Maria Lucia Cruz Correia

Common Dreams: flotation school is a prototype for a mobile survival school that travels and adapts to each city’s specific context by partnering with local universities, art institutions, and organizations promoting sustainability.

Structure: The school uses a collective process based upon the four elements (air-water-earth-fire) as an attempt to rethink our notions of survival in relation to geo-politicization of natural resources.

Fields: The project draws on a transdisciplinary, collaborative process to facilitate a dialogue between art students and/or experts from the fields of political ecology, sustainability, economics, agriculture, holism, activism, science and architecture.

Method: As a methodology, Common Dreams encourages participants to engage in a critical reflection about what “pedagogy in arts” means today, and, in particular, how this approach can influence our ability to address the climate emergency. The primary topics addressed in the project include: education-ecology-shelter-sustainability-social-economy-resources-cosmologies.

Outcome: Every edition of the school has a different format depending on its location and the local partners. Consequently, the outcomes from Common Dreams can take various forms, including a floating raft on the lake, a tent in the forest, or a public conference or debate.

Maria Lucia Cruz Correia’s artistic work communicates her deep commitment to engage with ecological crises and the climate emergency. She seeks to address contemporary environmental crimes by creating participatory laboratories that connect the wider public to artistic approaches alongside the voices of scientists, activists and lawyers.

Correia’s visual installations, performances, participatory laboratories, and talks are grounded in the belief that complex ecological communities, incorporating humans and non-humans, are already a reality. Consequently, she seeks to trigger audiences’ capacity to connect to a “more-than-human-world.”

Most of Correia’s projects are temporary, autonomous platforms that propose utopian and resilient public services as alternatives to the current capitalistic system. Because she engages contemporary discourses related to the Anthropocene, nature, colonization and the climate emergency, her work primarily takes the form of long-term projects seeking to generate a process of awareness, transformation and restoration.

From 2013 to 2019, Correia held an artist residency at Arts Centre Vooruit, and since 2020 has been a resident of Wpzimmer (BE). She received the 2017 Roel Verniers Prijs at the Theaterfestival with her first theater piece, Voice of Nature: the trial, and her new project KINSTITUTE was shortlisted for the 2019 COAL prize (FR). Correia’s work has also been supported by Imagine 2020. She is currently part of a number of networks, including DISPLACEMENT: Uncertain Journeys (CH), Be Part (EU), Green Art Lab Alliance, and TerraBatida (PT).