The Miguel Hernández University of Elche (UMH) is proud to present the ‘With Touching. Politics and Poetics of Touchability’ collection. This exhibition, curated by theorist, designer, and activist, Fefa Vila Núñez, is open to the public for viewing until June 1 in the Universitas and Gray rooms, both located in the Rectorado & Consejo Social Building on the Elche Campus.

Fuente: UMH.

This project is a result of a collaboration agreement signed by the UMH Vice Rectorate for Culture and that of Inclusion, Sustainability and Athletics with the Generalitat Valenciana through its Vice Presidency and Ministry of Equality and Inclusive Policies to promote activities on equality in diversity.

This collection addresses issues of physical distance and the “loss of the body” triggered by the worldwide pandemic, and it brings together artists whose work reflects touch and the need to create new poetics, aesthetics, and vehicles for its redefining.

María Hamilton (aka Materia Hache) presents, as an artist/DJ, an invitation to dance as a formula for care, reflection, and resistance, while Spanish artist based in Berlin, Marisa Maza, addresses tensions–distance and proximity, affirmation and rejection–between gender and coloniality in a video installation made in Colombia and funded by the Goethe-Institut of Germany. Dominican artist, Lizette Nin, focuses on the issue of skin and distance that racialization imposes on the bodies of the Black Antillean population and what the biography itself hides. The Spanish duo of Marta de Gonzalo and Publio Pérez, who work from the narrative, popular culture and critical pedagogy, reflect on the concept of cleanliness.

Likewise, Floy Krouchi and Fefa Vila come together to present an audible evocation that reactivates contact and group desires for joy and revolt. Xoan Anleo, artist and professor at the University of Vigo, presents an audible piece from his Correspondencias project (opened in 1989). For his part, Alicante artist and professor at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Pepe Miralles, who examines the connection between art and illness, displays on the walls his creation of El libro de los cuidados. Furthermore, choreographer and Barcelona artist, Aimar Pérez Galí, exhibits and offers the public letters he wrote to the dancers he worked with and who died of AIDS. For Diego del Pozo, artist and professor at the University of Salamanca (USAL), affection, the skin, and touch serve to present notions, such as contact and contagion, in his video. Madrid artist, Andrés Senra, launches debate on distance and the virtualization of physical contact via sexual applications. Finally yet importantly, Coco Guzmán intervenes directly on the Gray Room walls with an expansive drawing that delves into texture and tactility as experiences from an expanded sense, queer.

Thanks to the agreement between the UMH Vice Rectorate for Culture and that of Inclusion, Sustainability and Athletics with the Generalitat Valenciana, various curated cultural projects have been made possible. These include Festa Pagana (Haizea Barcenilla & Garazi Ansa, 2020); Pedagogías Feministas. Otras formas de hacer mundo y Aprendiendo a ser artistas; Videotutoriales feministas (colektivof, 2019); Visualidades Diversales (Belén Romero, 2018); El mundo zurdo: Gloria Anzaldúa y su galería de pensamiento (Rían Lozano, Nina Hoechtl, Julianne Gilland, Coco Gutiérrez-Magallanes, 2018); and A Revolutionary Love (Johanna Caplliure, 2017).

Exhibition space capacity is limited. Social distancing is required and masks must be worn at all times.