Politics of Research / Situated Commons
Saturday 27, 17.30h. at Intermediae
With Isaac Marrero-Guillamón, Javier Rodrigo and Aida Sánchez de Serdio
Mediation and research have become key terms for some curatorial projects and debates. Practices, spaces and networks build up a collective research on the meaning of culture and the social function of its institutions in relation to "the commons", opening up a debate on the notion of an other institutionality and overflowing the spaces of the collective (be that a cultural institution, a school, a grassroots space, or the very idea of citizenship). In this context, many cultural projects take up research as a key notion in the relationship between cultural production, the production of knowledge and the construction of the social.
The current politics of the modes of production of collective bodies of knowledge intersect with new modes of construction of citizenship, and the generation of common wealth. The emerging models of research and circulation of knowledge, different forms of urban experimentation, the traditions of feminist research, the famous IAP, militant research, popular education... articulate other politics of relationship, care and mediation in the political economy of research groups and the groups by whom and with whom co-research is undergone, and bodies of knowledge produced. This dimension doesn't exclude the fact that these politics of research can lose their goal of transformation, in citizen environments and specific fields of situated praxis, while at the same time opening up and generating models of construction of bodies of knowledge and collective pedagogies.
In this manner, the question of the politics of inquiry is answered through a kind of new pragmatism, or lesser politics, from the standpoint of which to question the tensions, relationships and the circulation of this production of situated bodies of knowledge. Under this starting point, neither the institution no the research groups would therefore occupy a neutral space, and neither would they define themselves as an incomparable framework. Rather, they would be described as specific, and in process. Their actions are considered unfinished, partial, situated; on the search of connectors with the social tissue, and joining multiple conversations. The frameworks of decolonisation, the bodies of knowledge produced by education, and a heterogeneity of practices of social experimentation can be posed as other scenarios from which to rethink the politics of production and circulation of bodies of knowledge, as another political dimension of the commons.
Intermediae, together with Transductores (as part of their Research Residency at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), Isaac Marrero-Guillamón and Aida Sánchez de Serdio, invite you to participate, share and debate the various starting hypotheses which affect the practice of a large part of the mediation and research initiatives.
Isaac Marrero-Guillamón will present a project produced with Hillary Powell (The Art of Dissent: Adventures in London's Olympic State) which responds to the challenge of compiling and organising a disperse and heterogeneous series of artistic and cultural projects produced as an anwer to the brutal transformation of East London motivated by the 2012 Olympic Games. The project defends the specific role played by these practices in the configuration of antagonistic spaces in relation, for example, to the politics of regulation what is known, what can be said, and what is visible effected by the Olympic machinery (and its collorary: the division between those that have a right to speak and those who don't).
Javier Rodigo will present Transductores' project of citizen research and consultation with the MSR Team in Quito, Ecuador (currently in its second phase). For this purpose, he will engage the issue of how feminist pedagogies help us rethink other frames of relationship and the paradoxes of work in the production of knowledge beyond the classic models of empowerment and dialogic consensual learning. Articulated around this position, collective pedagogies emphasise a pragmatic relationship of transformation, premised on situated and active bodies of knowledge, which generate new forms of politics through learning communities. In a composition of both perspectives, the issue of how to transmit situated bodies of knowledge, how to circulate the production of research and how to generate multiple work tools crosses the challenges of these pedagogies, and, therefore, of the politics of research.
Aida Sánchez de Serdio will contribute to the debate through a reflection on the production of knowledge at a university in a state of emergency. The current situation, which poses the risk of the dissapearance of the public university model as we have known it since the mid-80's of last century, has made a large number of members of the university community face the need to ask themselves about the current situation and about the future perspectives of this institution, and their role in it. In the same manner, the very definition of knowledge, and its forms of production and transmission (terms which also need a deep rethinking) are being challenged. On the basis of a comparison between previous research projects on changes at the universities, which she has been involved in, and the urgency of a militant research which is being drawn out in the present moment, she will attempt to order, in real time, some possibilities for research and action, the most significant space in which might be one of the exteriority, and not interiority of the object of study.
Associated texts
Isaac Marrero-Guillamón
(2011) “London 2012: espacio de excepción”. urbe. Revista Brasileira de Gestão Urbana (Brazilian Journal of Urban Management), v. 3, n. 2, p. 179-190.
(2012) “Photography against the Olympic Spectacle”. Visual Studies, v. 27, n. 2, p. 132-139.
(2013). “Por una teoría del actor-red menor: perspectivismo y monadología”. In F. Tirado and D. López, eds. Teoría del Actor-Red. Más Allá de los Estudios de Ciencia y Tecnología.Barcelona: Amendia, p. 331-356 (in the press).
Javier Rodrigo
Texto presentación :Comunes, colectividades e institucionalidades: paradojas productivas y pedagogías inapropiadas. https://www.box.com/s/6iva80kuil8ploxb7jbx
http://transductores.net/?q=es/content/laboratorio-ciudadano-mercado-san-roque-exposici%C3%B3n-y-socializaci%C3%B3n-del-trabajo-del-grupo-ms-0
Aida Sánchez de Serdio
(2010) “Políticas de lo concreto: producción cultural colaborativa y modos de organización”. In Collados, Antonio y Rodrigo, Javier (2010) Transductores: pedagogías colectivas y políticas espaciales.Centro José Guerrero. Granada. p. 44-64
http://www.mov-s.org/wp-content/uploads/Transductores.pdf
(2009) The Political Economy of the Monument. In Street signs, Spring 2009. Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR). Goldsmith College. University of London (p. 2-4)
http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/streetsigns_spr09.pdf
