Thinking

Enrolment at biblioteca.ca2m@madrid.org  

The only requirement to take part is to have read the books before each session, and to attend with a participative disposition. The group will be moderated by Tamara Díaz Bringas

You’re looking at a clock. It has hands, and figures arranged in a circle. The hands move. You can’t tell if they move at the same rate, or if one moves faster than the other. What does 'than' mean?

The crew of the ship Gum –a nickname meaning something like “pet”– is sent to outer space to gather information on unexplored worlds. One of the scientists on board has a special gift, a talent for "wide-range bioempathic receptivity", which allows him to pick up emotions and perceptions from his surroundings. When the group lands on a distant planet on which there seems to be no life forms, they are faced with unexpected events and mysteries in which empathy proves critical. Vaster Than Empires and More Slow by Ursula K. Le Guin will be the starting point for the reading group which will now focus on science fiction.

To give ourselves time, to take time on fiction stories that participants in previous reading groups wanted to share. The first group came together at the end of 2014 with an invitation to Saber con quién se trata (Know Who You are Dealing With) from Bulegoa zenbaki barik, the art and knowledge office located in Bilbao, which proposed a programme of readings on different agreements, contracts and relationships that define our everyday life. The participants in the opening experience played with and transformed the initial programme, and between 2015 and 2016 we opened up a new phase that expanded our desire for collective reading and experimentation. The second group, called El cuerpo como archivo (The Body as Archive) asked itself, among other questions, about the body as a political and cultural archive and technologies –legal, medical, architectural, media– for the production of the body, gender, sexuality.

Although a large part of our reading is based on essays, science fiction has also crossed our paths on numerous occasions. For instance, Albert Meister’s La soi-distant utopie du Centre Beaubourg (1977) argued: "the only way to reject the system is to ignore it, to deny it. Not against it, but beside it, creating a parallel universe, the parallel space-time continuum of science fiction". Or the inspiring political and multi-species history fictions of Donna Haraway that, as she herself as said, have their stem cells in the creators of science fiction.  

In this third season of the reading group scheduled over ten evenings between February and June 2017, we will take our starting point in stories by Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler, as well as Ted Chiang, Clarice Lispector and Macedonio Fernández. Similarly to previous occasions, our meetings will ultimately be shaped by the affinities and derivations of the group. Without any given destination, we instead propose to collectively gift ourselves the stores we deserve, the time we deserve and perhaps along the way we can also gift ourselves tools for the worlds we wish to inhabit. We might spend three to five sessions on one single story or we could read a different one for each session. In any case, we will strive to stroll leisurely towards the unexpected. And more slow.

In 1979, shortly after the date established by Malcolm McLaren as the beginning of punk, a pioneering essay by Dick Hebdige was published, Subculture. The Meaning of Style. In this text, contemporary to some of the movements he wanted to study, Hebdige adopted the methodology of Cultural Studies, which breaks down the hierarchies that separate High and Low Culture, in order to examine how the Post-World War II subcultures in Great Britain had been born, and to define the strategies they had followed in opposing the established order. Hebdige's outlook partly differed from that other, romanticized and nostalgic one, which some later authors projected on their particular constructions of punk and its antecedents, and took up the notion of conflict as a starting point in his analysis.

It was a case, first of all, of a class conflict, since all these movements - the Teddy Boys, the rockers, the mods, the skinheads and the punks - appeared among English working class youths, who were resisting the limitations imposed on their own class, as was the case, especially, with the elegant mods, or the ideals of the middle class, and as, eventually, was the case with everybody. The development of these groups also involved a racial conflict, since they were formed by white people, and were opposed to the subcultures developed in those years among the Afro-British population (even though the later would sometimes be their very base), as was manifested in the confusing relationship between the first wave of punk and the Rastafari movement in the West Indies. Nevertheless, Hebdige ignored another conflict - that of gender - which would reveal itself later, with the texts of Angela McRobbie, who would ask herself about the role played by women in the development of subcultures, the riot grrrls, and the re-appropriation by homosexual collectives of some of the resources used by punk.

In the search for a genealogy of these subcultures, Hebdige traces out links between these groups that would break away from the norm and the avant-garde of the late nineteenth century and the beginnings of the twentieth century, based on the importance of style for them, as something significant, and the consequences that this had in how they used objects, decontextualizing them and turning them into symbols of dissidence. These tactics used by subcultures lead him to work on the notion of bricolage, which, generalized and simplified, could be extended to the use of assemblage, collage, and DIY by punks and other subcultural groups.

In this selection of recent books, magazines, and fanzines, self-published, or released, in their majority, by independent publishers, we have assumed some of the aspects mentioned in Hebdige's essay. On the one hand, we have tried to trace out a history, brief and incomplete as any other, of the subcultures that came before punk, or that appeared at the same time, taking up as a departure point the figure of the dandy, and pointing out its links to the historical avant-garde. On the other hand, we have included editions that revise the publications of the punk movement, and some of its most relevant figures. We have also attempted to show how some current artists contemplate this movement, and what followed it, what has been termed post-punk. He haven't included only nostalgic projects, something we know is over and can never be recuperated, but we have also looked for other publications, that analyze punk with anthropological detachment, or question it from a feminist and queer vantage point.

