Comparabilities: relationship and scale
June 29–July 2, 2015
CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo
Av. Constitución 23
28931 Móstoles, Madrid
Spain
International seminar: Free registration from the June 1, 2015
Workshop: registration via application from up until the June 10, 2015
Confirmed participants: Erick Beltrán, Pedro Cesarino, Alice Creischer, Willem de Rooij, Oier Etxeberria, Anselm Franke, Juan Luis Moraza, Manuela Moscoso, Ruth Noack, Osias Yanov.
Lead by Pablo Lafuente and Asier Mendizabal
Comparabilities: relationship and scale
Establishing a relationship, as a process of composition, of production of meaning, analysis or knowledge, is a practice that is as common as it is problematic. How do we establish relationships? According to which variables? What kind of relationships can be established between similar and dissimilar elements? Are there any impossible, non-productive comparisons? Do basic operations in art, such as analogy or homology become more meaningful if we confront them with their equivalents in other realms of knowledge?
This symposium attempts to explore a proposition by Marilyn Strathern, where, in her book Partial Connections, she presents the need (or, at least, the productivity) that emerges when we establish relationships between items from different scales. Scale here can be understood in terms of size, but maybe also in terms of category, type, relevance, or time.
Establishing a relationship allows for narratives that, for Strathern, offer means for understanding social life. Thus, for example, the relationship between individual and collective, with echoes of structural analogies such as fragment and totality, or figure and background, is the basis of one of the possible narratives of modernity. What would happen if this relationship were, in turn, compared to other modes of understanding the social totality, beyond the modern European scheme? That is, what if this relationship between individual and mass were not understood in dialectic or agonistic terms, as in European modernity, but in an attempt to maintain the difference between the elements in the relationship?
This symposium is an attempt to establish and study relationships between different scales, in an anthropological and political context as well as in the art and cultural sphere, where relationship and comparison are recurrent strategies, or, maybe, a common place.
More information about the programme at www.ca2m.org
Or contact: jei.ca2m [at] madrid.org / T +91 276 02 27
