Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives

The Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives (IMNA) is a laboratory for cultural innovation in response to the climate emergency. Located at the Center for Contemporary Creation Matadero Madrid, and partnering with many institutions and universities, IMNA supports and proposes projects at the intersection between art, fiction, science and strategies based on collective intelligence. Current planetary challenges require the practice of empathy and thinking beyond disciplines. Based on this belief, IMNA advocates for the formulation of a pact of justice and coexistence between all species, as well as for a sense of responsibility towards future generations. Rather than being a traditional institution, IMNA functions as a mutant device that facilitates the adaptation to uncertain futures. It does so through artistic disruption and new forms of storytelling. It is a space for research, interdisciplinary experimental creation, and collective learning; a meeting place for highly diverse agents where the model to follow is the behaviour of ants, bees or slime molds with a thousand heads.

Knowledge Innovation Communities for Climate

IMNA is part of the EIT Climate-KIC, which promotes the Deep Demonstrations of Clean and Healthy Cities: an initiative that seeks to support 15 cities in their rapid change towards decarbonization. The Deep Demonstrations project aims to ensure a resilient future with zero net emissions in 2030. Unlike the other cities where the Deep Demonstration is led solely by the city councils, scientific c research centres and private companies, Madrid works with IMNA as a partner for the initiative in the cultural sector. In this context, IMNA promotes artistic experimentation to activate complex processes of political and social transformations in cities.

Practicing cooperative resilience

As part of this initiative and from our commitment to innovate collectively and by learning from adaptive strategies of other species, in 2019 IMNA launched a joint research line with national and international centres that focuses on the study of swarm methodology. Inspired by living organisms and applying principles of ludic thought, we have learnt tactics of cooperative resilience. This has materialized overtime into a working methodology and into a cooperation game. By imitating other species and cooperating across institutions, IMNA has become a metabolic device for collective imagination.

IMNA operates through an interdisciplinary network that brings together an international group of artists, designers, researchers, scientists, engineers, architects, public policy makers and many other agents.

This network is promoted by:

Center of Contemporary Creation Matadero Madrid; Innovation and Technology for Development Center of the Polytechnic University of Madrid (itdUPM); Madrid City Council, through its Internationalization and Cooperation Department, Environment and Mobility; Department and Interdepartamental Group for Climate; Ferrovial; Fundación Daniel y Nina Carasso

Project Team

Rosa Ferré (Matadero Madrid) and Amanda Masha Caminals (IMNA)

Project Name

Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives

Team Location

Madrid, Spain

Category

Arts, curatorial and creative practice