Joaquín Collado’s Curated Selection – November 2025

These readings I recommend here may be broad and hearty, but in some way, they trace a path through questions that have run through me and shaped my gaze in recent years. I haven’t read them entirely, nor from beginning to end: they’re drooled over and deciphered in no particular order, riddled like the worm that burrows into the apple—curious, hungry—and knows only the throats and cracks it has opened. It knows-unknows the apple, but—is it an apple?

“How daring, Raquel,” I thought, “and how ashamed I feel.” Her invitation stirred some affects in me. The first: shame. And from here, my first reading. In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes a beautiful essay on shame as an affect of volcanic energy and transformative power, emerging from stigmatized childhoods. Written, moreover, from a gesture of transmission, of care, of allowing oneself to be seen, to teach, to share. Shame (I recall her saying something like this) comes from an external and shamed gaze, and clings to the body, shaping us into little shameful (or ashamed) animals. Perhaps what makes us human is that first confusion of thinking ourselves separate from what we point to as the other.

And here comes Marta Segarra, to cast light on the immense darkness and, at the same time, the narrow certainty that separates us from animals (from the animal we continue to be). Humanimales shakes the borders between the human and the animal, throwing stones and spit at the traditional notion of the human subject. Continuing this exercise of shifting our self-centered gaze, Rosi Braidotti opens up the world of The Posthuman, where the “post” does not come to erase the human, but to imagine how a relationship with the world might look from beyond the human as the center. Expanding our capacity to see what is, Vibrant Matter surprises us by disarticulating binaries such as the living and the inert, or the active and the passive. Jane Bennett thus rounds off this collection of four readings that, from now on, will exist in book form at Graner. Beware: books of sophisticated forces and powers capable of altering the order of a library.

Joaquín Collado, associate artist at Graner 2025–26 with the project Dejarse quieto flotar (Let Oneself Stay Still and Float)