Mexigeil

Curatorial Mutiny, Linköpings universitet, Karolinska institutet together with their partners in Mexico are organizing a workshop and a series of public events in Mexico City in autumn 2015. The project will draw together international artists, musicians and neuroscientists for a week-long meeting to reflect on the relationship between neuroscience, art and creativity entitled “Mexigeil.”

The one-week workshop will specifically focus on:

•    How does habit nurture and inhibit creativity?

•    How is creation related to problem solving, norm breaking and conflict?

•    Inspire new ideas, expressions and content in music and art.

•    Inspire new ideas in neuroscience.

Mexigeil will bring together 6 international creators and researchers who will work with 3 colleagues from Mexico during one week. Together they will reflect on how habits influence and shape our lives. While we are dependent on a certain amount of recurrence in our lives, norms, habits and conventions can also stand in the way of human creativity. What can be done to enhance creativity? Are our brains hardwired for habits or creation? Can we learn or train our brains’ plasticity? Do scientists and artists think differently – if so are these thinking patterns innate or have they been learned?


Finding new solutions is connected to how we think about the past. Therefore, two of the days of the workshop will put special emphasis on local and global heritage. It is logical in the context of the workshop to look at how cultural, scientific and social heritage can both free and inhibit the creation of new ideas. Preservation of past human achievements is essential for maintenance and progress of human existence, but many questions remain unanswered how we retain a dynamic relationship to these traces. In other words, how do continue to draw new knowledge from the past and rediscover history – both in its glories and its lowest moments? Or phrased differently, how does the past stay a lively workshop of teeming ideas rather than a dust covered museum of objects that have no connection to our everyday existence?

Each day will offer a specific problematic that the group will work on together. Every evening will host a public presentation that will appeal to broad and diverse audiences and include musical events, performances and lectures accompanied by drinks and light food that will enable meetings across both borders, genres and disciplines and offer inspiration for new ideas and solutions.

A special website will be created for the event and will be continuously updated so that discussions and videos can be followed globally. A publication will be designed and produced upon the project completion that will ensure that the outcomes of the meeting will be dispersed and kept for future.