Afterschool
Program
Vortex
Artists
Eric Iocco
Afterschool (Barcelona)
Afterschool is a cultural platform that transforms a former school in Barcelona into a space for encounter, learning, and artistic creation. Reclaiming its history as an educational center for migrant and working-class communities, it proposes reimagining these spaces as open forums for dialogue, experimentation, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Through exhibitions, artistic practices, and educational programs, Afterschool fosters a playground for cultural projects, promoting international exchanges and cultural models based on self-management, community building, and collaborative forms of cultural production.
Proposal
The Witchcraft Supper is a group exhibition in which artists explore medieval symbols of power and mystery, transposing them into the context of contemporary society—swords, horses, and crystal flowers. The artists’ works engage with the research of After Poema, drawing parallels between the past and the illusory reality of fairy tales.
The installation is inspired by centuries-old underground movements, the subtle signs of communication, and the architecture in which they were housed.
Mary LeRanch is a Barcelona-based transdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, performance, and design. Her practice explores the relationship between the vulnerable biological body and technological systems, addressing themes such as consumer capitalism, patriarchy, beauty standards, bodily dissociation, and identity. Combining contemporary dance and contortion with sculptural prostheses, she creates speculative and dystopian narratives rooted in cyberfeminism, transhumanism, and the poetics of the glitch body. Her work has been presented in exhibitions and performances in Barcelona and London, and she was awarded the XarxaProd Award in 2025.
Eric Iocco
Eric Iocco is a Spanish visual artist and tattoo artist based in Barcelona. Working primarily with painting, while also incorporating sound, drawing, and installation, his practice explores the relationship between visual art, music culture, and contemporary society. His work addresses themes such as mental health, social anxiety, class, artistic production, environmental crisis, masculinity, and individualism. Combining abstraction and figuration, Iocco reflects on uncertainty and the personal and collective tensions generated by social and cultural transformation. He holds a Master’s degree in Artistic Research and Production from the University of Barcelona.
Urania Hadal is a Barcelona-based artist whose practice unfolds across sculpture, object-making, and spatial installation. Drawing on astrology, mythology, ritual, and tarot, she investigates the relationship between symbol, matter, and presence. Her altars, reliquaries, swords, and ceremonial structures operate as architectures of invocation, activating intuitive forms of perception and opening thresholds between the visible and the invisible.
is a Catalan artist working primarily in painting. She studied illustration and self-publishing at Escola Francesca Bonnemaison and later fine arts and design at Escola Massana.
Her practice functions through autobiographical material, seeking to establish links between everyday experience and the mytho-poetic structures that underlie it. Her painterly process centers on gesture, dilution, and erasure as compositional strategies: she works with oil paint, rags, and sandpaper, employing layering, glazing, and reworking as key methods. Drawing from personal writings, archival photographs, literary references, and motives related to the body, intimacy, and memory, she constructs an approximation of how we relate to the spaces that surround us, foregrounding their latent narratives through artistic practice.
Her work has been presented in gallery contexts including Escat Gallery (Barcelona), Malpais, as well as in acknowledged shows such as La Bibi Panorama #8.
Mar Villeyra is a multidisciplinary artist. Her practice operates through the articulation and transformation of visual and non-visual materials, generating new modes of expression that move between image, text, and installation.
Working across digital and analogue photography, printed matter, video, and experimental writing, she incorporates obsolete technologies—such as fax machines and printing presses—as active tools for image manipulation, foregrounding the material and processual conditions of representation. Her work is grounded in an investigation of how digital immateriality can be translated into tactile, sensory experiences that engage the body.
Through layered processes of translation, distortion, and re-inscription, Villeyra constructs speculative narratives that intertwine fiction and memory.
