MADRID.- The exhibition Machinations departs from the innovative idea of the "machine" formulated in 1968 by French thinkers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. For them, the machine, far from its instrumental and alienating connotations, constitutes a nucleus of an infinity of potential human and non-human relations, where a myriad of links between technologies, knowledge and practices come into play.
In accordance with this theoretical framework, the show explores forms of resistance, coalition and creativity that materialize in the present by way of around fifty artists, most of whom hail from the Mediterranean area and African continent and reflect on the historical and present-day circumstances of such territories.
The works presented stretch across a broad array of formats and techniques that approach drawing, painting, comic books, sculpture, theatre, dance, performance, installation, film, video and animation from a critical perspective that are distributed in three interconnected thematic spaces: War Machines, Schizo Machines and Cinema Machines of Care.
War Machines shows proposals for action to find alternative ways of organizing the commons. The connections between nationalist ideologies, militarism and colonial memory, as well as between extractivism, forced migrations and border policies, are some of the issues addressed in this first space, but they run throughout the whole exhibition as well, since transversality is one of the central ideas of the show.
Schizo Machines focuses on the unfolding of subjectivities outside the standard psychoanalytic schemes. Starting from the notion of "institutional psychotherapy", the Guattarian "schizoanalysis" makes possible to situate discomforts in the social space and to liberate repressed desire.
Cinema Machines of Care focuses on the moving image with various works that, in contrast to the mode of production of commercial cinema - oriented towards disseminating hegemonic representations - employ the resources of mass cinema as an effective means of expression and struggle in the service of minorities, a practice that aroused Guattari's interest.
From the Machine to Machinations
The exhibition starts with two spaces where several works that somehow evoke mechanical imaginaries are put into dialogue. This is the case of Tropical Space Proyectos, a series of sketches by Simón Vega (El Savador). As a parody of the space race as the ultimate form of colonialism, these designs condense a critique of the technological gap between the first and the third worlds.
In the same section, visitors can see the sculpture Rádio Voz da Liberdade by Ângela Ferreira, who rescues a forgotten history of solidarity between the Algerian population recently independent from France and that of Portugal, subjected to the regime of Oliveira Salazar. Since 1962, the Algerian RTA collaborated with the Portuguese clandestine radio to disseminate messages that led to the Carnation Revolution of 1974. This is an example of support for European liberation struggles from Africa, and not the other way around.
The next room shows the installation "La Révolution et les révolutions"..! by the Beninese artist Georges Adéagbo. This bricolage juxtaposes objects of all kinds, coming from different traditions, brought from high and low culture, which give an account of the Chinese or Cuban revolutions as well as of the small day-to-day revolutions.
War Machines
Before its technical and functionalist sense, the term "machine" brought together several meanings. In its Greek origins, the concept of the machine was applied above all to the fields of war and theater; it could refer to a war artifact as well as to a stage device. This section starts with a room with the works of Alexander Tuchaček (Austria), or Sammy Baloji (Congo), among other artists, which function as theater machines, but also as war machines.
Tuchaček recreates in the interactive installation Paradise Now - Echos From the Future the experimental practice of the post-dramatic group The Living Theatre which, shortly after the French revolts of May ‘68, presented at the Avignon festival a play for which they had prepared a tableau-map with eight revolutions against all kinds of repressions and whose eighth act was to take place outside the hall. However, the attempt to take the theater outdoors was censored by the police. The installation combines a historical video fragment of The Living Theatre with instructions for the visitor, who can decide whether or not to obey the script.
Theater also constitutes the discursive core in the installation A Blueprint for Toads and Snakes by Baloji, who addresses the colonial memory of his country through an analysis of the extractivist mechanisms applied in the province of Katanga in Congo, in a scenography without characters.
Schizo Machines
Upon ruling out the influence of the Oedipus complex and dissociating the subject from the family sphere — characteristic of psychoanalysis currents — schizoanalysis allows contemporary malaises to be situated in social space. In this line, the second part of the exhibition shows works that explore the alteration of states of consciousness, minority animist rituals, unpublished modes of communication or speculations on science-fiction futures.
The case of the Catalan artist Albert Porta, known as Zush/Evru, is of particular interest in exploring the concomitances of the war machine with the schizo machine. In 1968, during a stay at the Phrenopathic Hospital in Barcelona (Hospital Frenopático de Barcelona), he founded Evrugo Mental State, a territory both real and imaginary that he describes as a parody of the concept of the State: its main industry is ironic weaponry; its patrimony, ideas. For this space, Zush invents a flag, a national anthem, a currency, a passport, a map, and even a language. All this paraphernalia of state iconography is displayed in a showcase next to the Casa Buja, a white cube profusely drawn on its inner sides.
In the same room the visitor can see the large-format drawings by Florencia Rodriguez Giles (Argentina) belonging to the series Biodélica, in which multiple couplings and fusions seem to be taking place in a diptych that presents an exuberant chaos of torsos, legs, tongues, fins, eyes, hair, claws, masks, etc., as well as the comic strip Esquizoide (Schizoid) by the Galician artist Antón Patiño, with several drawings of human heads interspersed with different practically indecipherable writings.
In two rooms the documentary The Marginalized Majority. From Basaglia to Brazil by Spanish artist Dora García is shown, which takes up some aspects of the Guattarian ethical-aesthetic paradigm and discusses them with Franco Basaglia's anti-psychiatry approaches. Through workshop footage and interviews with members of various institutions, García points out the potential of art to question certain social conventions.
García's videos are followed by British artist Gee Vaucher's series of large portraits Children Who Have Seen Too Much Too Soon, along with her videos Angel and Silence and her book Lost, which compiles thousands and thousands of anonymous stick-figure drawings representing World War I victims.
Cinema Machines of Care
Opening this section, the visitor can see the video installation Supporting Polygon / CAE (Collective Assamblage of Enunciation) by French filmmaker François Pain, Guattari's partner for decades. Interviews with Francesc Tosquelles, Jean Oury and Félix Guattari serve as a thread to problematize issues such as the political positioning of institutional psychotherapy, the impact of contemporary violence on forms of subjectivity or, among others, the self-management of social clubs in clinics.
Another project that can be seen is the one developed by the Leonese collective La rara Troupe, a creative group focusing on mental health issues. The members of the group collected video sequences that had harshly recorded the isolation of the Covid pandemic and composed Shooting on the Edge: Self-management and Nonsense, which confirms that cinema can become an instrument of communication and social cohesion.
From the Cameroonian filmmaker and activist Jean-Pierre Bekolo - who suggested the idea of a "cinema that heals," based on attention and care and that encourages subjects to tell their own stories in order to promote a new art of living in society and emphasize reciprocity between filmmakers and viewers - the video installation Healing Festival. Cinema and Traumas is shown.
Reflections on Integrated World Capitalism
Following Bekolo's installation and alluding to the notion of Integrated World Capitalism adopted by Guattari, lies The Last Painting, a new production by German composer and musical director Heiner Goebbels. In an industrial setting, a group of performers drag the relics of four hundred years of European history out of the warehouses of the past.
In Undesirable Aliens, Basque artist Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa analyzes capitalism through three videos showing characters wearing giant grotesque masks, like big heads. Two of them are starred by intellectuals who expose their respective theories in relation to capitalism, as is the case of MIRACLE MIRACLE by Milton Friedman.
Space 1 and Protocol Room
The exhibition also spreads through two other spaces in the museum: Space 1 and Protocol Room, both in Sabatini Building’s same floor. The former shows Frente a Guernica (In Front of Guernica) by Italian filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi and the latter houses an installation produced specifically for this project by Galician artist Loreto Martínez Troncoso, which proposes a listening space where sound, in tune with the movements of the visitors, becomes noise.
