Curated by Inés Plasencia and Víctor Mora
21, 22 and 23 October; 18, 19 and 20 November 2021

Organised in collaboration with the R&D project “Audiences of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (...)” (“Los públicos del arte y la cultura visual contemporáneas (...)”), coordinated by the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) with the support of the Daniel & Nina Carasso Foundation.

“The Names of Fear” (Matadero Critical Studies) is a programme that takes the form of lectures and discussions, based on the radical approach of practice-based learning. It’s a forum in which to explore ways of naming fear from various perspectives, enabling recognition and resignification as a collective exercise.
Psychology defines fear as anguish triggered by a specific, identifiable threat. It thus differs from anxiety, a form of anguish whose origin is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint. Beyond this nuance, which isn't always obvious, both emotions reveal -and warn us- that we are in a vulnerable position in the face of something we perceive to be imminent or at least possible, which puts our bodies, our material status, our communities or our very lives at risk. In this regard, fear is an ambivalent place; it’s an emotion that’s undesired, yet it enables us to react to danger. Moreover, fear transcends the individual and weaves itself into the social fabric because it is first and foremost a political and cultural emotion, an emotion which communicates to our bodies the uncertainties and violence we perceive in a special way that falls outside of normative frameworks of identity.

Partnerships therefore necessarily emerge in response to fear, enabling us to share and combat our vulnerability; communities arise which are brought together by fragility. Perhaps we have devoted too much time to speaking about fear without naming it or, at the very least, without pointing to it as a common experience with specific causes which nevertheless has a certain transformative potential.

Seminar 1
21, 22 and 23 October 2021
The programme’s first seminar brings together experiences and know-how from different areas, in sessions consisting of two lectures and time set aside for participants to talk and share. Designed to take this sort of horizontal approach, the programme explores the artistic and cultural sphere as a place of possibility from which we can describe and analyse
fear but also broaden our imaginations in the face of it.

Thursday 21 October from 5pm to 8.30pm (with a break)
Contemporaries Settings of Fear (Escenarios contemporáneos del miedo)

This first meeting explores contemporary settings of fear. Remedios Zafra, a writer and researcher from CSIC’s Institute of Philosophy (IFS), will reflect on the transformations that subject-creators are experiencing as workers during the pandemic and post-pandemic, which is a context of physical fragility and social vulnerability wherein uncertainty gives way to fear. Taking the view that artistic practice allows us to reach terrain that is difficult to narrate, this discussion presents such practice as a possible lens through which we can more easily speculate on political and creative powers of fear in the social space. In addition, the artist Kiluanji Kia Henda will talk about his project, The Geometric Ballad of Fear, which uses photographic intervention in pictures of the sea -construed as a boundary and a danger- and of the city walls constructed in southern Europe to stem migration from Africa, to explore the stories that foster fear of cultural diversity.

Seminar presented by Inés Plasencia and Víctor Mora

Remedios Zafra
Reflecting on the Era (from a Perspective) of Fragility and Fear (Pensar la época (des)de la fragilidad y el miedo

Kiluanji Kia Henda (visual presentation)
The Geometric Ballad of Fear

Remedios Zafra: An essayist and researcher at the Institute of Philosophy (IFS) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) whose work focuses on critical study of contemporary culture, creation, feminism and internet identity policies.

Kiluanji Kia Henda: A conceptual artist born in Luanda (Angola) in 1979 whose work touches on history, politics, war and the impact of colonialism, as well as excitement and hope for the future. When creating his pieces, he uses a wide range of media including performance art, installation art and photography.

Friday 22 October from 5pm to 8.30pm (with a break)
Devices and Representations of an Emotion (Dispositivos y representaciones de una emoción)

This second session strikes up an exchange between different views on the representation of fear, by means of lectures followed by debates. Nancy Garín, an art researcher, journalist and independent curator with a background in critical thinking, archive, memory and decoloniality, will present reflections derived from Spectres of the Urban (Espectros de lo
Urbano), a research project that questions the relationships between economic development, urbanisation, coloniality and culture within the framework of the modern “world-system”. Mario Buletic, curator of the Ethnographic Museum of Istria with a background in critical museum studies through the display of aspects of daily life, will discuss the development of the curatorial process for the exhibition What are You Afraid of? Fear in our Everyday Life, which explores social and cultural aspects of this multifaceted emotion.

