Luis Guerra

2024-2025

Tomás y Valiente

MIAS-UAM

TO REPAIR IS TO LEARN. ART AND DESIGN PRACTICES AS PEDAGOGICAL DEVICES OF REPAIR

Biography

Luis Guerra is a visual artist and philosopher. He has been a Senior Researcher at the Research Institute of the University of the Arts in Helsinki, Finland. He is currently developing research on Artistic Thinking and Pedagogy, entitled Gestural Philosophy: Collective Artistic Practices as Informal Devices of Intentionless Learning, Radical Democracy, and Institutional Activism, funded by the Research Council of Finland Profi7 Fund. Between 2022 and 2023, he was a Fellow Research Artist in the Theory & Art program at the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, Austria, and participates as a researcher in the Postfoundational Thinking Research Group (PID2020-117069GB-100) at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Barcelona, Spain.

He recently published his third book, On Gestural Apparatuses for a Memory to Come, Academy of Fine Arts Press, University of the Arts Helsinki, 2024. He has been supported by the Saastamoinen Foundation, the Kone Foundation, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain), the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (Germany), Canada Council of the Arts, The Danish International Visual Arts Council, among others

Research project 

The ecological crisis we are all experiencing on a global scale is almost indescribable. It affects every aspect of our lives and has exposed us to the fragility and fracturability of our world. Through their practices, artists and designers around the world confront a multiplicity of forms of damage, seek solutions, and create repairs that respond to and challenge institutional responses, enabling new processes of adaptation, thinking, healing, and care. Reparation is an essential concept in current processes of understanding and reflecting on artistic practices, and reparative practices in the arts are a way to drive effective and sustainable changes in the world. To repair is to heal. To heal is a process of intense care, a period of accompaniment, recovery and re-bonding.

This research explores how these reparatory practices today constitute pedagogical devices that create informal learning spaces where resilient methodologies and vulnerable knowledge can grow and compose sustainable ecologies of institutional activism. Understanding the reparatory perspective in the field of artistic pedagogy implies strengthening a conception of creation that assumes the need to respond to different global and local issues through artistic methodologies that reflect the multiplicity and complexity of our societies

Selected publications

2024. On Gestural Apparatuses for a Memory to Come, Helsinki, University of the Arts Press.

2024. “Bernard Stiegler’s postfoundational aesthetics and gestural apparatuses for a memory to come”, Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico 16(2), pp. 133-146.

2023. “Education as a pharmakon. Action art as political pedagogic device for enacting radical democracy”, Ethics and Education 18: 3-4, pp. 371-386.

2023. “La Aracneida, Fernand Deligny y la tentativa de una filosofía gestural”, Arte Individuo y Sociedad, 36(1), pp. 15-24.

2022. Wandering Echoes. A Handbook of Operative Losses, Berlin, Errant Bodies Press.