Find your Place in Space Sonic Encounter with Magui Dávila, Maite Muñoz, Natalia Piñuel and Félicia Atkinson
We propose a sonic escape from the earth with the poet and composer Félicia Atkinson; and the rewriting of electronic music from Natalia Piñuel’s perspective of gender and non-binary identities. An event that serves as the closing of the exhibition Repair Manuals and Cosmic Sounds in which we will also be accompanied by its curators, Magui Dávila and Maite Muñoz.
Find your place in the space is a subtitle that appeared on the cover of one of the first editions of The Whole Earth Catalog. In 1966, its editor Stewart Brand asked himself the LSD-inspired question: “Why haven’t we ever seen a picture of the whole Earth?” and printed posters and buttons that he sent to NASA members and handed out at universities. The USA and Russia already had the means to take and publish these images, and Buckminster Fuller had spoken of the importance of the idea of the Earth as an interconnected sphere in order to raise awareness of community and eco-social responsibility. In 1967, the first colour image of the whole earth was published; who knows, perhaps it was because of Brand’s influence! That image became the cover of The Whole Earth Catalog starting with its first issue and forever changed the paradigm of our perception of the Earth and the space surrounding it.
Finding a place in the universe has also been an idea promoted by Afrofuturistic sonic fiction, seeking a new planet where the black race can thrive. In 1971, Sun Ra taught the course “The Black Man in the Cosmos” at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the course of his visits to California, Sun Ra drew the attention of Jim Newman, who produced the film Space Is the Place in 1974.
Programme
Presentation by Magui Dávila and Maite Muñoz, curators of the exhibition Repair Manuals and Cosmic Sounds
Magui Dávila is an independent curator working in the visual arts, and graphic and sound self-publishing as part of the Las Lindas Pobres project. She is a researcher and producer under the performative format that she calls techno marrón (brown techno). She produces the image for the She Makes Noise festival and is one half of the deleteD_action_sound duo. She programmes art spaces and slow dance clubs.
Maite Muñoz is an independent researcher and curator specialising in artistic practices related to archives and the use of artist publications and self-publishing as forms of expression. She is a member of Vista Oral, the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive and the Autonomous Oral History Group. She has curated various exhibitions, public programmes and publications.
“Electric Nature”, a talk-meeting with Natalia Piñuel Martín
Ecological practices in contexts of culture and contemporary art cannot be understood without feminist, anti-racist and decolonial activism. A rewrite of electronic music is required that contemplates gender perspective and non-binary identities. “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world” wrote Donna Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto (1988). The great contemporary myth represented by the cyborg figure has managed to flow and become built up in the online framework and virtual worlds. Through this talk we will share how electronic music is closer to science fiction every day, but also how every day it feels more connected to the organic, thus giving visibility to the transversality of popular culture in the 21st century.
[This text will be available in English soon]
Natalia Piñuel Martín és historiadora de l’art per la Universitat de Salamanca, investigadora cultural i comissària. Cofundadora de la plataforma Playtime Audiovisuales. Des del 2015 és col·laboradora fixa de la revista Inquire-Magazine. Entre les seves publicacions destaquen Ellas hacen ruido. Panorama España (Las Lindas Pobres, 2014). Paral·lelament, ha desenvolupat una identitat com a DJ amb el pseudònim Deriva. Actualment dirigeix el podcast d’art contemporani i música electrònica Derivas per a la ràdio de La Casa Encendida.
Performance-Concert with Félicia Atkinson
Félicia Atkinson is a French musician and artiste, born in 1981 in Paris. Her work deals with topics of deep listening, cut ups, silence, noise, and language. It is a combination of improvisation and superimposed composition, as an abstract woven material, where the voice meets electronics, acoustic instruments, and field recordings. Her latest albums are Everything Evaporate (2020), The Flower and the Vessel (2019), Hand in Hand (2017) and A Readymade Ceremony (2015), as well as working with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma on Limpid As The Solitudes (2018) and Comme Un Seul Narcisse (2016). Together with Bartolomé of Shelter Press, she co-founded a record label/publishing platform that builds up dialogues between contemporary art, poetry and experimental music through printed publications and records. She’s performed at Berlin Atonal, the Barbican in London, the Semi Breve festival in Braga, Unsound Karkow, Le Guess Who? Utrecht, ISSUE Project Room New York, Presences Electroniques festival Paris and Zebulon Los Angeles.
If you have any question, feel free to contact us on 93 481 33 68 or by email at macba [at] macba [dot] cat
