2023-06-20 20:04:24
In 1968, when Parisian students were looking for the beach under the cobblestones of Boulevard Saint-Michel that were later thrown by the gendarmes, two French philosophers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, coined a new concept of machine. They declared that the machine as a physical object, crucial in the industrial revolution, capable of performing productive functions and generating benefits, had been overcome. For these iconoclastic thinkers, the machine became a machination. An intellectual concept, the creative machinism that allowed action in many areas, from dissidence and political battle to the definition of collective identities and, of course, artistic creation.
This concept is explored in the exhibition ‘Maquinaciones’, which the Museo Reina Sofía is hosting until August 28. It was presented yesterday by the new director of the art gallery, Manuel Segade, but it is an inheritance from his predecessor in office, Manuel Borja-Villel. A complex sample of thesis, the last curated by Borja-Villel for the Reina, not easy to assimilate and understand, very much in the style of the former director of the museum. So much so that for some it is “the penultimate manolada”, an exhibition “that you do not need to understand to enjoy it”, according to those responsible.
For Guattari and Deleuze, the machine, “away from its instrumental and alienating functions of the individual, constitutes a nucleus of infinite potential human and non-human relationships where endless links between technologies, knowledge and practices come into play”. This is how the curators of the exhibition explain it together with Borja-Villel: Pablo Allepuz, Iliana Fokianaki, Rafael García and Teresa Velázquez, head of exhibitions at the museum. They have needed five years to bring their proposal to fruition. «We explore a philosophical concept of the machine and see how its idea is configured in the interconnectivity of heterogeneous elements, how all kinds of human elements make up machines without forms, a conceptual machine that works when the mechanism breaks down and that works ‘machinically’» says Velazquez.
A woman observes the work of Florencia Rodríguez Giles “Obra Biodélica” (2018) F. Alvarado / EFE
Under this prism, the exhibition explores forms of resistance, coalition and creativity in the present through almost fifty artists. They are creators mostly from the Mediterranean area and Africa whose works reflect on the current historical circumstances of these territories and other issues that shape contemporary subjectivity and the world.
“It is a conceptually very complex exhibition,” Velázquez acknowledges, “but it does not need explanations for the viewer to gain knowledge through works that transmit ideas and imply reflection.” “It has been said that we must manage to reach the public with exhibitions that are not understood,” recalled Velázquez, who assumes it with an exhibition “that can be seen without understanding and enjoyed sensorially.”
liberating
In his proposal “subjectivity is something open, adaptable and modifiable”. “It has a sense of otherness and the capacity for ‘autopoiesis’, for self-generation, and for change to unite the human and the non-human,” he says. “It is a set of machinations that frees us from the straitjackets that constrain us intellectually, and that we must not understand through language either, but rather through the sensory,” she insists.
Manuel Segade, poses next to the works ‘All mining is dangerous’ (in the background) and ‘Carton Puppets’ by Taring Padi. F. Alonso / EFE
Some of the pieces were expressly commissioned for the occasion, others are by the artists themselves, and some are on loan from museums or collectors. They cover a wide variety of formats and techniques: drawing, painting, comics, sculpture, theatre, dance, performance, installation or video. They are spread over 17 rooms grouped into three interconnected thematic spaces: ‘War Machines’, ‘Schizo Machines’, and ‘Cinema and Care Machines’.
In the first there are “proposals for action to find alternative ways of organizing the commons.” It addresses issues such as the connections between nationalist ideologies, militarism, and colonial memory, as well as between extractivism, forced migration, and border politics.
‘Schizo machines’ appeals to the deployment of subjectivities outside the classic psychoanalytic schemes of Freud and Lacan. «Based on the notion of ‘institutional psychotherapy’, ‘Guattarian schizoanalysis’ makes it possible to situate discomfort in the social space and release repressed desire».
View of Sammy Baloji’s installation ‘A Blueprint for Toads and Snakes’ (2018). F. Alonso / EFE
‘Máquinas de cine y cuidados’ focuses on the moving image, with works that, in the face of the productive model of commercial cinema and its hegemonic representations, «uses resources from mass cinema as an effective means of expression and struggle at the service of minorities » a practice that aroused the interest of Guattari ».
#machine #machining