The Formalist Resource. Art and Autonomy after 1990

As a recap of the previous sessions, this screening considers a geography of past and present struggles: a refined formal approach, a portrait of popular life, the landscape testimony of working communities and the critique of accumulation and inequality. The monumental diptych Too Early, Too Late (1982) reflects Engels’s sharp analysis of the French Revolution, along with the enumeration of the distribution of taxes on different hamlets in the French countryside. In the second part, the account of Mahmoud Hussein — a pseudonym for Egyptian Marxist historians Bahgat El Nadi and Adel Rifaat — ranges across the memory of anti-imperialist citizen revolts in Egypt throughout the twentieth century. The film destabilises stereotypes and common places of political insurgency in the North African country. Recovering and circulating this latent memory helps to name that which still resists being named and, as Straub y Huillet indicate, “making the revolution is to put very old yet forgotten things back in their place”.  

Framed inside The Collection Screened is the programme Present Time: Insurgent Images, curated by Luis López Carrasco, a key film-maker with a distinguished international career. The works in the programme, selected from the Museo’s film and video collection, interlink projects that are conceptual, refined, systematic — as an X-ray of their time in history — with firebrand domestic and activist films, comprehending different political emergencies from the second half of the twentieth century in Europe and Latin America. These works are viewed in light of a genealogy of revolt which buries its roots in the nineteenth century.

If cinema does not set out to reach objectivity then each film takes a biased view of observed reality. The session begins with the seemingly neutral view of Cao Guimarães to observe a boy and girl playing in the rain in Da Janela do Meu Cuarto (From the Window of My Room, 2004). A work, deceptively relaxed, which prefigures one of the session’s constants: the place of childhood as a project of worlds to come. The boundless urban vitality of Barcelona Joan Colom portrays in El carrer (The Street, 1960) comes face to face with the extraordinary Niños (Children, 1974), by the Grupo de Cine Liberación sin Rodeos, a multi-voiced depiction of a group of friends in Cuzco whose citizen-focused schooling co-exists, just, with their daily work and reveals the limitations of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces in Peru. Visión de la selva (View of the Jungle, 1973), by the same Peruvian collective, puts forward another model of representation and intervention on the public sphere with direct news activism, which denounces the plundering of the Amazon by multi-national companies. 

Framed inside The Collection Screened is the programme Present Time: Insurgent Images, curated by Luis López Carrasco, a key film-maker with a distinguished international career. The works in the programme, selected from the Museo’s film and video collection, interlink projects that are conceptual, refined, systematic — as an X-ray of their time in history — with firebrand domestic and activist films, comprehending different political emergencies from the second half of the twentieth century in Europe and Latin America. These works are viewed in light of a genealogy of revolt which buries its roots in the nineteenth century.

Time, light, vision. What is an image? How does an image make us see the world? First, hypnosis, a reset: Paulino Viota’s Duración (Duration, 1970), the portrait of a clock face over sixty seconds. Next, a window into a slightly altered reality: Javier Aguirre’s Objetivo 40º (40 Degree Lens, 1968–1970). A minimum intervention that inspires a session considered as successive immersions in blocks of time, as well as a journey that starts from the intimacy of a candle, the movement of a car around abandoned peripheries and the traces of anti-Franco protestors, with night falling to the emotive, profound and sharp voice of Ocaña. Now in 1990, the journey ends at other street protests, those articulated by the Agustín Parejo School collective owing to the housing problem in Málaga. As Javier Aguirre states: “It is not about achieving the objective. It is about demystifying it”.     

Framed inside The Collection Screened is the programme Present Time: Insurgent Images, curated by Luis López Carrasco, a key film-maker with a distinguished international career. The works in the programme, selected from the Museo’s film and video collection, interlink projects that are conceptual, refined, systematic — as an X-ray of their time in history — with firebrand domestic and activist films, comprehending different political emergencies from the second half of the twentieth century in Europe and Latin America. These works are viewed in light of a genealogy of revolt which buries its roots in the nineteenth century.   

The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.

If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.

Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.

The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?