Sergio Rubira is a Lecturer in History of Art at Madrid's Complutense University, and Academic Secretary of the Máster in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, UAM, UCM, and Museo Reina Sofía. He is an editor at EXIT magazine, and a contributor to El Cultural de El Mundo.

Free entrance.

The strategy might be homespun but the consequences can be industrial. Go into McDonalds. Buy two cheeseburgers. Take the meat from one of the burgers and put it in the other … Voilà! You have a Double Cheese at the economic price of two cheeseburgers. And as a leftover extra, you have a bun to be filled with whatever you want!  
 
PLAY
Beneath the thrown-together, amateur look of the Tuplajuustovinkki tutorial lies a finely spun subversive potential. Showing us how to turn two simple hamburgers into a double, the maker of this video uploaded onto Youtube four years ago, “deconstructs” hamburgers and remakes them in his own way, to suit his personal whim and his wallet. He dismantles and toys with the multinational’s commercial philosophy, imagining a shared form of resistance. While, to begin with, the consumer is controlled by the system, he can emancipate himself through his desire to test and to play, but also through his affirmation as a producer and transmitter of unusual contents. He becomes an unexpected agent of knowledge, aware that knowledge is a realm of invention in which “play” is much more that hitting the play button, but an approximation to the creative space of performance by instructions. Nevertheless, here play can be perverse: To what extent is the tutorial able to question the capitalist machinery of the production of desire? Does it not operate unwittingly as a hymn to the commodity and a productive system that it wanted to attack? Who eats who: us or the hamburgers? In short, the FAQ of a world in which capital is not just the title of a book.

VIEW
Watching others do things that make us believe that we too can do them; we look and learn. In addition, everything looks easy, possible and reproducible in the world of tutorials. As a genre in itself, the tutorial can take the form of videos, manuals, guides, diagrams and leaflets that are distributed in online and offline networks. Often lending more emphasis to images, they require a discursive capacity by association and invite the elaboration of a narrative by intuition. For instance, Tuplajuustovinkki operates under a clearly visual pedagogy. The viewer can easily identify the goal, method and causal relations, even if he or she does not understand a word of Finnish. The interpretation is structured around successive suppositions that are then confirmed, enabling even the inevitable misunderstandings to yield fortuitous discoveries and inventions. The video-tutorials are based on an ability to speak simply about something complex. But, as we all know, speaking simply is never easy, and perhaps that is precisely the source of its popularity, as can be readily seen in the number of views registered below it. As eminently visual materials, video-tutorials stake out a privileged space where theory, and not just visual narrative, is a question of editing. And here, the usual and sometimes mocking expression of “do you want me to draw it for you?” is no longer poking fun but the complete opposite: a serious educational tool.

SHARE
With their tricks, strategies and recipes, tutorials paradoxically make incursions into two opposing realms. On one hand, they are a format proper to structured forms of knowledge that foster a sense of normativity of rules; on the other hand, they are easily parasited by informal knowledge, creating an ideal terrain for experimental and speculative practice, a place where knowledge is formed, communicated and distributed on the sidelines of official institutions. The uncontrolled circulation of these materials, that seem to be governed by a logic of abundance, leads to multiplication, association and contamination of knowledge, fostering a hybrid field of learning that, at once, encourages the appearance of new ideas to be spread. The supremacy of authorship is questioned and, as a consequence, it becomes a point of intervention, taken over by new communities of knowledge and by their collective productions. Open to comments, whether appreciative or not, to be edited or simply photocopied, they feed off their very own call for participation. As open codes, they demonstrate a sufficiently cheeky flexibility to worm their way into even the most orthodox circuits. Under the logos of multinationals that sell happiness in the form of videos or sandwiches, they perhaps introduce a lingering, niggling doubt: Who do the ideas actually belong to?

Though we are constantly assured that “everything is written in books”, others would say that “if it exists, you’ll find it in internet”. Keeping an open mind about these commonplaces but trusting in the “popular” as a mechanism of making worlds, the exhibition Tutorial: Who Teaches What to Who? wishes to offer a platform for dialogue between the selection of publications presented here in various formats and methodologies of transmitting knowledge. Exploring disparate associations between elements of visual culture, publishing, literature, science and contemporary art, the material on display proposes an overview of the cultural memory of know-how and rethinks the ways of generating, diffusing and imagining new politics of collective learning.

Divided into three categories borrowed from internet parlance – PLAY, SHARE and VIEW – the publication rereads these imperative verbs as an invitation, as instructions and directions for a performance as visitor. (Suggestion: in this shared game, it is equally desirable to visualise tactics for dismantling these same categories. The manual can be rewritten and here coincidence plays a key role).

