with IRINA MUTT, PEP VIDAL, and RAQUEL FRIERA
The next session triangulates three terms that hardly approximate each other because of the scale and/or degree they represent, or because of images of valuation that have been consigned to them. Dictation-Didacticism-Dictatorship: Do you know the distance between them? will problematize the proximity of pedagogical procedures between the triangulation of dictation, didacticism and dictatorship, and how they translate in attempts of standardization and regularization. In professionalized (and sometimes tokenized) formats of relationship, such as collaboration, cooperation, or partnership, how do we confront ineligible moments of dictation, didacticism and dictatorship? How do we invert them when these moments are intertwined with social and political possibilities of solidarity and criticality? Do we magnify and expose them? What risks do we take when we call out the distance between them? How do new imaginations and frontiers are sustained when we injure the lines that separate dictation, didacticism, dictatorship, critical pedagogy, collaboration/cooperation, criticality, and solidarity? What truth-telling and risk-taking do we employ and for how long do we do it just to expose an invisible distance?
Curator and art critic IRINA MUTT specializes in feminist and counterculture studies. She writes regularly in A-Desk online magazine and has recently co-curated “Plaga Festival”,a festival of pop-up exhibitions in Barcelona. She has been curating the exhibition El temps invertit in Can Felipa (2014) and in the mediaton team program for Sala d'art Jove - 2014. Currently curating the performance program “MICRO” in Nau Estruch Sabadell.
With degrees in Mathematics and Physics (PhD), artist PEP VIDAL straddles across infinitesimal calculus, topology and infinite series. His dissertation at Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona (UAB) and ALBA synchrotron (2014) focuses on mathematical algorithms for improving accuracy of instruments used in particle accelerators. He is also a co-founder of granja.cat, a project focused on spreading mathematical culture -specially in child- with workshops, talks and other activities.
Artist RAQUEL FRIERA combines a critical look at the economy with an awareness of gender. Indeed, her projects wipe out everything she learned in her economics degree course at university. She has focused on the issue of labour, both in the context of gender and the art world (for instance, in a sound installation created with the female cleaners of the Fundació Tàpies in Barcelona) and also in other sectors, and she has shown interest in areas where job insecurity is predominant. From this viewpoint she has reflected on the presence of women in public spaces, creating sound installations in the squares and streets of Istanbul and El Prat de Llobregat. Taking advantage of everything she learned in the university degree course of fine arts and more – which she completed in 2006- she attempts to always combine conceptual reflection, a long process of work with people who take part in her projects and criticism of all hierarchies.
© Hangar, Barcelona 2016. Photos by Marzia Matarese, cc-share-alike.
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Footnotes are activities designed as annotations to the development of artistic contributions to Lightning Studies: Centre for the Translation of Constraints, Conflicts, and Contaminations. Dispersed in the city of Barcelona, Footnotes is a series of encounters and meetings with materials, references, cultural agents, and institutions. It works as a discursified waiting list—protruding in the frame of the project, or merely resolving its irrelevance or impossibility to be translated. Practically, its method responds to the question: how do we document and then retrieve something that is marked or registered, but it has neither fully shown itself to us nor formed its connection to our context?
