Lo Relacional

Back and forth between the Baix Empordà and Barcelona, Patricia and Desiré stir up consciences through Lo Relacional, a collective driver of relationships and practices between education, cultural creation, and community dynamics. From a feminist, intercultural, queer, and intersectional perspective (intersectionality is the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities and their respective systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination), they activate individual, social, and community transformation processes that explore new forms of more shared, equitable, sustainable, and diverse living. Their strength is generating relationships between people, contexts, disciplines, and ways of doing and being. They don’t have a single way of working, employing a hybrid operation that adapts to the needs and possibilities of each project, always focusing on the relationships that arise through their dynamics.

Though small, Lo Relacional’s team of collaborators unite according to each project. They work based on orders they receive, primarily from public institutions. Their projects are deeply focused on the settings, such as civic and educational centers. They employ empathy, active listening, and special attention regarding people’s processes and mechanisms.

“Is anyone left out of our actions? At Lo Relacional, we consider differences through empowerment and alliances, not through creating inequalities. We make bodies, genders, sexualities, abilities, cultures, and spiritualities visible from an intersectional perspective."

Through their experience at schools, they highlight that equality is often confused with uniformity, and that spaces for free and reflective dialogue are needed. For example, they cite the location of classroom tables, predetermined in a specific, non-inclusive way, for understanding communication between students and teachers. Their projects seek to move from a standardized pedagogy to one with freedom, equity, and plurality. They teach self-acceptance and self-love and articulate new ways of thinking and being together.

Lo Relacional works from, with, and for abnormality. They question our privileges, how we can become aware of the roles we have internalized, and how we transmit them in our personal and professional relationships. They question what we have assumed is valid, natural, or normal as the absolute truth, and seek to work on listening and sharing with people who have different interpretative frameworks.

“At Lo Relacional, we ask ourselves about care: for ourselves, others, and the environment. How can we make our lives more friendly and sustainable? We craft questions, embrace (in)coherencies, and leave room for nuance, experimentation, and failure. We ask ourselves questions from a shared responsibility, to continue living and conspiring towards pluralities so minorities can feel comfortable and welcomed in life’s common spaces.

Is there room to be optimistic? Definitely. Otherwise, we wouldn’t do what we do. //