27th IMAGE SYMPOSIUM DANCE THIS MESS AROUND

The idea behind the Image Symposium is to provide a space for collective thinking on the theory, practice, semantic openings and contemporary demarcations of visual cultures, taking the form of a forum for debate, a symposium and workshops, and an open call for research projects.

The point of departure for this edition of the symposium is the work of a research group at MCA2M which has sourced in Manel Clot’s texts a multitude of incipient ideas, obsessive desires, textured references, serious nostalgia, untimely utopias and sudden fatigues that underpinned the brevity and transience of his sentences and dominated his thinking almost permanently. Rather than anachronisms, his discursive output has left us reminiscences of the 1990s: one worth underscoring is the connections between the concept of club culture and art practice; another is the invention and implementation of appreciative and operative categories, where none previously existed, for the consideration of new expressive repertoires and new meaningful registers that would become symptomatic of a time and a place.

This symposium is curated by Jesús Alcaide, Néstor García and Víctor Aguado. The title is borrowed from Musée des phrases, 2003-2015, by Manel Clot. The image (High Culture, 1996) is by Carles Congost, produced for an exhibition at Transmission Gallery and taken in Manel Clot’s studio with the assistance of Daniel Riera. The image shows a young Fine Art student called Joan Morey.

CALL

MCA2M announces an open call for the submission of research projects to be presented at the 27th Image Symposium, whose theme is club culture: club culture as the act and practice of expanding the field of given representations of subjectivity, of producing fictions of somatic permanence, fluctuations in desire, possibilities of dissidence towards the social distribution or other relationships between the body and temporality.

The selected projects may be presented in two different formats:

(1) Presentation of papers or performative lectures, with a duration of 30-45 minutes during the afternoon, based on or presenting for the first time a research project related with the theme of the symposium.

(2) Commented listening sessions on a theme of interest for the symposium, with a duration of 45-60 minutes during the morning, either closed or open to the participation of attendants in the construction of meaning.

Projects submitted to the open call should send: application form and project dossier to the following email: recepcion.ca2m@madrid.org. When attaching video or audio files, please follow the specific instructions included in the form. The submission and presentation of the project can be made in English or Spanish. Forms with incomplete information shall not be accepted.

The deadline for presenting projects is 31 March. The curators of this edition of the symposium shall select a maximum of 6 projects, bearing in mind the selection criteria of the relevance of the project to the theme and format of the symposium, as well as its overall coherence within an artistic or research practice.

The names of the selected projects will be announced on 7 April. Although persons selected shall be informed of the exact day and time of the presentation, it is expected that they be available to attend the symposium on all three days: 19, 20 and 21 May.

Selected projects shall receive a fee of €300 for their presentation at the symposium, which shall be subject to obligatory tax deductions. When necessary MCA2M shall also run with the travel and accommodation expenses.