Partitions Seminar
29 - 31 May
29 May
-Salvador Cayuela
Research Doctor linked to the Jean Monnet Chair at the University of Murcia, where he works with the chair holder, Prof. Klaus Schriewer.
"Building the ideal producer. Mechanisms of subjectivation and resistance in Franco's Spain ".
Venue: Museu Picasso
Time: 18.30
The main objectives of any political system are, on the one hand, to bolster the power of the State and, on the other hand, to reduce individuals' response capacity. In this regard the Franco regime was no exception and therefore, from its beginnings, had to organise a whole set of mechanisms for disciplining, standardising and regulating individuals and populations, which permitted the replication and legitimisation of the system, on the one part, but, conversely, proved unable to minimise the resistance that, ultimately, led to the downfall of the dictatorship.
-Alejandra Riera
Artist
< ... - histoire(s) du présent - ... > Dated reflections on the politics of images in the ongoing war. Free presentation.
Venue: RAI Art
Carrer Carders 12, principal
08003 BARCELONA
Tel. 692 104 312 / rai-art@pangea.org
http://rai.pangea.org/contacto/?lang=es
Time: 19.00
The question of being sensitive to the essential things that surround us is not especially new. The publication or dissemination of different ideas on a wider scale is not without its risks. We know that our economy is not adequate. Nor was it in 1929 when Kracauer published The Employees in the form of twelve articles in the literary and cultural section of the Frankfurter Zeitung (before publishing them as a book). At that time, Kracauer described the status of the employee as something that had not been "analysed" enough owing to its excessive proximity. "And what about the employees themselves?" he reflected. "They are even less aware than others of the situation they find themselves in. However, anyone can observe how they live. This exposure to the gaze of others is precisely what prevents the discovery of the truth, like in The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe. Nobody finds the letter because it is in full view of everyone. Undoubtedly, considerable forces are in play so that we do not notice anything".
[Kracauer, Les Employés, 2000, p. 27.]
-Beatriz Preciado
Philosopher and queer activist, Research Associate at the Université Paris VIII
"The State Brothel: Sex, Biopolitics and Debt in the Utopian Construction of Europe after Restif de la Bretonne"
Venue: Museu Picasso
Time: 20.00 h
Not long before the French Revolution, in 1769, the writer Restif de la Bretonne devised a plan to build a network of state brothels in Europe aimed at "clearing the city streets of the danger supposed by solitary, lost and homeless women". Conceived by Restif as a biopolitical approach to urban hygiene to prevent and treat syphilis in Europe, the state brothel operates within a debt economy: the women workers, accused of spreading syphilis or perverting social morals, enter the brothel with a debt to be paid, which is gradually revealed to be unpayable. Restif's state brothel as a European utopia appears, today, as a critical model for reflecting on the current construction of Europe around debt, the new forms of capitalist accumulation, the policies of preventive detention and the exploitation of the force of sexual labour.
-Nancy Garín and the Colective Al Hanan-Las Lícitas
Art Historian// Collective Al Hanan-Las Licitas
Venue: Pati LLimona Civic Centre, with the collaboration of the Collective Al Hanan-Las Lícitas
Pati Llimona Civic Centre
Carrer Regomir, 3
08002 Barcelona
Tel. 93 256 6100 / ccpatillimona@patillimona.net
www.bcn.cat/centrecivicpatillimona/contacte.html
Time: 19.00
The effectiveness of the sexist discourse is manifested especially in the continuing validity of the historical wall that stands between "bad women" and "decent women" and which has provoked the social isolation of prostitutes and a lack of solidarity among women. Until just a few years ago, women's movements had marginalised women prostitutes by not allowing them to add their voices to the struggle for rights, despite being among the principal protagonists. Feminist ideology has cooperated naively in the discrimination against sex workers by seconding a victimising and alienated vision of women prostitutes, persons seen as incapable of acting autonomously and creating their own strategies. The payment to prostitutes for sexual services has been seen by classic feminism as the maximum expression of the subordination of women. As for the whore stigma, it is a very effective tool for controlling the rest of women and perpetuating a lack of solidarity among them. There is no worse insult for a woman than to be accused of being a whore. For this reason, women who seek social acceptance try hard to elude this denigrating label although we often fail in the attempt. Any woman can, at any time, be considered "too independent" and a dangerous opponent of the sexist social organisation that refuses women the right to self-definition and, therefore, to self-sufficiency. The stigma of being called a whore serves to keep women at bay, to punish us if we dare to transgress the social norms assigned to each of the sexes. Therefore, the reflection made by Gayl Pheterson is very appropriate, when she maintains that while there is still one sole woman discriminated against because of her sex life, all women remain vulnerable to discrimination. Against all odds, the world of prostitution is also our world.
