NOSYMMETRIES
IDENSITAT + La Capella Centre d'Art (Barcelona)
In the framework of CARE ECOLOGIES 2023-2025
NOSYMMETRIES is a research project which will open up a variety of artistic processes linked to issues which are pertinent to three spheres in which social inequality takes a number of forms. The open call will seek out three projects to collaborate with a guest working group previously invited on account of its career-path and its socio-political involvement in grassroots projects and issues which tackle inequality.
The working methodology consists of a collaborative process during a month in Barcelona between an artist or collective, and one of the working groups invited to take part in the project. Each working group has predefined a specific research theme: Impulsem - Inequality and Employability-; Xeito Fole and Andrea Corrales – A dance and a prison cell; Sex work and dissidences- ; Florencia Brizuela and Ainhoa Nadia Douhaibi - The structures of racism: capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism. The artist or collective wishing to participate in this process will be selected through this open call, after submitting a proposal which must follow one of the predefined research fields.
NOSYMMETRIES will explore the concepts of critical imagination and social creativity from a variety of perspectives on social inequality. We understand the connection between critical imagination and social creativity as a collective process for gathering proposals which look beyond the visions of a permanent future state of collapse. In this case, the above concepts refer to activities resulting from a combination of responsibility, and individual and collective care as a way of contributing to a new collective imagination.
In order to achieve this objective, we offer 3 artistic residencies trough open call of one month, with each residency working in Barcelona with one of the invited groups. During this month, participants will interact, learn, and share their experiences and knowledge, and will also outline a joint outcome. This outcome may be realised after the conclusion of the month’s residency, and will be presented collectively, open to the general public.
Artists must submit a proposal for research and production of an artistic project in dialogue with one of the participating working groups. The working groups must contextualise the research, offering a sociopolitical response that integrates, as far as is possible, the dialogue which lends form to the temporary residency. Idensitat will be the promoting agent and mediator in the different phases of the process, with the aim of creating an intersection between critical imagination and social creativity; a task which will be undertaken in collaboration with La Capella Art Centre.
The participating artists must share methodology and sensitivity with one of the working groups in relation to themes such as sexual dissent, migration and borders, and education towards employability, based upon the concepts and conditions stated below. No symmetries refers to the need to create asymmetrical, dissident, alternative spaces in order to aspire to a symmetry that counteracts the increase in social inequality.
COLLABORATING WORKING GROUPS AND RESEARCH THEMES
IMPULSEM - Inequality and Employability
The working group on Inequality and Employability, led by Impulsem, will make use of their Educational Excellence programme with which they test new educational models to achieve individual and collective success by adapting to the needs and interests of individuals, and generating new academic and professional opportunities through co-responsibility and the promotion of real work spaces.
IMPULSEM is a non-profit social cooperative located in the Ciutat Vella neighbourhood, in Barcelona’s Raval District. With a multidisciplinary team, they work to improve the quality of life of citizens, developing integrative actions within the social context, touching upon the fields of education, labour, and continuing education.
The aim is to work with young people through professional workshops, carpentry, jewellery, screen printing, textiles, or cooking, in a real learning context.
Selected project:
Our Common Spaces" - transforming the city for community spaces. Making street furniture for community gatherings. / Dr Gabriella Kiss
It is known that surroundings greatly influence us, making it hard to see the need for change. However, we can only contribute towards shaping our social environment by identifying areas that require improvement. This can be achieved through observation, analysis, critical thinking, creativity, and collaboration with others.
The project aimed to design and build street furniture for community gatherings together in collaboration with participants through participatory action research.
During her collaboration, Gabriella organised participatory workshops, and worked closely with the organisation's staff and alumni in order to visualise the shared space together. She also investigated how the designed physical environment might extend itself in order to reveal broader social relationships. The community led the entire participatory project, from the formulation of a shared question until the implementation of the concept. As an artist, Gabriella facilitated engagement and dialogue during the participatory process.
It has been truly inspiring to see how the community transformed the space by means of shared imagination. The construction of the envisioned space is still underway.
BIO
Dr Gabriella Kiss (she/her) is a participatory and community artist, an early career researcher on the topic of community-based public art and a lecturer at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, Budapest (HU). Her area of expertise is creating participatory and community theatre performance spaces in urban public spaces. She conducts arts-based research focused on creating and developing collaborative alternative knowledge communities based on citizen’s collaboration.
More information:
Website: https://gabrielllakiss.wixsite.com/mysite
Xeito Fole and Andrea Corrales- A dance and a prison cell; sex work and dissidences.
