On 26 March 2026, LABoral Centro de Arte hosted philosopher and researcher Alberto López Cuenca for a thought‑provoking lecture on The Arts of Conviviality, inviting audiences to reconsider how we coexist—human to human, and human to more‑than‑human—in an era shaped by accelerating technoscience.

Speaking to a full auditorium, López Cuenca revisited Ivan Illich’s seminal notion of conviviality, a call for collaborative, sustainable, and interdependent ways of living that resist the extractive logic of industrial systems. While Illich himself acknowledged the limits of convivial strategies in transforming post‑industrial society, López Cuenca highlighted why the concept is resurfacing today: as a framework for care, mutual support, and alternative modes of relating in a world increasingly mediated by technology.

The lecture unfolded within the context of Smells like kin, the ongoing artistic research by Lea Luka Sikau and Denisa Půbalová in collaboration with scientist Felipe Lombó. Their work explores fermentation as a multispecies practice—an entanglement of microorganisms, humans, and environments that generates new material and symbolic forms of kinship. López Cuenca connected these ideas to broader questions: Can conviviality itself ferment? Can art cultivate new forms of togetherness amid global instability?

Presented by Pablo M. Testa and framed within the European research project STUDIOTOPIA, the event opened a space for reflection on how artistic practices can model new ecologies of collaboration, care, and coexistence. The conference video captures this timely conversation at the intersection of philosophy, art, and the living world.