Nancy Garín
Despite the Fear... Political and Aesthetic Constructs throughout Life (A pesar del miedo...Construcciones políticas-estéticas por la vida)

Mario Buletic
Representing Fear in the Museum: The Exhibition “What Are You Afraid of? Fear in Our
Everyday Life” (Representando el miedo en el museo: la exposición “What are you afraid of? Fear in our everyday life”)

Nancy Garín Guzmán: An independent art researcher, journalist and curator who is part of Etcétera art collective, La Internacional Errorista, the research group Península, the AIDS Anarchive and the project Spectra of the Urban Phenomenon, which explores the urban as part of the colonial, capitalist machine.

Mario Buletic: A graduate of the University of Padua (UNIPD) with a degree in Ethnology who manages museum collections, exhibitions, educational projects and editorials. His work focuses on critical museum studies and digital aspects of museum theory and practice.

Saturday 23 October from 10.30am to 2pm*
Validating Error: Forms of Expressing Vulnerability (Validar el error. Formas de expresión de la vulnerabilidad):

In this session of presentations and debate, the LASTESIS collective and artist Costa Badía pool together their work and reflections on forms of artistic expression involving the notions of fear and vulnerability. Dafne Valdés, Paula Cometa, Sibila Sotomayor and Lea Cáceres are a group of four teachers and artists who live in Valparaíso (Chile). In 2018, they formed a collective with the aim of disseminating feminist theories and demands by means of different artistic languages. Some of their work, such as A Rapist in Your Path (Un violador en tu camino), a performance piece that became an international anthem protesting violence against women, and the subsequent manifest, Burning Fear (Quemar el miedo), are the result of a particular collective creation method which they will discuss with us in their presentation. Costa Badía is the founder of La Tullida Gallery, a place of encounter between art and functional diversity created with the aim of providing a safe haven for artistic projects based on “crippled activism”. Costa Badía will present Hurt, Vulnerability and Fear: Creating from a Perspective of Otherness (Herida, vulnerabilidad y miedo: creando desde la otredad), describing fear-based creation processes which reflect on the validation of error, the challenge of stereotypes and the coexistence of normative and
non-normative persons.

LASTESIS
The Transformative Potential of Performance (El potencial transformador de la performance)

Costa Badía
Hurt, Vulnerability and Fear: Creating from a Perspective of Otherness (Herida, vulnerabilidad y miedo: creando desde la otredad)

*From 9am, Costa Badía will be live streaming the performance piece “...Showing her vulnerability...?” (“... Mostrar su vulnerabilidad?”) on her Instagram account, where we’ll be able to accompany the artist as she travels from her home to Intermediae. It’s an exercise in sincerity since, as she explains, “it's the time when I feel most vulnerable, as neither
transport nor spaces are accessible”. Instagram @costabadia

LASTESIS is a group of four teachers and artists who live in Valparaíso (Chile). Dafne Valdés, Paula Cometa, Sibila Sotomayor and Lea Cáceres teamed up in 2018 with the aim of disseminating feminist academic theories through theatre, collage and street performances.
 
Daffne Valdés Vargas: A performing artist who graduated in Theatre with a specialisation in Dramaturgy from the University of Valparaíso, and from the University of Santiago with a diploma in Children's and Young Adult Literature. Her work in the area of creation and management of artistic and educational projects has been carried out in theatre companies
from Valparaíso. She also works in the publishing sphere, heading up projects that aim to foster reading/writing at the children's publishing company La Pataleta, and as an assistant editor at the art research magazine Panambí, published by the University of Valparaíso. In the area of education, she has taught the subject of theatre in primary, secondary and
higher education, and held various artistic workshops in both formal and informal teaching settings.