The working group Un baile y un calabozo: trabajos sexuales y disidencias led by Xeito Fole and Andrea Corrales, proposes a space for dialogue, resistance, and critical thinking around the intersection between sex work and affective, sexual, and gender dissidences. It aims to expand and alter the visual imaginaries related to sex work and prosex activism based upon aesthetic, politic, and historical alliances between sex work and sexual dissidences.
To this end, the following themes are proposed as a starting points to develop a joint project: How much of the Law of Social Danger and Rehabilitation is currently in use through prohibitionist and censorious policies against sexuality and its economies? How may we invoke history, images, law, labour precariety and shared repression? Which bodies/imaginaries coexist in between the world of sex for cash and the realities LGTBIQAP+ communities?* Conversely, knowing that persecuted sexual practices are a risky business, How do we include care at the core of the realities of sex work? How may we create a kind of visibility that does not put us in danger?
This working group space has been conceived as a Trans*temporal meeting, beyond the mere identity; a link between artists, prosex activists, sex workers, and sexual and gender dissidents.
* We included the P for prostitute as a starting point, embracing collective and silent struggle.
During the residency, Andrea and Xeito's artistic investigation-production project has focused upon expanding and altering the imaginaries related to sex work and prosex activism based upon the aesthetic, political, and historical alliances between sex work and sex-dissidences. We reflect upon and mount a resistance in the intersection between sex work and affective, sexual, and gender dissidences, a position that challenges the current legal measures producing ruptures between sex workers and sex-gender dissidences in the Spanish State.
They also look for care practices in the ways by which images are produced. They wonder how to generate images/produce imaginaries which do not place anyone at risk. Considering that proscribed sexual practices entail certain risks, by creating a space for dialogue, resistance, and critical practice, their research focuses on generating visibility corresponding to ethical, situated, and responsible practices with involved communities.
By analysing statistics, census information, archives, laws, and reports which render visible/categorise social groups within the State's repressive apparatus, Andrea and Xeito interrogate the measures of power which operate through the visualisation of data and their technologies of control. They delved into techniques of the production of truth based on the positivist imperative and operations of abstraction as formulas for concealing certain experiences which would remain protected by preference rather than made visible.
Their research methodology is characterised by its indisciplinarity. On the one hand, it starts from the search and analysis of data extracted from official documents such as the Ley de Vagos y Maleantes (Law of Vagrants and Criminal), August 4th, 1933 and its modification on July 15th, 1954; the Ley Peligrosidad y Rehabilitación Social (Law on Social Danger and Rehabilitation), August 4th, 1970, and files indexed under the category “homosexuality” and “prostitution” in the Portal of Spanish Archives (PARES).
On the other hand, they reviewed virtual archives of the INE - National Institute of Statistics and the publications of the BOE - Official State Gazette, generating counter-images which do not attempt to make visible but rather to obscure the violent stories of the lives of their comrades, while producing images which lend continuity, to the present day confronted by the abolitionist narratives of the state’s feminism.
In this way, they seek to break with the single and biassed narratives under which archives and state statistics are constructed, erasing memories, lives, and shared struggles. They are interested in reflecting upon, and acting towards the creation of their own databases from which they explore other perspectives, complexifying these perspectives from a situated experience, and resisting the domestication of the gaze, and the homogenisation of the ways of seeing proposed by the project of the modern-colonial state, and perpetuated by the institutions of knowledge-power.
They seek a responsible and critical relationship with data and the devices which produce them, in order to create visual interferences. They contemplate, based upon their invigilated existence and their persecuted history, the visible and the invisible, silent claims and struggles, the absence of data and records. They reflect with, from, and between images, provoking strange visualisations and methodologies for not-seeing. They write, converse, produce and manipulate data, and are interested in a practice of “counter-statistics” which actively and collectively wonders how not to see as the state sees.
Selected project
Un baile transbutch-femme: cartografía de los trabajos sexuales en Barcelona (A transbutch-femme dance: mapping sex work in Barcelona / BajoRufián
This project reflects upon the sense of belonging to the spaces of the transbutch-femme community engaged in sex work in Barcelona. It is conceived as a cartographic COUNTER-archive which mutates into various forms based on the spaces where there were activist, identity or emotional alliances between trans people and sex workers.
With the intention of staying with the trouble (Haraway 2016), using a scavenger methodology, they have collected information in a variety of archives, documentation centres and exhibitions spaces in Barcelona, discovering several places where these alliances took place, to later map them by going to these sites and placing their bodies in them. They intend to re-signify these places through artistic practices, at the same time as creating a new space of habitability of their own.