INDISCIPLINADAS: Based in Madrid and in Cali since 2013, the Indisciplinadas collective develops curatorial, editorial and educational projects that experiment with methods of engaging with the context of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture through practices that lend themselves to cross-contamination, recombination and the diffusion of various codes and forms of knowledge. Its interest in the field of publishing is reflected in the “Cuadernos domésticos” project, in the ”Soft [cover] revolution” exhibition and in pedagogical programmes such as “No Room for Books”. It has also collaborated with institutions such as Museo de Arte de Castilla y León (MUSAC), Instituto Europeo de Diseño (IED-Madrid), Biblioteca de las Conchas at the University of Salamanca and Lugar a Dudas in Cali.
 

TUESDAY— FRIDAY. 11:00 — 14:00 & 16:00 — 21:00
Holdings can be consulted freely in the library
http://otraspublicaciones.tumblr.com
www.indisciplinadas.com

Artists' fascination by literature has a long-standing tradition. Artists have embarked upon countless experiments starting from written stories, mainly since the 60s. And also, in the last decades, we have witnessed how texts are becoming more and more present in exhibitions. Up to the point that in many occasions they become ventriloquists to the art pieces and in others they act as the perfect route companions. This particular forms of communications do not happen in the usual places. They are both heterogeneous and sensible. Artistic writing is under a constant genre mutation and shows the ability to offer different versions of the same material.

In CA2M library we want to invite all writers, theorists, historians and artists to share and experiment the fascination fostered by artistic writing. For six sessions we will write using artistic projects as a starting point, and we will learn the strategies used by different creators. 

At the end of the workshop, we will compile and publish the texts written by the participants.

Georg Simmel's sentence "Knowing who you're dealing with is the first condition for the deal to be possible" serves as the starting point of this reading group, and it inspires a debate about the different agreements, contracts and relationships that accompany and define our everyday life. Contracts, whether explicit or latent, configure the different ways of doing, but always under minimum conditions: the first of them being among whom is the pact established; the second, how is the agreement reached; and the third, what does it cover.

In order to answer the first question, we can say that we would like to establish a deal with those interested in reviewing the terms that regulate our day to day lives, and imagining new models of possible agreements. How are we going to do this? Through the constitution of a stable reading group, extended in time. In the group, we will engage in a discussion from the vantage point of four frames - curating, criticism as a literary genre, social theory, and contemporary dance and choreography - through a selection of texts which could include essays, legal proceedings, conferences, poems, prose, critical reviews, news, interviews, films or audio recordings. What are we going to talk about? We are going to talk about how the definitions of these four areas were defined in specific historical moments, making certain forms and values prevail over others; and about how all this has generated the sum total of practices we are part of.

"Knowing who you're dealing with" is an initiative organized by Bulegoa zenbaki barik, an office of art and knowledge based in Bilbao, on the premise of the previous experience of "EL CONTRATO", a two-year long project in collaboration with Alhóndiga Bilbao, developed in two parts: a reading group and an exhibition. The sessions at the CA2M will be moderated by Tamara Díaz Bringas in dialog with Bulegoa Z/B (the members of which will be part of the first four sessions). The texts will be sent out to participants two weeks before each reading session. The requirement to participate will consist in reading the texts before each session, which should be attended in a participatory spirit.

www.bulegoa.org

www.alhondigabilbao.com/programacion/el-contrato

Proposed readings:

Roland Barthes: “Sobre la lectura” in El susurro del lenguaje. Barcelona: Paidós, 1987

Bruno Latour and Émilie Hermant: “Esas redes que la razón ignora: laboratorios, bibliotecas, colecciones”, in Retos de la postmodernidad, Fernando García Selgas y José Monleón, José (ed.). Madrid: Trotta, 1999.

Clifford, James: "Sobre el surrealismo etnográfico", in Dilemas de la cultura. Antropología, literatura y arte en la perspectiva postmoderna. Barcelona: Ed. Gedisa. p.149-188

Gertrude Stein: If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (Si yo le dijera: un retrato completo de Picasso), 1923.

Ingeborg Bachmann: “Música y poesía” (1959) and “Sobre poesía. Segunda conferencia de Fráncfort” (1959-1960). En Bachmann, I.: Literatura como utopía (Selección de escritos críticos). Pre-textos, Valencia, 2012.

John Cage:Lecture on nothing (Conferencia sobre nada), 1959.

Joseph, Isaac: “Dramas” and "El orden de la interacción y su vocabulario" in Erving Goffman y la microsociología. Barcelona: Gedisa. [p. 51-67 and 119-121]

Kunst, Bojana: "Danza y trabajo: el potencial político y estético de la danza", in Lecturas sobre danza y coreografía, Isabel de Naverán and Amparo Écija (ed.). Madrid: Artea, 2013.