Contribution short abstract

My sharing focuses on what happens when Political Ecology & Degrowth Master students engage in performative and site-specific practices in Barcelona’s public space, using embodied artistic methods as a pedagogical strategy to reflect on the “inconvenience of being together.”

Contribution long abstract

My contribution emerges from four years of co-teaching artistic practice modules in the Political Ecology and Degrowth Masters at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Between 2022 and 2025, four cohorts moved through co-designed sessions with María Heras that combined Theatre of the Oppressed, improvisation, collective listening and rhythm work, theatre of objects, and score-based performances in Barcelona’s public space.

I can share about what happens when students step out of the traditional classroom into artistic relational practices. Through their written reflections and our observations as space-holders, I delve into how artistic methods can produce shifts in perception and open a space in which discomfort and shared vulnerability can be worked with rather than avoided.

I would like to intertwine three threads that continually surface in our classes: the uneasy task of teaching about oppression with students who often hold privileged positions; the capacity of embodied methods to make power, fragility, solidarity and conflict felt in the body rather than kept at a critical distance; and the way public space can act as a partner in the learning process, through its almost-forgotten presence and through its social and material tensions. Together, these threads form a pedagogical approach to embodied political ecology that is continuously put to the test and that, every year, offers us new learnings.

Keeping these threads in relation, I would like to reflect together on the methodological and ethical challenges of facilitating processes where students may enter states of heightened vulnerability, working with body, biography and emotion.