Mónica Candela

Visal Residency Program | January 2026
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During my residency, I have focused on my own narrative and poetic production, scattered across dozens of notebooks. To give it a continuum or several, a container or several. Reorganize it and come closer to its artistic abundance.

BIO 

I am a multifaceted person who, with my own hands and together with my family, has created a biodiverse, bioclimatic, and ecological place in which I live — a place that for the past 25 years has been a seedbed of life in the desert of Puerto del Garruchal. For more than 20 years, I have worked as a university professor, teaching wildlife epidemiology and training in wildlife management alongside biologists, veterinarians, geographers, and ecologists.

I collaborate with transhumant shepherds from Santiago de la Espada in the search for creative and sustainable futures, as I believe that certain ancestral and borderland human cultures are at risk of extinction, despite all the social and cultural strategies that could support them. Since 2019, I have been working and researching in eco-social justice, leading an international and multidisciplinary group to create innovative tools that connect schools with their nearby landscapes through social participation, food sovereignty, solar cooking, cinema, and more. Yet what feels most urgent currently is the possibility of giving physical form to my thoughts and emotions through narrative, poetic, performative, pictorial, and/or sound-based media—allowing each idea to manifest itself in the way it chooses.