On Wednesday, February 12, Swiftly arose and spread around me. Interventions for a Sticky Thinking (Act Two) was presented at the CA2M Museum, marking the activation of the second part of the curatorial research within the framework of the Encura VII residency. This opening into the research process featured contributions by La cuarta piel, Sandra Mar, Maya Pita-Romero, Laura Ramírez Ashbaugh, and María Rojas.

Encura is a research residency program aimed at promoting, expanding, and complicating curatorial research processes by intertwining the artistic contexts of Barcelona and Madrid. It encourages and enables curatorial investigations that do not result in conventional exhibition projects. This grant is led by HANGAR, the CA2M Museum, Casa de Velázquez, and hablarenarte.

The second act of this curatorial research project was conceived as a performative and reflective gathering inspired by the exploration of sticky thought and the potential of slime as a political, ecological, and affective concept. The event brought together a series of interventions addressing topics such as the mediation of viscosity in human and more-than-human relationships, as well as the radical connection between bodies, fluids, and environments.

This sticky thought develops as a conceptual and sensorial framework that blurs the boundaries between bodies, objects, and environments, exploring dynamics of connection and transformation. Drawing from the intimate contact described by Walt Whitman in the poem that inspires the project’s title, this sticky thought takes saliva as a medium that, as it flows and spreads, connects the human with the more-than-human, the scale of our body with the infinitely large and the infinitely small.

Danez Smith amplifies this perspective through poetry from a queer, racialized, and HIV-positive standpoint, where fluids, like lubricant, activate both an intimate practice and a political metaphor of exchange and relation. Here, viscosity becomes a way to resist normativity and embrace a relational understanding of identities and bodies, beyond imposed limits.

Writers such as Karin Anna Pittman and Karen Barad also approach stickiness through its mediating element: connections “lubricated” by the viscous and the sticky are not simply links between pre-existing agents, but generators of new, overflowing forms of being and knowing.