DU-DA is a space for research and artistic creation at the intersection of art, health, the body, and pedagogies of finitude. Through artistic tools and practices, we create learning contexts and public programmes that bring together expert knowledge, embodied experience, and forms of knowledge that often remain outside institutional frameworks. We work with an international network of collaborators to address questions that are difficult to approach from within a single discipline.
Since 2019, Dying Cool has developed as an ongoing research strand exploring contemporary forms of dying, end-of-life care, rituals, grief, the funeral industry, ecology, and the social and political conditions that shape how we die. This research has also led us to investigate cycles of matter, critical spirituality, more-than-human worlds, and ancestral forms of knowledge.
From this body of work emerges one of our main fields of research: pedagogies of finitude. We understand finitude as an inherent condition of life. We are interested in developing tools and methodologies that enable us to learn how to relate to loss, illness, ageing, dependency, and death—to strengthen our capacity to remain present with, and accompany, that which we cannot control, and in doing so transform the ways in which we live together.
Our work is grounded in more than a decade of experience in research, mediation, teaching, cultural management, and knowledge production, developed both within institutions and through independent practices. This trajectory has shaped a hybrid practice that, in recent years, has found in finitude and death a particularly fertile territory for investigating the political, poetical, and affective conditions of life.
This is why we continue to play, film, cook, plant, nurture, dance, and advocate for other ways of approaching and producing knowledge as an integral part of our practice.
WE
Project Co-Director
I tend to position myself within working processes that involve interconnections with their context. I am interested in practices built through knowledge transfer and alterity, which question the boundaries of the cultural sphere and expertise. I hold a degree in Film and Audiovisual Media. I am interested in the mechanisms of looking and in the hideaways that emerge through the processes of observing with a camera.
Codirecció de projectes
Project Co-Director
My theoretical and artistic practice lies at the intersection of word and body. I am interested in textuality insofar as it can become alchemy, and in embodied poetics as a tool for deprogramming our ontological binarism. In 2020, I published my first novel, Año del caballo, with ediciones en el mar.
Mar Sureda / mar(at)du-da.net
Mediation and Pedagogical Research
My practice weaves together artistic literacies, relational ontologies, speculative fiction and insurgent pedagogies. I explore ecologies of care that overflow the boundaries between the classroom, the museum and the territory. I studied Fine Arts and hold a PhD in Arts, Education and Cultural Policies. I research, write, and seek to teach and imagine other ways of being together in the world.
Management and Partnership Development
I am a historian by training and a cultural manager by way of drift. I also work as a process facilitator, drawing on methodologies inspired by community anarchism, grounded in horizontality, collective autonomy and our capacity to organise ourselves in order to make other ways of life possible.
My professional trajectory has given me experience, perspective and sensitivity towards issues of gender and intersectionality. It has also allowed me to understand how inequalities intersect and how they shape our possibilities for participation, collective organisation and community building
Aran Jimenez / aran(at)du-da.net