trenza
mediation program for warm meetings with the institution
TRENZA is a mediation program designed by the collective Lumbre within the framework of Art Space Unlimited. Its intention is to open a space so that La Escocesa may become a home for communities that do not currently inhabit it.
Lumbre – warm encounters – is a collective formed by Tau Luna Acosta, Diana Rangel and Juan David Galindo. It was born from the desire to center the potential of being together and creating together. Their working methodology is slow and persistent—a way of resisting the overproduction and overprogramming that defines the neoliberal logic of the art world.
TRENZA focuses on people from the Global South who are involved in art and cultural production and who, due to structural inequality, are not yet part of the contemporary art circuit in the city.
Migration involves multiple forms of uprooting: territorial, emotional, and professional. Upon arriving in a new country, economic survival and the bureaucratic demands of immigration paperwork take priority. As a result, the networks of support and professional continuity often go into pause. Entering the local art scene can be particularly difficult, as each context has its own implicit dynamics, codes, and languages, requiring often frustrating processes of translation.
This project stems from the situated experience of those of us who migrate as artists and do not fit into categories like "emerging," "young," or "mid-career." Migration places us in another kind of threshold—one we share with others who come from the Global South and seek to settle in European territories. We believe in juntanza — gathering and collective strength — as a way to share strategies and to build spaces that respond to our situated needs and are as large as our desires.
The proposal is organized into three threads: Fire, Earth, and Alliances. Though autonomous, these threads are interwoven with each other and with the community at La Escocesa, to build bridges between the space, its surroundings, and artistic-cultural practices.
Fire
coordinated by Juan David Galindo
A collective learning group focused on survival strategies within the artistic context in Barcelona. With a critical stance on hegemonic models of professional success, this thread seeks to generate practical tools and shared knowledge for subsistence. It will include a mapping of the local professional context: its agents, codes, and dynamics.
Land
coordinated by Diana Rangel
This line of work is connected to the mental health of migrants, especially artists from the Global South. Earth evokes the cutting and regrowth of roots, the search for water and fertile ground. The migratory experience is a continuous process of settling, adapting, and readjusting our spaces of desire and action to new territories. Earth explores how identity and belonging are reconfigured in new contexts, generating an exchange of knowledge and shared ways of doing that can offer comfort and support to others who are recently arrived or in the process of settling.
Alliances
coordinated by Tau Luna
This thread runs transversally through TRENZA, seeking to build connections with collectives, projects, and individuals who have long been working with, for, and from the migrant community of the Global South in Barcelona. We begin from the understanding that cultural workers are also political agents. Opening La Escocesa to a specific community means embedding it within the broader cultural and political fabric of the city—beyond the field of contemporary art alone.
Methodology
Each mediation line is conceived as a research process that will result in tools, open public encounters, and closed sessions for specific groups.
The project begins with an internal training on white privilege and ethno-racial awareness, led by researcher Danielle Almeida. This session, addressed to the team and the broader community of La Escocesa, marks the symbolic beginning of TRENZA. We believe that to open doors, we must first prepare ourselves to listen. And there is no real listening without first turning inward. This training aimed to help us examine and work through our own structures and privileges, to begin dismantling the systemic racism we are part of.
We also believe that any mediation process must begin with a diagnosis grounded in active listening. For this reason, the first step in TRENZA is a data collection process focused on the relationship between La Escocesa and migrant artists from the Global South. Surveys and interviews will be conducted, and the findings will be systematized and visualized. This work will be carried out with the support of Dones Migrants from Dones Visuales, who specialize in this area within the audiovisual industry in Catalonia and are part of the working group for the development of the Cultural Rights Law currently being drafted by the Ministry of Culture.
In parallel, and building on the prior development of a resource guide for migrants in Barcelona, we will carry out a second, smaller-scale mapping focused specifically on collectives working on migrant mental health. Through this already-established network, we aim to strengthen this line of work with a more holistic perspective.
Program
May 2024
Workshop on White Privilege by Danielle Almeida
We reflected on structural racism and white privilege as an institutional logic.
Dancing Hackathon with Radia Cavaret
A playful space to share and expand the resources from the Lumbre guide.
June 2024
Distribution of the Lumbre Guide
A guide to mutual support and regularization resources for migrants, distributed to collectives and cultural spaces across the city.
October 2024
Anti-Doce Gathering with Regularización Ya! and Personaje Personaje
A meeting to discuss the current state of migration legislation in Spain and Catalonia, and the progress of the Popular Legislative Initiative "Regularización Ya!"
November 2024
Visionary. Creative Project Lab for Migrant Artists from the Global South by Maria Elisa Gomez
A workshop to critically and creatively deconstruct the position from which migrant artists speak and create.
January 2025
Lab for Migrant Artists with Juan David Galindo
A space to collectivize knowledge and unpack the explicit and implicit rules of the local art scene.
March 2025
With Home on Our Backs. Sessions on Migratory Grief with Julia Castillo, Juani, and Personaje Personaje
A space for reflecting on migratory grief beyond individual, psychological, and pathologizing perspectives—framing it as part of a web of social and colonial oppressions, and recognizing it as a different path for each body.
April 2025
Migration, Body, and Transdisciplinarity by Eugenia Aptecar
An exploration of transdisciplinary knowledge as a core strength of migrant artists.
May 2025
Trenza Gathering
A meeting for migrant artists to access the resources and spaces of La Escocesa, grounded in care and belonging.
The project is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.