María Sánchez: Memories of water: Songs for rain and mourning. Bodies and becoming in rural environments.

María Sánchez (1989) is a writer and rural veterinarian. She is a regular contributor to digital and print media on literature, feminism, extensive livestock farming and culture and rural environment. She wrote the poetry book Cuaderno de campo. In Tierra de Mujeres she addresses the work of women in rural areas, the need for a "sustainable future", the importance of preserving extensive livestock farming and the pampering of a relegated language. Almáciga, an illustrated poetic glossary of rural words, will be published in 2020.

Part of the event series "Bodies and Wandering":

This cycle proposes a series of meetings for joint reflection on the body and wandering as keys to reading contemporary artistic creation and critical thought in Spanish-speaking America and Spain.

Through a series of conversations between April and June 2023, we will seek to deepen in the creative and research projects of the invited artists, focusing on the displacement, transformation, and detours - material, spatial and discursive - which create corporeal and semiotic tensions. For this, we take up the concept of wandering, as deviation and error, with different shades of significance that point towards change without a fixed objective, a way of moving and a practice of representation that can be considered improper because it implies a deviation from the straight path of the norm. This approach also helps us to understand the crossing of traditional boundaries of gender, artistic disciplines, capacities, and territories, to visualize openings in the study of the arts and humanities.

We will ask ourselves: What specific vulnerabilities do wandering bodies face? How can we think about wandering in a vitalist and positive way? What aesthetics and ethics accompany these displacements? How are these bodies and their wanderings represented? Which methodologies can be employed to approach these issues from university research?