Paula Cometa Stange: A designer with a degree in History and Social Science who is also a lecturer in the same subject (University of Valparaíso). She holds a diploma in Art Theory from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (UC). The artistic and thematic development of her work involves human analysis of those who view it, enabling a circular story that
moves through and strikes up exchanges between texts, images and other materials. The technique of collage is her primary medium.

Lea Cáceres Díaz: A costume designer who created the clothing brand [SUB]Lea-te. She aims to question everything, based at all times on multiple approaches of exploring information and on historical research as an important means of comprehending the past to create aesthetic projects that validate, foster and give visibility to individual identity by
means of understanding collective behaviour.

Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem: A performing artist who has a degree in Theatre with a specialisation in Dramaturgy (University of Valparaíso) and a Master's degree in Sociology and Anthropology (Catholic University of Louvain). She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary methods, in both her academic and her artistic work, and has an extensive
background and self-taught education in flamenco. In recent years, she has been exploring sound design linked to performance art. She is currently completing a PhD in Social Science at the University of Chile, researching the connections between feminist performance art in Chile, the collective and the political. She also works as a researcher
and lecturer at the University of Valparaíso.

Costa Badía has been a presenter, disseminator and artist in international meetings and art and disability events. She is the founder and director of La Tullida Gallery, a place of encounter between art and functional diversity created with the aim of providing a safe haven for artistic projects based on “crippled activism”.

Saturday 23 October from 5pm to 9pm
Workshop with writer Mariana Enríquez (online)

Mariana Enríquez, a journalist and author whose works include Our Share of Night (Nuestra parte de noche, 2019) and Things We Lost in the Fire (Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego, 2016), will hold a workshop specifically developed for Matadero Critical Studies: “The Names of Fear”. Her narrative, which traverses terror and explores the languages of
fear, has a very strong impact in this collective exercise which looks at different ways of talking about, naming and facing the emotion based on artistic theory and practice.

Mariana Enriquez is a writer, journalist, teacher and assistant editor of the “Radar” supplement of the newspaper “Página/12”. In 2019, she won the Premio Herralde Award for her novel “Nuestra parte de noche”.

Seminar 2
18, 19 and 20 November 2021
Organised in collaboration with Lola Visglerio, Inés Molina and Olga Fernández (UAM).

This second part of the programme weaves together different forms of creation and research methods that reflect on or share experiences of various dimensions of fear. Based on projects and research selected by open call, the seminar looks at both collective strategies and individual analyses and experiences to name acts of violence and threats
that require awareness to be raised, against a backdrop of empathy, action and hope.

Thursday the 18th from 5pm to 8.30pm
Technologies of Threat (Tecnologías de la amenaza)

Both legitimised forms of political violence and terror as a metaphorical resource in fiction act on people and communities through strategies that constantly “warn” us of what could happen if we go up against the social or natural order. However, this threat conceals a danger that is already real, and hides the violence which is already being perpetrated,
perhaps somewhere else, with another name, but against which our only resource is our ability to organise ourselves in the face of fear.

Acontraluz
[You Can't] Cover the Sun with One Finger (no se puede] tapar el sol con solo un dedo)

Yvonne Anders
Who’s Talking? Artistic Strategies to Co-create Narratives in Urban and Rural Areas
(¿Quién habla? Estrategias artísticas para cocrear narrativas en zonas urbanas y rurales)

Paula Bruna
Insects, Spiders and Other Terrifying Beings: The Cracks in Anthropocentrism and the Challenge of the Ecocentric Shift Behind Plague Horror Movies (Insectos, arañas y  otros seres terroríficos. Las fisuras del antropocentrismo y el reto del giro ecocentrista tras el cine de terror de plagas)

Inés Molina Navea
At the End of the Rainbow (Al final del arcoíris, 2012/2021)

Accompanied by: Carolina Meloni
 
Acontraluz consists of Amal, Bea, Fátima, Fátima, Fátima, Hanan, Houda, Irene, Lidia, Loubna, María, Maryam, Najwa, Oumaima, Sakina, Sara, Zahra and Zakia, health workers and residents of Cañada Real Galiana who in May and June 2021 created a support forum to help weather the impact of the electricity cuts that began in October 2020 and continue
to this day.

