1st edition of the Climate Biennial Announces Its Dates and Title: Rehearsing the Unexpected
The Climate Biennial: Art, Industry, and Territory will hold its first edition from June 12 to September 20, 2026, in Avilés, Asturias, under the title Rehearsing the Unexpected. This name reflects the biennial’s philosophy: exploring moments of transition and change where what once seemed stable no longer is, and the future cannot yet be clearly defined.
Artistic director Amanda Masha Caminals explains: “Rehearsing the Unexpected proposes embracing uncertainty as a field of action, without resigning ourselves to waiting for catastrophe. The Biennial sees art as a guiding tool, capable of raising questions, highlighting tensions, and proposing sensitive ways to navigate scenarios where no definitive maps exist.”
For over three months, Avilés will transform into an open stage for exhibitions, meetings, workshops, and performative actions that connect art, industry, and territory. The first edition will unfold across eight confirmed exhibition spaces and additional public venues, including participatory architecture projects, educational programs, and community activities, inviting visitors to experience new forms of coexistence and care in response to environmental and social challenges.
Curatorial text and conceptualisation of the title of the first edition.
Rehearsing the Unexpected
Societies do not change following clear trajectories or single paths. Profound transformations -ecological, social, technological, cultural- are experienced rather as the crossing of thresholds: moments of instability in which what seemed to sustain the world ceases to do so and what is to come cannot yet be formulated clearly.
We live in a time of multiple transitions, where the climate refers not only to the atmosphere and its physical alterations, but also to the social climate that we breathe: the forms of coexistence, of conflict, of care, and of collective imagination that run through our lives. We do not inhabit a single climate, but many overlapping climates: environmental, social, political, affective and spiritual, which pierce through us and transform us.
Since ancient times, art has accompanied this type of moments. Long before becoming a discipline or institution, it has been and is one of the fundamental human practices to go through change: rituals, images, stories and gestures that have helped multiple and diverse communities to reorganise their relationship with the territory, with time, with the unknown. In ancient civilisations and contemporary vernacular knowledge, artistic practices are linked to climate cycles or to building links between the human and the non-human world. In all these contexts and through the centuries, art has not offered technical solutions or clear answers, but diffuse orientation.
The Climate Biennial conceives art as a support practice by which artists operate as step-through guides, capable of bringing up questions, pointing out frictions, exposing hidden issues, or presenting sensitive ways to navigate scenarios where there are no definitive maps. In the face of a dominant narrative that insists that social exhaustion and environmental collapse are to be expected, the Climate Biennial points —through art— towards the opposite energy: ways of thinking and doing that rehearse fairer and more habitable current times.
Under the title Rehearsing the Unexpected, the first edition of the Climate Biennial sates that spaces to meet, listen and experiment can be created through art, and they are capable of overcoming environmental urgency or polarisation. «Rehearsing” is presented here as a shared learning, a gesture that unfolds into action and in dialogue with others. «The Unexpected» opens up a field of possibilities: practices, collective stereotypes and ways of life that emerge from the present and lay out new ways of inhabiting the world together.
Rehearsing the Unexpected proposes accepting uncertainty as a field of action, instead of giving up and waiting for the catastrophe.
In its first edition, this rehearsal of the unexpected unfolds in Avilés and in different rural enclaves in Asturias; A territory with an intense mining and industrial history, still open reconversion and decarbonisation processes, and rural areas that support other forms of relationships with the land throughout. The approach to the context has been built collectively by listening and through discussion, by means of tools such as a critical cartography prepared by the artist Elisa Cuesta, or cultural mediation processes with local organisations guided by the curatorial researcher Zoe López, and the creative process of different artists, accompanied by this art direction and the curatorial researchers Carla Jaria and Elena Mataix. From this approach, the biennial is not understood as a device imposing a narrative or a new project, but as a reactive medium that accompanies and amplifies what is already underway.
«Spirit, rehearse the journeys of the body that are to come…». See Ursula K. Le Guin, «Come to dust”, So far so good, Copper Canyon Press, 2018
From these exercises of approximation to the local context and of attention to the global moment, Rehearsing the Unexpected presents exhibitions distributed in 11 venues in Avilés and a public programme that activates 15 spaces in the territory. In addition, it proposes other lines of work that expand its scope: the reconversion of public facilities through participatory architecture projects, the support to community practices in the rural area with the En Colectivo research, and art + education experiments.
With such diversity of lines of work, Rehearsing the Unexpected aims to expand the temporal scope of the biennial format. The work with the artists has unfolded in different time periods that exceed the framework of the event. In a commitment to artistic practice and experimentation, the biennial launches an ACTS (Art, Science, Technology and Society) production programme.
It is also linked to the National Art and Climate Collection with the incorporation of works from the biennial to the acquis. In addition, it incorporates adaptations of ongoing projects or creation processes in very early stages, and whose development will exceed the closing of the first edition of the biennial.
Thus, Rehearsing the Unexpected proposes an exercise of «walking in constellation” not constricted to a single time period and direction, paying attention to the relationships that sustain us and to the knowledge that emerges on the way. The constellations do not indicate a final destination: they allow to find the way while advancing, keeping the links between different bodies, territories, practices and times alive.
Through these exhibitory constellations, public, educational programmes, or programmes for the transformation of public facilities, Rehearsing the Unexpected brings together over forty artists and collectives, whose works are displayed in urban, peri-urban and rural contexts in three thematic axes: Weather Station, Present Industries and Grieve and Joy. On the one hand, Weather Station proposes new ways of observing, interpreting and communicating atmospheric issues in a context of environmental emergency. Weather station projects originate from art residencies carried out in dialogue with the National Meteorological Agency (AEMET, by its acronym in Spanish) and other scientific bodies. On the other hand, Present Industries investigates the legacy and possible futures of the greatest global climate-making human activity, the industry. Distributed among spaces linked to the mining, industrial and productive history of Avilés, Present Industries brings together artistic practices that examine the progress, energy transition, and sustainability collective stereotypes, as well as their material, social and symbolic tensions. Finally, Grieve and Joy refers to that which sustains us physically and spiritually, to the affective and sensitive dimension of transitions: what is lost, what hurts, but also what is celebrated and imagined collectively.
This diverse set of practices —local and international, individual and collective— and subjects does not propose a sole narrative about the environmental and social climate, but a field of relationships where art, territory and community are intertwined. The Climate Biennial is thus formulated as a space to rehearse other forms of attention, coexistence and care, understanding transitions not as a closed horizon, but as a shared processes built in common.
-Amanda Masha Caminals-
Art Director, Climate Biennial: Art, industry and territory
