SUPERHUMANITY TALKS in Havana, Cuba

In the years immediately before and after the 1959 Revolution, Havana was one of the great laboratories for experiments with modern architecture. It absorbed and transformed international tendencies but it also invented whole new models of architecture in a pulsating flux.
 

On Wednesday, March 22, at 6pm, e-flux Architecture will present SUPERHUMANITY TALKS in Havana, Cuba at Artista X Artista. Join Superhumanity editors Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley along with special guests including Miguel Coyula, Rubén Gallo, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez and Rachel Price for a series of presentations and conversations.

Drawing from “The Obligation to Self-Design” (e-flux journal issue 0), a text by Boris Groys in which a genealogy of design is traced from the design of the soul and the design of the self to "the design of life as a whole," Superhumanity responds to the theme of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial—Are We Human?—by engaging with and departing from the concept of the “self.” Superhumanity aims to explore and challenge our understanding of “design” by probing the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape, to which we ask: who designed the lives we live today? What are the forms of life we inhabit, and what new forms are currently being designed? Where are the sites, and what are the techniques, to design others?

With Superhumanity, 50 invited writers, scientists, artists, architects, designers, philosophers, historians, archeologists and anthropologists bring new insight to these and related questions.

Miguel Coyula is a Cuban filmmaker and writer. His films include Cucarachas rojas (Red Cockroaches, 2003), Memorias del Desarrollo (Memories of Overdevelopment, 2010) and Blue Heart (2017).

Rubén Gallo teaches at Princeton University and is author of Freud's Mexico (MIT Press, 2010) and Proust's Latin Americans (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). His essay "Designer Sex" was published as a part of Superhumanity on November 14, 2016.

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez is a Cuban novelist and writer of Dirty Havana Trilogy.

Rachel Price is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures at Princeton University. Her most recent book, Planet/Cuba: Art, Culture, and the Future of the Island, was published by Verso Books in 2015.

Superhumanity is a project by e-flux Architecture at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, produced in cooperation with the Istanbul Design Biennial, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand, and the Ernst Schering Foundation.

Artista X Artista is a non-profit initiative of Carlos Garaicoa Studio aiming to establish horizontal connections between the young Cuban art scene and a growing institutional network and cultural agents worldwide. Artista X Artista departs from the necessity to generate funding within the own artistic community in order to answer the needs of emergent artists while creating opportunities for international artists, curators, writers and musicians to visit Havana, so they can share with local cultural agents, teach workshops and do some on-site field research. In exchange a Cuban artist is meant to reciprocate. The idea is to start circulating the flux of artistic thought where both parts—visitors and local scene—be mutually inspired by their works and life experiences.

The Mexican collective Tercerunquinto (Gabriel Cazares (Nuevo León, 1978) and Rolando Flores (Monterrey, 1975)) are currently artists-in-residence as part of the exchange between Artista X Artista and Proyecto Siqueiros "La Tallera" supported by the National Institute of Fine Arts of Mexico.