Yvonne Anders is an artist from Leipzig, a city in East Germany. Her art work focuses on strategies for counteracting the instrumentalisation of fears by anti-democratic movements with the collaboration of associations, initiatives and institutions such as museums, schools and social establishments.

Paula Bruna has a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona (UB) and did her doctoral thesis on Art and Political Ecology. She researches the construction of the Anthropocene story from a non-human perspective, drawing on a combination of science, fiction and art.

Inés Molina Navea has an undergraduate degree in Plastic Arts and a PhD in Philosophy from Paris 8 University and the University of Chile. Her work has been exhibited in the Salvador Allende Museum of Solidarity, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile and the Museum of the University of Alicante, among other institutions. Her pieces revolve around the issue of reproduction.

Carolina Meloni: A philosopher born in Tucumán (Argentina). Her research areas include contemporary political philosophy, feminist thought, doctrines of gender and deconstruction. She recently published “Dream and Revolution” (“Sueño y revolución”, 2021) and “Feminisms on the Fringes: Abject, Half-Breeds and Bitches” (“Feminismos fronterizos. Mestizas, abyectas y perras”, 2021).

Friday the 19th from 5pm to 8.30pm
Thresholds of Fear (Umbrales del miedo)

This session shows the interrelationships between fear in physical and symbolic spaces of exclusion and inclusion; areas where the public and private, the inside and outside, blur together. Sometimes fear occurs between two places, on the boundaries traversed against our will or at times of transit which, like life and death, we barely know how to face.

Alicia Utiyama
Archaea

Viviana Bravo Botta
Levelling the House: A Technology of Fear on a Domestic Scale (Allanar la casa. Una tecnología del miedo a escala doméstica)

Miguel Ballarín
Ocupares: desestar un mal cómo

DU-DA Collective
Dying Cool (Morir Guay)

Accompanied by: Rodrigo García Marina
Alicia Utiyama: A 21-year-old artist who trained in applied sculpture and performance at La Palma Art School in 2020/21.

Viviana Bravo Botta: A Chilean visual artist with a PhD in Architecture and Urban Studies who specialised in Integration in Architecture and Art (Kunstakademie Düsseldorf). Her theoretical and artistic work focuses on the micro-stories of the modern project, exploring the role of the built environment in practices of control, in cooperation and in solidarity from the 1960s onward.

Miguel Ballarín is an art researcher. He has undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Philosophy and is completing a doctoral thesis called “Body and Crisis: A Critique of the Romantic Moment” ("Cuerpo y crisis: crítica del momento romántico") under the guidance of José Manuel Cuesta Abad (UAM). He won the Diversidad Literaria International Poetry Award in 2015. As a choreographer, he has undertaken research and creation residencies in institutions such as Naves Matadero (2017), Teatro Circo Price (2017) and Centro Danza Canal (2018, 2021), among others.

DU-DA (Sarai Cumplido, Belén Soto and Clara Piazuelo) is a collective that questions our ways of co-habiting with the aim of imagining other possible present-futures based on critical sensibilities.

Rodrigo García Marina: He studied Medicine and Philosophy and has a Master’s degree in Cultural Theory and Criticism from Carlos III University in Madrid. He has published several poetry books including “Aureus”, “Age” (“Edad”) and “Wanting the House” (“Desear la casa”). He earns a living as an editor.

Saturday the 20th from 4pm to 7pm (no break)
Transcending Fear (Trascender el miedo)

First-person accounts of how to face the fears made manifest in our identities and bodies. In this final session, artistic practice is presented as a tool to reflect on, overcome, name or, at the very least, manage to live with (or in spite of) our fears: creation as a discursive vehicle for exploring the transcendence of fear.

