It is not difficult to summarize what it’s worth and what it means to study at the Institute Art Gender Nature in Basel: it is the nearness, a climate in which all those involved matter and have an impact on the program. On the one hand, there are the questions that come from us to you. We say nature, gender, and race, but every seminar may say many other things as well; every hour editing, investigating a material, or trying a new work also adds to what we say. There are many environments that form the place where you study, but also discover your work. It seems crucial today to place art and its practice at the core of questions that form our experience of the world. It is why we pay attention to nature, because in saying nature we also say gender, we say technology, we say we want to contribute to a different idea and experience of experience. It is not only the urban, not only the human, not only the modern expectations of the arts and industry, but also the commitment to invent the time ahead of us by sensing differently all of what surrounds us. Gender is, therefore, a challenge. It emerges as matter, as substance, as question, as norm, as law, as experience, as abuse, as limit, as difference, as problem… It cannot be treated as a subject because it cannot be separated from any other existing thing. It needs to be seen as embedded in the very substance of our personal, social, cultural, economic, and political development.

We currently dedicate two research projects to investigating how artists migh impact the way we understand the oceans (together with TBA21–Academy) and the role education plays in realizing equality in the arts, in the real (together with Muzeum Susch).Because you may not be at all interested—at least at first—in these questions, their role is not to recruit you to a cause, but like rain, to immerse you in what may be valuable for you as an artist, as a contributing force to sense, where experience can turn into motivation. While reading the list of courses we distribute at the beginning of every semester, you will encounter many views and options to make and to reflect on art: from new technologies, history of exhibitions, painting or sculpture or video or sound, to performance and consciousness and its limits and the interest of artists in expanding traditional boundaries.

It is the sum and coexistence of the interest of all, the difference in the way everyone expresses it, the freedom one feels in the living respect that reigns, that makes this place pleasant. Do not misunderstand me, pleasant has two meanings here: it means demanding, since we expect you to be generous and share, and act upon what you do share, and surround yourself with mentors who know that difference in perspective is a way to learn how to find your own; but pleasant is also another word for political, since it is based on the right to be well, the responsibility we all share to make this happen, to allow this well-being to come alive—free of fear, anxiety, menace… And this is the challenge, because if we manage to experience the freedom joy gives us to think, to act, to share, would we then be able to deny it to others? That is why places, even humble and small, separated from the particulars of life, are so, so crucial today. They are beginning to be rare, and we are about to pay for this loss with our freedom. Be very welcome.

Chus Martínez