(Excerpt from an article by Isabel Holgado Fernández
Anthropologist. Member of the Collective Al Hanan-Las Licitas)
________
31 May
-José Luis Ortiz Nuevo
Historian and flamenco-style comedian
"Fragments: Flamenco Situations for the Sake of Money"
Venue: Museu Picasso
Time: 19.00
Fragments or Ephemeral Musical Consolation, Flamenco Situations for the Sake of Money, chosen, staged and voiced by José Luis Ortiz Nuevo
Synopsis
Thirteen situations in which the lives of Flamenco and Money intersect. Excerpts from the lives of artists related to monetary matters, chronicles of poverty and songs about the bloody dough, by way of a monologue, naked and sentimental.
1. The leverage of complaint.- Jingles
2. The dodge at Fuente Amarga according to Pericón de Cádiz
3. Once upon a time in Seville at the end of the uproar
4. Affection, version Carrete
5. It happened in 1892: tales of hunger
6. The labour crises in Andalusia, 1907
7. Food for the rest of your life, they said to Borrico de Jerez
8. Ephemeral musical consolation
9. I haven't got even a tin of biscuits left! Second by Juan Martínez
10. From the bottom of the mine
11. For the sake of twenty cents, a story by Pepe el de la Matrona
12. The way the world is
13. Funny tragic epilogue: The Tango of the Peseta
-Niño de Elche
Artist
"The lumpenproletariat loop"
Venue: El Dorado
Carrer Buenaventura Muñoz, 21
08018 Barcelona
Tel. 93 309 2967 / mailto:eldorado.sfb@gmail.com
Time: 20.00
In Lumpen, marginación y jerigonza (Lumpen, Marginalisation and Slang) Alfonso Sastre discusses the many Basque loanwords found in Caló, the secret language of the Gypsies. In fact, the mysterious rapport between Carmen and Don Jose comes after the gypsy woman uses a few words in Basque to address the soldier: laguna, ene bihotzarena (companion of my heart). It was logical that a language so different from Spanish would provide the tools for the slang speech of a social class that needed secrecy to survive. In this digression on Basque and Caló, the latent political issue of the problem of stateless languages has intimations relevant to Agamben's observations on the text by Becker-Ho. The fact is that the region that creates these jargons is essential for understanding the interest of the Situationists and other modern experimentalists in the gypsies. And there is also the matter of the oft-recurring importance of foreign languages for the creation of the new - foreigners in the Paris of the avant-garde, Kafka and Beckett, for example. It's not just a question of foreign languages, it is a question of retaining the foreignness of all language. "If vernacular languages are the slangs that embody the pure experience of language, just as the peoples are the more or less successful masks of the factum pluralitatis, our task cannot consist, then, in constructing grammars from these slangs nor the recodification of peoples by ascribing them state identities; on the contrary it is only by breaking at some point the chain of existence linking languages, grammars (language), peoples and states that thought and praxis will be equal to the times we live in. The forms of this interruption, during which the factum of language and the factum of community emerge into the light for a moment, are multiple and vary according to the times and circumstances: reactivation of a jargon, trobar clus, pure language, minority use of a grammatical language..." Agamben concludes. It is clear that without bohemian life - literally gypsy life -aesthetic modernity cannot be understood. It is worth recalling Marx's definitions of the lumpenproletariat in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where he refers to "ruined libertines, discharged jailbirds, vagabonds, pimps, brothel keepers, literati, organ grinders, gamblers, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, pickpockets and thieves, tumblers, rag pickers, knife grinders, tinkers and beggars, in short, all that formless, disperse and wandering mass which the French call la bohème".
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Practical information:
- Dates: from 14 to 18 May and 28 to 31 May 2012
- Venue: Museu Picasso, Centre de Coneixement i Recerca del Museu (Knowledge and Research Centre). Plaça Sabartés, 1. 08003 Barcelona; and various social and cultural venues around the city.
Entrance free. Limited capacity.
- Price: no charge
For further information: museupicasso@bcn.cat