New Materialisms

Carmen Bernárdez is an art historian and professor in the Contemporary Art Department at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her international academic studies in two traditionally opposing disciplines — art history and restoration — outline a research arc focused on the technique of the artwork understood as a cultural process. Drawing from these directives, she has written essays, edited catalogues and curated exhibitions on avant-garde artists across history, such as Ángel Ferrant, Pablo Gargallo, María Blanchard and Pablo Picasso, and has published the books Historia del arte. Primeras vanguardias (Planeta, 1994), Joseph Beuys (Nerea, 1999) and María Blanchard (Fundación Mapfre 2009), as well as contributing to a broad number of collective publications.

Carlos Fernández-Pello. Is an artist, designer and professor at IED Madrid. He combines his artistic practice with curating, audiovisual production, writing and DIY, and, through the object, his work focuses on a broad range of speculative and epistemological interests. He is the author of Saber Parcial/Sabor diagonal: imágenes del texto y producción de conocimiento desde el arte (the Complutense University of Madrid 2017), and designed, in addition to other strands of mainstream culture, the cover of Ídolo, an album by C. Tangana (2017, Sony Music). He has also curated Flowers; Abyss; Parataxis (La Casa Encendida, 2012) and, with Beatriz Alonso, is currently putting together an exhibition on the synchrony and eccentricity of artistic production in Madrid under the title Querer parecer noche (Wanting to Seem Like Night, Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo, 2018).

Michael Taussig is a social anthropologist and professor at Columbia University. He is the author of a broad number of essays, including The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), in which he explores how indigenism dismantles capitalist exchange; Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (University of Chicago Press, 1991), an essay on the fictions of death during colonial terror in Latin America; and Magic of the State (Routledge,1997), on how the modern colonial state operates through principles of power and abstraction akin to magic. His work is key to understanding a material sense of the object which differs from the fetishist sense and that of the value of traditional change.

Diana Taylor is an art critic, theorist and professor of Performance Studies at NYU (New York University), as well as the director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. She is the author of the book Performance (Duke University Press, 2016), which explores the expanded use of the term, not only on an artistic level, but also economically, sexually and politically, with a view to conceiving of performance as an act which is inseparable from the manifestations of power, memory and identity. Moreover, she has studied the relationships between civil society, trauma and performance practices in Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's 'Dirty War' (Duke University Press, 1997) and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2003).

Jesús Vega is a philosopher of science and lecturer of Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His work is based on an analysis of the epistemology of technique and perceptive experience. From the sphere of the so-called post-humanities, he has analysed the modes of knowledge production and awareness of the object. He is also the author of Los saberes de Odiseo. Una filosofía de la técnica (Eudeba, 2009), and a broad range of articles and contributions in collective books on the philosophy of science and technology.