participants prepare funding applications and write letters of support. The Impact Grant received through The Supporting Act Foundation matters a lot for an independent platform like ours, because it lets us keep offering that access while sustaining our own work. Beyond that, we hope IPS can be a safe place to ask the questions our times require, with a community to ask them among. We don’t expect to solve any of this, but we hope each edition [of our programming] is a bit more accessible, and a bit more useful to those who join, than the last.

Remaining independent is both a challenge and a commitment. It means navigating precarity while creating the conditions to work outside established frameworks. But independence is never self-sufficiency: it is built through interdependence, across collaborations, shared resources and the multiple structures that sustain us. Our autonomy grows through these connections.

Lastly, what are your aspirations for IPS over the coming years, how would you like to grow and evolve?

Close to turning seven, we feel, without ever taking it for granted or wanting to get too comfortable, that IPS has moved past the emerging stage and is beginning to consolidate. That lets us start thinking about what comes next in the medium and long term, and the support we receive gives us more room to plan.

In the short term, our priority is to consolidate what we are doing today, looking after it and after the people who collaborate with us or come to us. Making our programs accessible and open to more people remains a big goal, and we want to keep building on what is already in place.

From there, we would like to open new avenues of research and commissions where emerging voices have a central place and not an auxiliary one, and to keep experimenting with sonic practices. Tender Radio has become a place where listening, storytelling and collective work meet, and a way to give visibility to what the people who pass through IPS make. We see a lot of ground still to cover there.