Clara Moreno
You Created the Vegetable Baby (Tú creaste al bebé hortaliza)

Roberta Marrero
Collage Poem (Poema Collage)

Elisa González García
Crackles (Crepitantes)

BB Kru
Guilty Until Proven Innocent (Culpable hasta que se demuestre inocente)

Accompanied by: Diego del Pozo

Clara Moreno Cela (born in Madrid, 1993) is an artist and cultural mediator who explores the exchange between drawing, text and performance art. She works with Lo-Fi textures and a classic-trash amalgam of literature. She earned a PhD in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) with the thesis “The Concept of Intuition in Situated Performance and Cultural Mediation Projects in Spain” (“El concepto de intuición en proyectos performativos y de mediación cultural situados en España”).

Roberta Marrero has written three books: “Dictators” (“Dictadores”), “The Green Baby (Childhood, Transsexuality and Pop Heroes” (“El bebé verde (infancia, transexualidad y héroes del pop”) and “We Can Be Heroes”. Her work has been displayed in galleries in Madrid, Barcelona and Paris, and at the contemporary art institutions Le Transpalette (Bourges, France) and MAC/VAL (Paris).

Elisa González García is a visual artist, cripple activist and researcher. She has worked at and exhibited pieces in institutions like La Casa Encendida, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Centro de Arte Complutense, Museo ABC and Vigo City Council. She devotes her artistic practice and research to the project “Crackles” (“Crepitantes”), with which she aims to broaden the image associated with the disease called cystic fibrosis.

Belén Kruppa was born in 1995 in Bonn, Germany, but she grew up in Cuernavaca, Mexico. She studied documentary film at ECAM. Her projects question what is real and what is fiction, and reinterpret the initial perception formed regarding image.

Diego del Pozo Barriuso is a visual artist and professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Salamanca. He is a member of the artistic collectives C.A.S.I.T.A., Subtramas and Declinación Magnética and his work is inspired by the politics of emotions, affective economies and how affect is produced socially and culturally. His pieces are included in
collections such as those of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, CA2M in Móstoles and MUSAC in León, among others.


7.30pm to 9pm
Session of artist videos on fear, co-curated with Hamaca

This session features five visual projects which offer different narrative itineraries through fear and connect elements such as memory, the body on the boundaries of the public and private, affect, dissidence and its normative implications. Film screenings followed by discussions will be held to share impressions and draw up a map of fear, its expression, its
transformations and its collective possibilities.

Presentation by Eli Lloveras and Belén Soto
Im Fluss | Cecilia Barriga (2007), 5 min
SKINHEARTS | Sally Fenaux Barleycorn (2015), 5 min
The Breathing Lesson | Dora García (2001), 6 min
Orbainak | Jorge Moneo Quintana (2019), 29 min
Olvidada Ciudad de los Idiotas | Pedro Ortuño (2005), 9 min
 
HAMACA is a non-profit organisation that aims to preserve, distribute and showcase national and international videos created in the Spanish context. HAMACA founded the archive in 2005 and since then it has been compiling the most representative productions from the 1970s onwards. It currently has a catalogue of over one thousand works by artists
and filmmakers, which it updates twice a year by selecting a jury composed of video and visual arts professionals.
 


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The committee that will select the works to be presented in the second seminar includes Lola Visglerio, Inés Molina, Olga Fernández, Inés Plasencia, Víctor Mora and Zoe López Mediero, and Azucena Klett from Intermediae.

The programme “The Names of Fear” is organised in collaboration with the R&D project “Audiences of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture in Spain: New Forms of Collective Artistic Experience from the 1960s on” (“Los públicos del arte y la cultura visual contemporáneas en España. Nuevas formas de experiencia artística colectiva desde los años sesenta”) (PID2019-105800GB-I00), run by the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) (chief researchers: Patricia Mayayo and Noemí de Haro) with the support of the Daniel & Nina Carasso Foundation.