Cristina Morales is a Barcelona-born, London-based cultural activist. She is a public anthropologist and cultural producer working internationally as a researcher, writer, educator, and curator at the intersection of radical politics, critical psychology, and community-based art. Her work draws on decolonial theory and frameworks in liberation and depth psychology to explore the interdependence of personal and social transformation. She bridges the critical human sciences with socially engaged art as a tool for collective healing, radical imagination, and embodied praxis. Her practice and interests span public engagement, co-led and critical methodologies, relational learning, alternative forms of knowledge production, accessible art circuits, social and avant-garde movements, African and diasporic culture, and holistic health.
In addition to being the founding curator of Counterspace, Cristina is currently focusing on her freelance writing, published across national, international, and specialist media, including Decolonial Thoughts (London), Humanities, Arts & Society (Paris), Gods & Radicals Press (Seattle), El Mundo (Madrid), and Radio Africa (Barcelona). She occasionally speaks for organisations such as the Social Art Network (UK) and lectures at institutions including ABK Stuttgart University of Art & Design (Germany). In 2021, she was awarded an artist fellowship at the Design Science Studio by the Buckminster Fuller Institute (San Francisco), as part of their decade-long movement The Regenaissance — a global confluence of creators shaping regenerative futures.
Growing up, Cristina navigated intergenerational trauma as part of the first generation raised after Spain’s fascist dictatorship, preceded by the Spanish Civil War, as the grandchild of Andalusian rural migrants. Interested in deepening her understanding of human beings, she became the first in her family to access higher education, earning a Bachelor’s degree in Social & Cultural Anthropology from the University of Barcelona (2008–2011). During these formative years of social critical thought, she also undertook a five-year journey of deep self-inquiry through depth psychology. This experience, alongside her lived reality of intersectional oppression, was pivotal in the ongoing development of both her personal and political consciousness, laying the foundation for her life’s work.
Driven by an INFJ-A personality type, often described as the idealist, allowed her curiosity to also fuel a passion for art as the human expressive language par excellence. Art, as our most powerful tool to question, imagine, create, and inhabit meaning, generating other realities. At a time when social practice art degrees were not available in Spain, Cristina already active as an entrepreneur in this niche, specialised in Cultural Management with a Master’s from the Open University of Catalonia (2012–2014). After completing her studies, she migrated to the Afro-Caribbean neighbourhood of Brixton in London to continue pursuing this call.
Throughout her career, Cristina has challenged neocolonial and neoliberal products such as the art market, gentrification, and the Anthropocene, as well as their hegemonic and intertwined social constructs — nation, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, faith, and race. She has done so by curating and creating political participatory art, co-designing decolonial toolkits, and organising global networks. The intersectional scope of her practice has led her to work with a wide range of international freelance projects, as well as private, public, and non-profit organisations, covered by media such as The Guardian, BBC News, Essence, and True Africa. Projects and organisations include HostelArt, Ribermusica, and Interarts in Barcelona, and Black Cultural Archives, Peckham Platform, and Disability Arts Online in London, among others. Her clients and collaborations include the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Extinction Rebellion (London), Africa Utopia at Southbank Centre (London), Quai Branly Museum (Paris), Plurality University Network (Paris), Afropunk (Paris), Notting Hill Carnival (London), Antiuniversity Now (London), Klimafestivalen (Oslo), Brighton Pride (Brighton), Utopian Studies Society (Global), and the Center for Artistic Activism (New York), among many others.
At the heart of Cristina’s career there is a passion for natural and cultural biodiversity. She is a polyglot (Spanish, English, French, and Catalan) who has lived with, travels to, and continually learns from diverse world cultures. Her core motivation — aside from her own story — is a profound respect for life, and for expansive consciousness as a determinant of experience in its full potential. This translates into a myriad of life-supporting fields, with a common denominator: a holistic lens on the powerful mystery of both ourselves and the tapestry of our world, on our creativity and liberating practices, and on our ability to live in a state of becoming. This site and work are an archive of communal resources and experiences, co-shaping alternative imaginaries and social poetics, in the building of another present and future.
Featured image: Photography by Williamz Omope. Antiflag by Totem Taboo. London, 2017.
CRISTINA MORALES 