Make kin(d), not future(s) On-day conference around ‘In the Open or in Stealth. The Unruly Presence of an Intimate Future’
The exhibition In the Open or in Stealth. The Unruly Presence of an Intimate Future, curated by Raqs Media Collective, is a multi-layered site of discovery that explores the concept of a future in which multiple histories and geographies are placed in dialogue, giving way to a plurality of possibilities and questions by following paths that interlace, entwine and expose relations between objects, feelings and concepts, while simultaneously tracing indeterminate spaces between them.
The conference will explore the main themes of the exhibition, but shifting the curatorial discourse in order to focus on specific subjects, such as the search for a revolutionary future presented by Adrian Rifkin in collaboration with Nina Wakeford; and Laura Benìtez and Andreu Belsunces’ speculative narratives about the future and the way these fictions can de-potentiate forthcoming possibilities. The programme will close with ¥€$Si PERSE, a countercultural and futurist project campaigning for a non-gender world, without labels or musical styles, that will place the dance floor at the very centre of the political debate.
Programme
SATURDAY MARCH 2, at 5.30 pm
Venue: Second floor of the Museum and Atrium.
Precio: Free. Limited places.
► 5.30 pm: Adrian Rifkin, in collaboration with Nina Wakeford.
Presentation of the performative lecture The Worker Poets, Political Repression: Weakness of memory, in search of a revolutionary future.
Venue: Second floor of the Museum
The two visitors set out to entertain and educate, but are not in agreement about how to deal with these serious materials concerning the borderlines of different forms of art and aesthetics, and different moments of politics and social relations.
The speaker addresses a group seated round a table, and offers each member a folder containing copies of precious archive material showing the repression of the popular song in the nineteenth century, in the USA of the 1950s or at the time of Franco and Mussolini. The speaker associates each document with a song or a piece of music, becoming quite excited about autonomy, about the creativity of moments of repression, and sentimental for a lost past of imagined community, while frenziedly playing some examples on vynil (do you have a player?) or on Youtube (you will need to be on line with sound and vision), moving around the table and pointing to items in the dossier (there will be no projected images, just paper).
The speaker is interrupted from the other end of the table by alternative materials that out-sing the speaker while examining other histories and their present and future becoming. Suprising each another, from this cacophony arises the ground for the audience to question and intervene as they see fit.
THUS the one who interrupts takes up the challenge of sentimentality by bringing into the conversation the use of popular songs since 1950s, from feminist and queer declarations drawn from the archives of Olivia Records to protest songs recorded by the British band Ova in the 1980s and the songs of the Spanish miners currently working on the new rail tunnels under London. The interruptor battles to maintain (through sound, voice and images) an alternative lineage of imagined community from her own artistic practice, looking at the 'undetonated energy' of previous identity struggles.
► 19 h: Laura Benítez and Andreu Belsunces. Conversation.
Venue: MACBA Atrium
► 20 h: ¥€$Si PERSE. Performance
Venue: MACBA Atrium
Public Programs
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Tel: 93 481 33 68
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