Materia Abierta in Inhabiting the Museum

Through its residency program “Inhabiting the Museum”, the Museo Tamayo houses part of the 2026 summer program “para los tiempos de cuevas sónicas”, organized by Materia Abierta.

Materia Abierta is a space for mobilizing political will through collective principles. Based in Mexico City, his program causes meetings for the exchange of knowledge and ignorance. Its activities are essays to reimagine learning processes as shared responsibilities and experiences that stimulate critical intimacy.

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Summer Program 2026: para los tiempos de cuevas sónicas

Under the title para los tiempos de cuevas sónicas, the Materia Abierta 2026 summer program is curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel and will be held in Mexico City from July 27 to August 22.

This edition will explore the figure of caves as temporary, geological and revolutionary phenomena through their sonic materiality. For four weeks, Materia Abierta invites you to delve into these resonant spaces of political insurgency and connection between material, mythological and spiritual worlds. We will work from improvisation as an expressive tool and as an aesthetic strategy of deep contact with the pulses of the earth. In these underground shelters, collective demonstrations have been conjured up, through sound, that have given rise to resistance movements and imaginaries of radical transformation.

With the help of speleologists, archaeologists, philosophers and artists, you will hear the caves of the Anahuac basin. These sites—planetary ears, passages between worlds and witnesses of social movements—link people to geological temporalities beyond the human and to the material dimensions of sound. They are living entities, sacred shelters capable of returning us to a state of intimate contact with the fundamental frequencies of life.

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Based on a vast framework of Afro-Brazilian philosophy, Leda Maria Martins finds other ways to capture and explain time, ways that establish dynamic perceptions of a time that is neither linear nor progressive, but that curves simultaneously backwards and forwards, in processes of evolution and continuous movements, which blur and dissolve Western markers of past and future. For this other perception and ontology of time, it is necessary to think of a different design. The spiral is the graphic representation that encompasses the processes of simultaneity and coexistence between the different points of a curve that connects ancestry—understood in a broad sense, for African philosophies, ranging from family relationships to social and cultural practices—and the present.

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Leda Maria Martins. Poet, essayist, playwright and teacher. He has a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the Federal University of Minas Gerais and a Master of Arts from Indiana University, United States, with postdoctorates in Performance Studies from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts, and in Performance and Rites from the Fluminense Federal University. She was a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, from 1993 to 2018, at the Federal University of Ouro Preto from 1982 to 1992 and visiting professor at the Tisch School of the Arts in 2010. He has published several books, book chapters and essays in Brazil and abroad, including The Shadow Scene (Perspective, 1995), Afrographies of Memory (PerspectivaMazza Editors, 1997), The Anonymous Days (Editora Sette Letras, 1999) and The final blade of the word (2025). Your book Performances of the spiraling time, poetics of the corpo-tela (Editora Cobogó, 2021) was translated into English and published by Duke University Press as Performances of Spiral Time in 2025, with a foreword by Fred Moten. In 2017, the Leda Maria Martins Black Performing Arts Award was created, sponsored by the Minas Gerais Development Bank. In 2022, he received the Milú Villela Prize, awarded by the Itaú Cultural Foundation.

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