This year’s edition revolves around an idea that comes up again and again in many of our conversations, an idea that may be simple, but is far from easy: if we want to die together, we will have to learn to live together, and ask ourselves what other ways of imagining life have been buried beneath all those layers of fear.
In some contemplative traditions, particularly Buddhism, generosity is understood as a practice that can help us face the fear of death. The body is the last possession we will have to let go of; therefore, practising the gesture of letting go throughout our lives may help us cross that threshold.
Learning to die can also be an opportunity to learn how to share, and to allow ourselves to be affected by other bodies and other lives. To become less entrenched and more available to connection.
Image designed by Cristian Toro
The open call
In 2025, we launched an open call for proposals working through hybrid, liminal and unruly practices, and addressing finitude from the realms of the sensory, the intimate, the borderland and the unclassifiable. We received more than 200 proposals — a response that far exceeded our expectations and allowed us to connect with a very broad community of practices and projects exploring death and finitude.
This year, we have decided not to launch a new open call. For ecological reasons too, we want to revisit some of the projects that were not selected at the time. So we are returning to the previous call to discover which proposals, ideas and practices we want to help grow now.
Gatherings around finitude
For the second edition of This Too Shall Pass. Gatherings around finitude, taking place on 20 and 21 November at La Escocesa and Hangar, we are opening up a space to practise different relationships with loss, time, illness, interdependence, and also the celebration of life.
Voices from the arts, critical spirituality and palliative care will accompany us in a question that is also an invitation: what forms of life emerge when we stop pretending that we are not going to die?
Collective residency around experiences of cancer and illness
We propose a shared space-time for living together, researching and creating around experiences of cancer and illness. A gathering to bring together different forms of research, experience and knowledge, and to connect people who are going through these processes with those accompanying them, with the aim of fostering forms of mutual knowledge and support.
The residency will function as a space for intimacy, listening and shared research, from which to explore other ways of accompanying one another through illness. The knowledge and materials that emerge from this process will subsequently be shared with the public.
Biomaterials laboratory-workshop
As part of our research line Make Death Soft Again, we will invite an artist to experiment with living and organic materials, exploring the possibilities of what we call waste when it comes to imagining other ways of materialising and accompanying processes of life, death and transformation.
The School of the Beyond
La Escuela del Más Acá is a space for learning and play that invites us to approach death with curiosity and from a non-adult-centred perspective. A programme of workshops for children and teenagers exploring notions of loss, rupture, farewell and transformation.
The programme places particular emphasis on observing natural processes as a way of reconciling ourselves with mortality and understanding the cyclical nature inherent to life.
With the support of:
