Screening and conversation
Admission starts at $5
April 4, 2023, 7pm
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, April 4 at 7pm for a screening of Itziar Barrio’s Robota MML (2023, 62 minutes). The screening constitutes the full-length premiere of Robota MML, the second film in Barrio’s Material trilogy on view in its expanded iteration at Barrio’s solo exhibition did not feel low, was sleeping at Smack Mellon (March 11-April 23), employing speculative narratives and non-linear timelines to investigate the intersections between technology, labor, identity, and matter. The screening will be followed by an in-person conversation between Itziar Barrio and social scientist and design researcher Laura Forlano, who collaborated with the artist on a series of sculptures that accompany the film in the installation at Smack Mellon.
Robota MML looks at the many valences of work and traces the etymological origins of “robot.” Coined by Czech writer Karel Capek in his science-fiction play R.U.R. (1920), which is set in a factory where robots are built to free humans from work, the term derives from the word robota, meaning forced labor. Barrio relocates R.U.R.’s characters to a contemporary setting sensitive to biopower, class consciousness, identity, and gender fluidity. In Barrio’s interpretation, the agent capable of affecting the human psyche appears in physical form as smoke. Barrio complicates the narrative through a nonlinear narrative structure as well as aesthetic references to Géricault’s painting Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) and queer night clubs. Continuous with the rest of Barrio’s Material trilogy, this film involves collaborations with different experts including a robotics engineer and a professional bodybuilder.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.