Intermediæ english blog

404: Amar en tiempos Hipster

Hipsteria Lane: Gentrifying Intimacy

April 20-21 11am-2pm and 4pm-8pm.

A workshop kicking off collective research into a new cultural paradigm through its media representation.
 
It would be quite hard to understand cultural industries without first understanding the central position that love has attained in the heart of them.  If we took away love as a theme for pop music, film, literature, and television programmes, we would be left with scarcely any content, or we would at least have to make do without a main content that simultaneously forms the backbone for many others.
 
Here when we say love we do not mean a set of emotions and feelings that are felt and lived by those consuming cultural content.  Instead we are talking about a complex instrument pertaining to cultural industries and having different genealogies and manifestations.  We are talking about a discursive framework containing collective imaginations and sincretic representations.  We mean a set of archetypes, narratives, key words, situations, and conduct that are inextricably linked and woven into the content of cultural industries in a sort of discursive consensus of love.
 
Therefore, we must escape from the proverbially inrreproachable individual feeling and focus on disecting a social instrument represented and presented incessantly as text, pretext, or subtext in contemporary cultural products.
 
Amar en tiempos Hipster [Love in the Time of the Hipster] is a workshop that sets out to discover what is the ideal for love and what ways of experiencing sexuality are represented by all things “hipster”.  It is a workshop for analysis and the building of (ambiguous) texts using several kinds of language (discursive, journalistic, fiction and non-fiction, textual and audiovisual, ethnographic, pictorial, stage, and podcast) pertaining to the socio-emotional forms and sexuality that the hispter “subculture” offers and how we are affected, both socially and individually, by it.
 

Open Terrario / Presentation of the book 2000 Kcal / 8439.5 kJ 2000 Kcal / 8439.5 kJ
Rafael Suárez


Thursday 10 January 7:30 – 10 pm

This work began in 2009 as a reflection on assessing the human body as an economic system. Parallels were drawn between the problem of obesity and the economic system in which we live, both phenomena characterised by improper management of surpluses. The photographic work has turned into a book with collaboration from two specialists, an economist and a biologist. They offer academic perspectives on surplus management in an organism and in a socio-political structure.
This unusual presentation will take place around a buffet table with various components that dialogue with the work to be presented.

Seed exchange bank event
Ecosecha

Thursday 3 January, 6 pm

The Seed Exchange Bank is an initiative in favour of decentralizing control of seeds and questioning the management models we generate or in which we take part in this culture with our current way of life. The Seed Exchange Bank and the activities it holds are offered as a metaphor for the need for change in society today.

The first Thursday of each month, a seed exchange session is held for growers, horticulture enthusiasts, and anyone interested in being part of a social network based on organic and sustainable principles, where know-how can be shared about working with seeds and ways to enhance organic agriculture in Madrid.

The Seed Exchange Bank can be visited on a regular basis at the Terrario at Intermediae.

ecosecha.blogspot.com
bis.intermediae.es

OPEN DIALOGUES
Toxic Lesbian

Mujeres bajo sospecha (Women Under Suspicion). Saturday10 November at 7 p.m.
* The session will be broadcast live as of 7 p.m. via the channel www.toxiclesbian.org and on @toxiclesbian as of 6.30 p.m.

Toxic Lesbian’s Open Dialogues present Mujeres bajo sospecha (Women Under Suspicion), a book that collects the research carried out from 2007 to date, along with a video directed by Cecilia Montagut titled Memoria y sexualidad de las mujeres bajo el franquismo (Memory and Sexuality of Women during the Franco Years).
Female sexuality, denied, silenced or repressed, is made visible in this project that goes beyond the model of an immaculate woman, a mother and wife, placing special importance on non-normative sexualities and homoerotic/affective relations among women.
The lack of any traces of female sexuality from that period impedes a linear history, aggravated by the silence imposed by the context and women themselves. Many suffered repression but there were also resistant subjects who lived out forms of sexuality that questioned the sole heterosexual model, moving away from passivity as destiny.

Participants at the meeting will include the project coordinator Raquel Osborne in dialogue with writer  Raquel (Lucas) Platero, researchers María Rosón Villena and Fefa Vila, and professors Jordi M. Monferrer Tomás and Kira Mahamud, as well as the public in attendance.

OPEN TERRARIO / Radio Sures

Escucha Pública #1. How to tell stories with sounds, with Antonio Altarriba. Friday 16 November at 8 p.m.

Radio Sures is a new web radio for radio documentaries. Without extra photos, or supporting videos, or multimedia bonus features, or anything like that. They tell stories using only sound resources. Of course that is possible.
They will prove it every month in the public listening sessions in which they will offer narrative sound documents, in Spanish and other languages, with subtitles.
Listening in the darkness, seated or lying down, as if we were in a cinema with a film without images. As Orson Welles said: “Compared to the cinema, radio has the advantage of having a larger screen.” He didn’t say that, but he could have.

The first session will have as a participant writer, professor of French literature and comic scriptwriter Antonio Altarriba, author of the marvellous Arte de volar (Art of Flying) (2010 National Comic Award).

