August 5–26, 2019
Materia Abierta, a summer program on theory, art, and technology in Mexico City, is seeking applications for its inaugural edition: Novo Pan Klub.
Taking place from August 5 to 26, 2019 the Novo Pan Klub will consider a contemporary crisis of imagination and reanimate Argentinian artist Xul Solar’s Pan Klub. This “universal club,” initiated in 1939 in Buenos Aires, was conceived as a “collective seánce” of minds and ludic ideas. Over the course of three weeks, the program will serve as an epistemic and political space from which new tools for the creation of meaning may emerge. It will be led by contributors from diverse fields of knowledge and praxis, including Black studies, Indigenous worldviews, queer and feminist practices, critical and philosophical computation, design, and environmental justice. The faculty will include Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Ramon Amaro, Vaginal Davis, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Gean Moreno & Ernesto Oroza, Reza Negarestani and Susana Vargas Cervantes. The program is curated by Natalia Zuluaga.
This call to awaken the collective imagination of the Pan Klub comes at a moment in which even the predictive and generative capacities of images and discourses seem to foreclose any way out of contemporary regimes of oppression. In addition, while the contemporary power of computation allows for the construction and distribution of innumerable simulations that offer convenient ways to perceive the world, these programs and systems only respond to their own design and training logics. The feedback tightening loop between media, knowledge, lived experience, and the environment, moreover, is not merely a concern for today. The future is trapped in an endless financialized exchange with the present; a loop that all but guarantees that the inequality, detention, and violence enacted upon racialized and marginalized bodies will endure. In considering the representational, structural, and technical problems posed by economic precarity, climate emergencies, racial injustice, and algorithmic dominance—to name only a few—Novo Pan Klub works toward collectively conjuring insurrectionary and perhaps even emancipatory language and imaginaries. The demand for new paradigms is particularly pronounced in Mexico, where a significant political transition has taken place and flows of power are not easily extractable from corruption and organized crime. With these landscapes in mind, Novo Pan Klub participants will consider with which knowledges and networks art and technology must begin to collaborate in order to force open new future-presents. The program intends to realize—and not only to serve as—a bridge between the world in front of us and those which remain unseen, occult, and yet to emerge.
Materia Abierta is developed with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in coordination with Cultura UNAM, the Programa de Arte, Ciencia y Tecnologías (ACT), and Cátedra Max Aub en arte y tecnología. Activities will be held at Casa Universitaria del Libro (CASUL).
The application is open from April 22 to June 15, 2019 to artists, authors, and researchers based anywhere in the world whose work engages critical and unconventional practices. For more information please visit materiaabierta.com.
