The hybrid research proposal Al calor devenimos hembras by Luca Carrubba and Maria Ignacia Ibarra has been selected in the latest call for the Barcelona Crea – HacTe Knowing-Not-Knowing: Territories Àrids Grants. This project proposes a critical look at the effects of climate change and environmental coloniality where the management of life, reproduction, care and migration are unequally redistributed among species, bodies and territories. The project is based on two unique biopolitical phenomena: the accelerated process of feminization of the loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta) due to the increase in sea temperature and the sand where they nest; and the egg-laying documented in 2020 in Barcelona, on the Mar Bella beach, and the progressive increase in nesting on the Catalan coasts since 2023.
Luca Carrubba holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the UB, researcher and co-director of ArsGames. Her work analyzes the logics of power in technology and digital culture. Maria Ignacia Ibarra is PhD in Society and Culture from the UB and lecturer at the UOC. She is a specialist in decolonial feminisms, anti-racism and political ecology of water.
Carruba and Ibarra will develop hybrid research through what they have called “amphibious exploration methodologies” that will include interviews and life stories, workshops to map affective geographies of water and its scarcity, and practices of amphibious ethnography and listening to underwater sounds. In the heat we become females It thus proposes to develop aquatic epistemologies and contextualize the socio-environmental crisis in our immediate context. It also articulates narratives about the socio-bodily effects of the climate crisis, understanding that the body is not separable from the social context and deviating from the postulates of individualism.
The project will be carried out in collaboration with researcher Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos, from the Diverse Research Group of Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), to provide an analytical framework from political ecology, and incorporates scientific research derived from the conservation of marine fauna. It will also have the scientific advice of Elena Abella Pérez, oceanographer, PhD in Ecology and Management of Living Marine Resources and coordinator of the Applied Ecology and Global Change Research Group of the BETA Technology Center of the University of Vic.
The evaluation committee, made up of Manuel Cirauqui (Eina), Vicente Matallana (NAF) and Tere Badia (HacTe), has valued the unique approach of the project that emphasizes the concept of aridity applied to aquatic environments and, specifically, to the Mediterranean.
The project will take place between March and April 2026, with a final public presentation of the research device.
