The Arts of Conviviality: Rethinking How We Live Together in a Technological World
The Arts of Conviviality: Rethinking How We Live Together in a Technological World
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.
Art & Science Fair at LABoral Showcases Youth Innovation
Art & Science Fair at LABoral Showcases Youth Innovation
In November, LABoral Centro de Arte hosted a new edition of its Art and Science Fair, bringing together secondary‑school students for a day of hands‑on experimentation at the intersection of creativity and research. The event, developed in collaboration with the collective GRIGRI and framed within the European project Studiotopia II, transformed the Gijón art center into a laboratory of ideas where young participants explored themes ranging from interspecies cooperation to the social impact of artificial intelligence.
Throughout the fair, students had the opportunity to apply to six different workshops led by artists, educators, and scientists, each designed to spark curiosity and encourage critical thinking. The activities invited participants to test materials, prototype concepts, and reflect on how artistic practice can help address contemporary environmental and technological challenges.
The gathering concluded with a collective assembly in which students shared their findings and discussed the role of creativity in shaping future solutions.
You can take a deeper look into the fair trough bellow video that captures the energy of the day, offering a closer look at the projects, conversations, and collaborative spirit that defined this year’s edition.
Video: Nadia Penella
Smells Like Kin opened at LABoral Centro de Arte
Smells Like Kin opened at LABoral Centro de Arte
The exhibition Smells Like Kin opened at LABoral Centro de Arte on November 7, 2025, inviting visitors into a sensory exploration of fermentation.
Every day, we digest live microbial cultures—cheese, dough, yoghurt, cider—in the form of liquids and fermented foods.
Smells Like Kin is the result of artistic research into these traditional and laboratory fermentation practices, both inside and outside Asturias. The exhibition presents a sensory experience around the culture of fermentation that invites visitors to smell, touch, or listen to the elements present in the gallery.
The floor sculptures show the soundscapes collected by the artists: the vibration of pressing apples for cider, the decomposition of matter recorded with hydrophones, and narratives of people who engage in fermentation in Asturias, whether as daily work, festive ritual, or scientific experiment.
In the space, aromas move and settle, activating memories and bodily knowledge. The suspended silicone membranes—moulded on the concrete floor of LABoral—evoke the scoby, a living organism that ferments, unites and transforms.
Smells Like Kin proposes fermentation as a way of thinking and feeling the connection with the living, an essay on expanded relationships: bonds based on shared practices, mutual transformations and interspecies relationships, questioning inherited ideas of belonging beyond the blood family.
Artists: Dr. Lea Luka Sikau y Denisa Půbalová
Scientist: Felipe Lombó
Originaly published at LABoral Centro de Arte.
