Machines

A small informative, educational and exchange seminar with participants in political art groups, collaborative and cooperative art practices, creative political collectives from places on two continents.

If there is something to be highlighted in the current protest cycle (which, in a few strokes of the pen, has periods of maximum visibility such as the arc stretching from Seattle to Genova or the world demonstration against the Iraq war, founding moments such as the Zapatista uprising in 1994, effects on a macropolitical scale such as the processes of institutional change in Latin America, etc.) it is definitely the way in which innovation is a structural feature of the new forms of political action and construction which are at the base of that cycle. In recent years there seems to have been a confirmation of the image of the machine Guattari and Deleuze used to refer to the need for open, flexible forms for political creativity, for which the molar and molecular, micro and macro dimensions of politics, could cease, as they have done at other moments, to be mutually exclusive.

To simplify, notions such as machine or political creation allow us to mark out a territory from where we can radically rethink the relation between art, communication and politics, put into practice now as overlapping or interlinked components, avoiding the classic game of addition: art 'plus' politics, politics 'plus' art, politics 'plus' communication. For at least a decade we have been accumulating experiences which have occurred in every corner of the planet, practices quite distinct from one another which have not and will not multiply unless we think of them as genetically involved in the global protest cycle in progress.

In Sydney, Buenos Aires, Moscú, Kassel, Berlín, La Habana, on different scales and with different degrees of success, institutionally visible activities of new political art practices are following on one another, substantially different from their replicas enclosed in the international contemporary art circuit. But the institutional moments mentioned are only flashes, albeit notable ones, occasional in a continuum that often flows totally outside, sometimes between the inside and the outside of the artistic and social institutions. Someone has called these other practices 'dark matter': like the material which, despite making up most of the weight of the firmament and having a decisive influence on the evolution of the visible universe, broadly speaking remains hidden. It operates tirelessly between visibility and invisibility; it flows between different constitutions and forms.

The aim of the seminar is to pool and contrast some specific recent experiences of this dark matter. The central issue we are putting forward is this: what forms, ways and tools do some of these modest flexible machines equip themselves with? For them there is no radical politics without creativity in the practices, without permanent invention in the forms and ways of self-construction.

Some people taking part in the seminar (and groups and experiences in which they take part):
Daniel Lima and Joana Zatz from São Paulo (Contra Filé, Frente 3 de Fevereiro, A Revolução Não Será Televisionada, Política do Impossível),
Juan Manuel Díaz and Verónica Iglesia from Buenos Aires (La Comunitaria TV),
Loreto Garín from Buenos Aires (Etcétera, Internacional Errorista),
Natasa Ilic from Zagreb (What How & for Whom [WHW]),
Branka Ćurčić from Novi Sad (Kuda.org),
Pilar Monsell and Javier Toret from Málaga and Sevilla (Centro Social Casa de Iniciativas, Entránsito, Otramálaga, Fadaiat, Indymedia Estrecho),
Gerald Raunig from Vienna (eipcp, transform),
Ateneu Candela from Terrassa, Oficinas de Derechos Sociales (ODS), etc.

The activity is conceived as a continuation of two done last year: the seminars Another visuality. Discourse of display / display of discourse and
Capitalism, work forces, politics, antisystematic movements; it is also linked with the Political Imagination section of the MACBA Independent Studies Programme (PEI). Organised in association with Brumaria.