They are developing a visual counter-cartography, to be accompanied by an edible narrative regarding the archive. Their performance will consist of writing a counter-narrative full of questions on edible paper; questions which arose through an internal discourse during their investigation and which allow them to connect their bodies to the archive by introducing and digesting it.
BIO
BajoRufián is formed by María Bajo and Marta Rufián, researchers and multidisciplinary artists from the fringe. They recognise themselves as a non-binary butch symbiotic entity that bases their work on experience around gender, sex, and sexuality from a transfeminist and queer/cuir perspective. They flow between the institutional and the peripheral, using multidisciplinary artistic practices as research tools in their scavenging methodology, with which they propose new critical realities.
Florencia Brizuela and Ainhoa Nadia Douhaibi - The structures of racism: capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism.
The working group The structures of racism: capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism led by Florencia Brizuela and Ainhoa Nadia Douhaibi, proposes a reflection upon how the machinery of racism is built from historical and anticolonial perspectives, compared to the widespread idea that racism is a prejudice.
The relationship that exists between patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism in the configuration of current societies will be analysed.Some of the questions they propose as a starting point for reflection are: How sex/gender, race, and capital are connected today? How much colonialism is there in the sex/gender system and heterosexuality? What is racial capitalism? How should we consider racism beyond ideology? What do we think about the issue of colonialism in the metropolis? Who are the colonial subjects in Europe?
The analysis from these perspectives pursues two objectives to be developed jointly with the participant group; firstly, identify the devices through which racism is reproduced, the immigration control industry, labour exploitation, borders, CIES (foreign detention centres), racialisation of domestic and care work, criminalisation of migrant youth, etc.; and secondly, provide analytical tools to (re)think anti-racist movements and struggles today.
Selected projects:
El Susurro de las Luciérnagas (The whisper of the fireflies) / Cacao diaz and iki yos piña narváez funes
Research proposal attempting to construct anti-colonial narratives through exercises in critical storytelling and speculative fiction. The Whisper Of The Fireflies are fictional capsules of escapability from the colonial structures of domination: the cis-hetero-sexual sex-gender matrix, the racial structuring of bodies, and the construction of the border system of Fortress Europe.
This artistic research project stems from the situated experiences of iki yo piña and Cacao Diaz as resistant trans black-Caribbean migrant bodies in this modern colonial world. Their existence implies using daily technologies of storytelling and radical transvestite imagination in order to break the canons of biology and the colonial binary-sex-gender system, and to transit through the streets of Barcelona which have a grammar that constantly reopen the colonial wound. It is not possible to trace lines of collective counter-colonial escape without first imagining them radically.
Cacao diaz
Afro-descendant artist, student of musical production, performer, singer. Articulating several disciplines of the live performing arts, builds stories and vibrations through the body from their lived experience as a migrant and trans body. They collaborate artistically with the group Tinta Negra, Colectivo Ayllu; are part of the Ballroom España scene; and are a member of the kiki house of Laveaux. Part of the Ballroom culture, they have been involved with affective communities of sexual dissidences and migrants, as part of the collective Don't Hit a la Negrx, and Trammy Tanny House.
iki yos piña narváez funes
Cimarrona- fugitive. Caribbean writer, performer, and cartoonist. Researches anti-colonial archives and sexual dissidence, black Caribbean memories, and spiritualities and ancestral times.They are a member of the Ayllu collective, the Periferia Cimarrona Cooperative, and the experimental group of radical black thought "in the wake" of Espacio Afro. Co-founder of the collective Don't hit a la negrx. They have collaborated in texts: Devuélvavvos el oro, “no existe sexo sin racialización”, (h)amor trans, Futuro Ancestral, among others. Their creations form part of the Reina Sofia Museum Collection. They have participated in the Sydney Biennale (2020), the Triennial of the Arts in Brazil (2021), Kochi Biennial, India (2022). They have recently participated in exhibitions such as “El territorio está intacto”, espai 13 Fundación Miró 2023 (Barcelona). Sao Paulo Biennial 2023 Brazil, Anti Futurismo Cimarrón with the Colectivo Ayllu at the Virreina Centre de la Imatge.
NOSYMMETRIES 2024
A project by Idensitat in collaboration with La Capella Centre d'Art. Co-founded by Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament de Cultura.
Is part of CARE ECOLOGIES 2023-2025, lead by G&A Mamidakis, State of Concept, Centre Feminist Media (Athens), WHW (Zagreb) and Idensitat (Barcelona), co-founded by Creative Europe.
