non-oppression lab for artistic and research practices

confronting the oppressor we all carry within

The Non-Oppression Lab for Artistic and Research Practices is a transcontinental, multilingual research space developed in contexts including Bogotá, Bahía Solano (Colombia), Berlin (Germany), Tunis, and Pune (India). It is designed as a dialogical infrastructure and a space for collective safety. The Lab emerged as a response to artistic and community-based processes that inadvertently reproduce oppressive, colonial, paternalistic, or extractivist practices. It seeks to reposition relational artistic practice as an ethical, affective, and care-based space for the co-production of knowledge free from discrimination.

This is a one-session research and creative encounter conceived as a direct response to current forms of oppression, violence, and inequality. It is aimed at artists, cultural workers, and anyone interested in community-based action who wishes to challenge hegemonic structures. Starting from the premise of confronting the oppressor we all carry within, the session explores and deconstructs concepts such as white saviorism, tokenization, instrumentalization, dense diversity, third identity, and time as oppression.

The encounter focuses on protecting and resisting alongside the communities with whom we work, while preventing cultural extractivism, gentrification, and the unauthorized appropriation of knowledge. It seeks to recognize internalized forms of oppression through the body itself, in order to build ethical, affective, and care-based frameworks that sustain autonomy and dignity in each territory.

Drawing on pragmatic compassion and perspectives from the Global South, the session combines behavioral psychology exercises with the hands-on manipulation of earth pigments as social binders. This sensory experience allows participants to embody the theory and “warm up the word”, engaging in dialogue with critical texts in order to transform ideas into concrete practices of non-oppression.

bio

Carmen Caro is a Colombian interdisciplinary artist, cultural producer, and activist whose practice lies at the intersection of artistic research, sociopolitical advocacy, and ethical South–South co-creation methodologies. Her work is grounded in listening as a political, aesthetic, and epistemological position. She develops peacebuilding processes, non-oppressive creative practices, and initiatives defending bodies of water alongside grassroots collectives, including the community she comes from in the Andes region, as well as Indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descendant communities and diverse artistic and cultural organizations and institutions in Colombia.

Her artistic practice is rooted in the search for non-oppressive ways of creating and inhabiting knowledge, understanding territory as a living web of memories, affects, and collective forms of knowing. Art becomes a tool for care and listening, where sound, language, pigments, textiles, and matter operate as practices of resistance and ways of invoking the body’s memory. From this position, her practice proposes a shift away from hegemonic logics of power towards sensitive, collective, and sustained relationships understood as forms of everyday resistance.

Her practice seeks to make the fabric of collective care tangible. She is the founder of Radio Juntanza, a biocultural platform for research, dissemination, and accompaniment of women-led territorial processes. The platform works from an ecofeminist perspective, using art as a situated form of knowledge production. Through Radio Juntanza, she develops research and action strategies that bring together human rights, art, and ethical communication in contexts of conflict, socio-environmental inequality, and community resistance.

Her practice has expanded into international contexts including Guatemala, the Palestinian Territories, Tunisia, Germany, and Spain, among others, where she has developed research, training, and cultural management projects. She has been a researcher and fellow at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin, collaborating on interdisciplinary initiatives connecting artistic practices, archives, communication, and processes of justice and accountability. She is a member of the United Network Germany/Latin America, an alumna of the CrossCulture Programme (CCP), and an Elizabeth Selbert Fellow at ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Germany. She currently works as a trainer, cultural producer, and consultant specializing in non-oppressive practices and ethical communication in cultural and human rights contexts.

Trenza proposes to generate alliances with collectives, projects and people in the territory who have a long history of work by, with and for the southern migrant community in Barcelona. Based on the idea that art workers are political agents within the city and that in order to open La Escocesa to a specific community, it must be part of the cultural and political fabric of the city beyond the specificity of contemporary art.

If you have any needs or questions regarding the accessibility of this activity, please, visit the page "access La Escocesa" by clicking here