Luis René

Guerra Miranda

Luis Guerra Miranda is a visual artist and philosopher. He holds the Ramón y Cajal Senior Researcher position at the Institute of Philosophy - CSIC Spanish Council of Scientific Research. Former Senior Researcher at MIAS Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies, Casa de Velázquez and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and former Senior Researcher at the Research Institute at The University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland. He co-organized the GOAP (Open Group of Political Art) at the Arts Santa Mónica Center in Barcelona (Feb - Dec 2024). Former Fellow Artist-Researcher at the Art & Theory program, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, Austria 2022-2023, and former fellow researcher at the Postfoundational Thinking Research Group, University of Barcelona (2022-2023). He has also been a Kone Foundation Grantee 2020 and Resident Fellow 2021 at the Saastamoinen Foundation. From 2019 to 2020, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Artistic Research (CfAR) at the University of the Arts Helsinki. He also worked as an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Barcelona. In 2017, he was a resident artist at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, and he did a research residency at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía de Madrid from 2015 to 2016.

The main objective of his current research is to generate a new theoretical and practical framework from a reparatory perspective in the field of art and design practices, which involves strengthening our contemporary conceptions of creation and sustainable culture in the public sphere that assumes and includes the need to respond to different global and local challenges through artistic and design methodologies reflecting the diversity and complexity of our societies, recognizing the historical and culturally diverse roots, languages and ways of life, as well as the urgency of current ecological changes.

The reparatory approach considers contemporary art and design practices from an inclusive and regenerative perspective as critical-cognitive, reflexive, and experimental forms. A reparatory approach will focus on the networks and relationships built between social communities, reparatory art and design practices, and their pedagogical potential in an informal and extended social and political context. This research recognizes that art is a fundamental agent in transforming, sustaining, and holding social and knowledge production contexts. My research focuses on artistic initiatives already adopting a reparatory perspective, responding to material and immaterial social needs, and extending reparations towards the boundaries of social relations, emotional fields, communicative performativities, poetics of attention, and ecologies of collective affect.

In the face of existing harm, the act of reparation seeks restitution that does not imply forgetting the origins of the harm caused. Reparation suggests an understanding that the transformation produced by the damage has created a different reality to which it must adapt. Nevertheless, this adaptation supposes a transforming, relational, sustainable learning process. To repair is to heal, and healing is a process of intense care. Repair is a pedagogical process of reweaving and interweaving, which shapes new knowledge in a community, emerging from the damage that occurred. My research’s central hypothesis is that reparatory art and design practices compose informal pedagogical devices that promote forms and practices of direct democracy and social justice.

Guerra’s work as an artist has been exhibited at the Kunstpavillon, Innsbruck, Austria; Fabra I Coats Centre d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Museo de Reus, Reus, Spain; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Germany; Fundació Antoni Tapies, Barcelona, Spain; Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago de Chile; Goethe-Institut de Barcelona, Spain; Centro de Arte Lo Pati, Amposta, Spain; La Capella, Barcelona, Spain; Kunsthall 3,14, Bergen, Norway; Aratoi Museum of Art and History, Masterton, New Zealand; Fonderie Darling, Montréal, Canada; Charlotte Fogh Contemporary, Aarhus, Denmark; Alice Day gallery, Brussels, Belgic; Galería Casa Sin Fin, Madrid, Spain; Root Division, San Francisco, USA; Litteraturhuset (VOLT), Bergen, Norway; Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago de Chile; Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, among others. Also, he has participated at the LISTE Art Fair, Basel; ARTEBA, Buenos Aires; CIGE, Beijing; Chaco, Santiago de Chile; Brussels Art Fair, Brussels; ARTBO, Bogotá.