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Live streaming at 6 pm.

One of the key strategies of ‘cultural bioresistance practices’ is the creation of shared spaces for exchange, which favour the breaking down of barriers of specialisation. This, in turn, entails a commitment to interaction and to generating non-hierarchical relationships between different fields of knowledge. The levelling of hierarchies also applies to the unequal relationship between specialists and amateurs in artistic practices.
Bioresistance consists of disordering phenomena that disrupt mechanisms of alienation which seek to reinforce the status quo, thus blurring the boundaries between compartmentalised knowledge. This activity is based on the non-conception of a specialised field of knowledge defined by exclusive criteria, which disparages interaction with non-experts, because the denial of this interaction simply reaffirms the hierarchy of knowledge and of access to knowledge. Or, as Claire Pentecost puts it, solidifies ‘the systematic ignorance, generalized alienation, frustration of individual potential and, in the long term, social damage still difficult to predict.’

The first session of this activity is a seminar that brings together different lines of research and conceptual frameworks in order to explore the potentiality of exchange-based cooperative work for building spaces in which to exploit dialogic potential and address collective practices that can generate interruptions in pre-established imaginaries and reconfigure common spaces.

The second session consists of a workshop based on GYNEpunk: Autonomous ginecologyLAB, a research project that aims to generate DIY-DIT labs for accessible diagnosis and extreme experimentation techniques, and to develop protocols that can be used in both fixed and mobile environments. The idea is to hack and construct our own low-cost ultrasound, endoscopic, and ecographic devices, in an attempt to maximise the potential of shared learning and the radical energy of our own bodies, decolonising the body and exploding its pre-established imaginary.

Seminar curated by Laura Benítez Valero

PARTICIPANTS
Laura Benítez Valero
Laura Benítez Valero holds a PhD in Philosophy from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, specialising in the Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, an MA in Contemporary Philosophy and an MA in Contemporary Art Aesthetics and Theories, both from UAB. Over the past four years she has worked as an assistant professor and researcher. She has been a member of various R+D projects and has participated in several research residencies at Ars Electronica. Benítez Valero is an independent curator. As a member of the collective Leland Palmer she has worked on Segundo intento; Lo tengo, no lo tengo (Espai Zero1); Todo en parte, with Maite Muñoz and Araceli Corbo (MUSAC), and Milano Radicale, with Aria Spinelli (Fundació Antoni Tàpies/Homesession/Sala d’Art Jove). She is currently working on the research project An aesthetics of Disorganisation as a Contestational Strategy in Bioresistance and in the Generation of Critical-Participatory Discourses. Bioresistance, Transversality, and Emancipation, with a 2015 grant from the Department de Cultura, Generalitat de Catalunya.
https://laurabenitezvalero.wordpress.com/

Ernesto Casero
Ernesto Casero has a BA in Fine Arts from Universitat Politècnica de València. His early work revolved around visual perception and two-dimensional representation, and he now focuses on aspects related to the ideas of authenticity and truth, the history of biology, and the representation of nature from the perspectives of art and science. He studies the similarities and points of friction between artistic and scientific images, and the permeability of artistic media, as the basis for developing an aesthetic discourse on the arbitrariness of the history of science. The parameters of his recent work are strongly influenced by biology, particularly at the points where it touches other disciplines such as sociology, history, and economics. The connections between Darwinism and capitalism are the conceptual framework for his latest project. Casero has exhibited his work in galleries in Mexico, France, and Spain, and has participated in international art fairs in London, Paris, Madrid, and Lisbon.
http://www.ernestocasero.com/

Antonio Gómez Villar
Antonio Gómez holds a BA in Philosophy and a PhD in Humanities from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He is currently a teacher and researcher at several Spanish and international universities and institutions. His main lines of work revolve around analysing repertories of collective action in social movements from an antagonist perspective, contemporary philosophy in general, and biopolitical debates in particular. He is part of the international network of biopolitics researchers, and a member of the collective Artefakte, a web of complicity that seeks to trigger those small cataclysms of the mind that help to subvert the political and cultural grammar of our time. He is the editor of the book Vidas dañadas. Precariedad y vulnerabilidad en la era de la austeridad (2014) and contributor to diario.es.
http://antoniogomezvillar.com/

Paula Pin
Paula Pin is a transhackfeminist de-former with a strong inclination towards research and experimentation processes that involve collective, free technologies. She currently cohabits and works with Klau Kinki in the transhackfeminst laboratory Pechblenda, where they generate knowledge and technological autonomy. Crossing desires and disciplines they enter fully into the matter of a multiple body, be it organic, artificial, or a fusion of both. Biopunk Biosophy that fractilises into numerous, proliferous research lines and biopolitical practices. The Pechblenda bio-electro-chemical experimental laboratory is a common space for holding rituals and alchemically deriving practical knowledge with the desire to create new hybrid organisms, moments of affinity and quantum dissonance. Techno-witch rituals and acid noise with Transnoise, Quimera Rosa, klau and julito.
Plants, microorganisms, and other sources of alternative energy form a complex mesh of interactions which fuse machines, animal and plant organisms with the cosmos, opening up a transhackfemenist ecology.
www.jellypin.hotglue.me/

Gerard Vilar
Gerard Vilar studied philosophy in Barcelona, Frankfurt, and Konstanz. He was a scholarship holder at DAAD and Humboldt. His first faculty position was in the Department of Theory and Composition at the ETS of Architecture in Barcelona. He is currently Full Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory in the Department of Philosophy at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, which he previously directed.
Vilar was Coordinator and Director of the UAB-Fundació Joan Miró ‘Thinking Art Today’ and ‘Grammars of Contemporary Art’ MA programmes (2000-2012) He has also been visiting fellow and visiting professor at universities in Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. He is currently the coordinator of the EHEA Official MA in Art and Design Research at Eina/UAB. He has directed numerous research projects and is principal researcher in the project MINECO FFI2012-32614 ‘Aesthetic Experience and Artistic Research: Cognitive aspects of contemporary art’, 2013-2015.
http://www.esteticauab.org/

Proyecto becado por el Departamento de Cultura de la Generalitat en la modalidad de Beca de investigación en el ámbito de las artes visuales y del pensamiento, 2015.
Departament de Cultura de la Generalitat
With the support of grup de recerca "Experiencia estética e Investigación artística: aspectos cognitivos del arte contemporáneo" del Grup de Recerca en Estètica i Teories de les Arts (GRETA) of the UAB.
GRETA
Main sponsor of the activities:
Estrella Damm
Auditori MACBA

Programme

FRIDAY 18 AND SATURDAY 19 DECEMBER

FRIDAY 18
6 pm Presentation of the programme by Laura Benítez
6.15 pm Gerard Vilar
7 pm Antonio Gómez Villar
7.45 pm Ernesto Casero
8.30 pm Roundtable with Ernesto Casero, Antonio Gómez Villar and Gerard Vilar, moderated by Laura Benítez
Venue: Meier Auditorium. Free admission. Limited places, admission strictly in order of arrival.

SATURDAY 19
11 am - 2 pm GYNEpunk: Autonomous ginecologyLAB. Workshop related to Pechblenda project presentation by Klau and Paula Pin
Venue: Convent dels Àngels Auditorium. No tickets available for the workshop

For more information: Tel. 93 481 33 68
programespublics [at] macba [dot] cat