On Tuesday, December 17, Swiftly arose and spread around me. Interventions for a Sticky Thinking (Act One) was presented at HANGAR. This event marked the activation of the first part of the curatorial research developed within the framework of the Encura VII grant, which later continued in Madrid. This opening into the research process featured contributions by Ce Quimera, Ali Arévalo, Huaqian Zhang, and LANAV.

The first 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 unfolds 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, sticky thought takes saliva as a medium that, as it flows and spreads, binds the human with the more-than-human, and our bodily scale with both 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 of resisting normativity and embracing a relational understanding of identities and bodies, beyond imposed limits. Writers such as Karin Anna Pittman and Karen Barad also engage with stickiness through its mediating element: connections “lubricated” by the viscous and the sticky are not merely links between pre-existing agents, but rather generators of new, overflowing forms of being and knowing.