LA GASEOSA DE ÁCIDO ELÉCTRICO (THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST)
Javier Montero

Group Acting Workshop. Every Tuesday and Thursday from 12 July to 23 November, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. 

Casting Acting workshop: 26 and 28 June, and 5 July . Appoinments at 915 177 280.

La gaseosa de ácido electrico ( The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) is an experimental theatre project by women about age 60. It combines visual arts, writing, design from various angles, music, dance, and of course, theatre. This work fosters individual and group creativity, personal enrichment through creation, self-confidence and social interaction.
The subject of the work is an investigation of the mystification of love. Several groups of women will form a council of wise elders, the collective voice of experience, dealing with the complex theme of love without a shred of sentimentality. 

The following workshops will be held from April to October 2012: Group play writing; Acting; Sound space design; Staging,Lighting, Costume and Production design. These workshops will lead to an experimental theatre piece to be performed for the public in the autumn of 2012 and to several public actions in urban space. 
Javier Montero is a theatre director, writer, actor, teacher, and regular collaborator with institutions and art and drama centres.

Open calls or casting calls will be held for those interested in participating, with a view to their interests and experience.

SEED EXCHANGE BANK ACTIVITIES
A project by Ecosecha
Seed Exchanges are held the first Thursday of each month from 6 to 8 p.m.
5 th July



This initiative aims to foster decentralization of seed control, question prevailing management models and encourage organic agriculture in Madrid. The Seed Bank can be visited at the Terrario during regular opening hours or at other times by contacting info@intermediae.es.

Ovni Archive: Workshop: Collecting, Cataloguing and Categorizing
Thursday 24 February, 6:30 p.m.

Rosell Meseguer is offering this workshop to children ages 6-12. We will explore the archive, its origins and the significance of the “objects” comprising the Ovni Archive installation. A collection of objects, documents, photographs and drawings that create a space in the imagination about surveillance, war and the secret world of espionage, an archive of strangely familiar components. The monotype technique allows us to create imaginary documents, creatures we will attempt to name and classify, leading us to wonder what it means to construct history: to categorize, naming the world in order to be able to understand it.

> To participate send us an email: mediacion@intermedia.es

Jorge Blasco and Rosell Meseguer will guide us on a critical tour of the Archivo-archivante exhibit (ways of furnishing it).
Saturday 19 February, 11 a.m.

Ovni Archive, Satellite Contact and User Group Disco, the three art works comprising this exhibit, are placed at a tense spot in between the duality of archive-representation.

Curator and researcher Jorge Blasco, referring to the work of Rosell Meseguer, notes that in the territory of art we acquire, gather and produce documents that are "items" whose purpose is to be shown. Thus, the frontier between building an archive and the exhibit is broken down.

What are the consequences of this breakdown? In this analytical tour through the archivo-archivante exhibit, with an essential stop at the Ovni Archive installation by Rosell Meseguer, our aim is to reconstruct a certain geneology of these practices. In this sense, in the words of Jorge Blasco, we are invited to think about and understand the processes of the artist's work from a standpoint of the action of archiving-exhibiting as an inevitable pairing which implies that the structure of the exhibited archive be visible. This is in contrast to traditional archives, where one needs search instruments to understand the information hidden in the shelves or bits and where documentary units are recovered one by one, with no overview of the whole documentary context in which they are deposited.

SATELLITE CONTACT | ARCHIVING-ARCHIVE (MODES OF ENGAGING)
Uriel Orlow and Ruth Maclennan
From 18 November - Until 20 March

Video installation comprised of two screenings. Colour DVD and sound. Loop. 60’, 2004-2005

Satellite Contact is a journey deep inside one of the most extensive national archives in the world, The National Archives (the official archives of the British Government). For an hour, two video cameras move along at the speed of the mechanism responsible for searching documents throughout the archive’s titanic structure. From the innermost and most protected areas –entire rooms that serve as safe deposits- crossing long tunnels, passing through walls and ceilings, on to the hustle and bustle of the outside world: the reference and reading rooms. The collaboration between Uriel Orlow and Ruth Maclennan has resulted in an apparently simple, direct piece that manages to bring to life a tangible, recognizable recreation of the complicated apparatus structuring the archive. Through this work, one can penetrate the border of the archive, approaching it in a concrete, limited way that is also ontological and poetic.

Uriel Orlow (Zurich, Switzerland 1973). He studied Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, in London. After that, he did post graduate  studies in Philosophy, Literature and Aesthetics at the University of Geneva, completing his doctorate in Fine Arts at The Slade School of Art (UCL) and the University of the Arts, in London. Uriel’s work aims to address the impossibility of narrating or representing the past and he does so by going to places where history and memory are found, in search of blind spots in the production and distribution of knowledge. He has taught Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design and Goldsmith College, at the University of London, and currently he is a researcher at the University of Westminster in London.

Ruth Maclennan (London, United Kingdom 1969). She studied Fine Arts at Edinburgh College of Art and got her Master’s Degree in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths’ College at the University of London. Her work deals with questions about identity, using performance and language to explore the conditions that affect how individuals are defined. She has collaborated with Uriel Orlow on various occasions, approaching archives as both repository or physical storage and symbol or metaphor through which one can sink into an understanding of the past and the future.