Machinaciones

Exhibition project Museo Reina Sofia 03-09/2023

In the legacy of a Guattarian concept of machines, the term machination alludes to creative cunning, social flows thwarting the state apparatuses, imaginal machines, materialist simulations, dis/semblages.

On the background of today’s global neo-authoritarian developments, the exhibition will leap into the 1920s and1930s and their machinic forms of resistance and abstract machines. The works of Walter Benjamin, the assemblage around Bert Brecht, the Surrealists and their Spanish and North-African contemporaries will serve as important research grounds. Based on the Guattarian genealogy of machines also as theatre machines the exhibition will develop a specific focus on performative practices, epic theatre beyond the theatre, after-audience laboratories, post-media machinations. The nomadic flows and war machines across the mediterranean will serve as geopolitical focus of the exhibition, both in their historical and actual forms. Multilingual and translational machines and their flows and breakdowns will decenter the perspective and situate the exhibition with the help of the knowledge from concrete spaces (Morocco, Al-Andalus, RIF …).

The chapters are three provisional divisions of the show with provisional titles. As form, dispositive and architecture of the show should be machinic themselves, its clear that these divisions are to be connected by dividual lines traversing the logic of sectorial separation.

The constellations are the foyers (in the French sense), the floating or rampant middles of the chapters. They are commissioned collective research and artistic research projects (around 3 persons plus at least one responsible from our group) who decide about the form of their outputs (films, books, conferences, art works, …, nothing). Central working period 09/2020-03/2023 (main outputs until 03/2022), possible collective research residencies in Casa Azul in Malaga, outputs in or/and outside the exhibition.

Satellites is the provisional title for the positions and works assembled in a specific chapter, around the respective constellation.

The exhibition will not only assemble machinic art works, but also function as a machinic assemblage in itself. As a dispositive conceptually subverting conventional, institutionalized forms, it will try to create molecular propositions and dividual flows. The dispositive of the show will be proposed by specific artists and artist groups.

Chapter one War Machines

“The problem of the war machine, or the firing squad: is a general necessary for n individuals to manage to fire in unison? The solution without a General is to be found in an acentered multiplicity possessing a finite number of states with signals to indicate corresponding speeds, from a war rhizome or guerrilla logic point of view, without any tracing, without any copying of a central order.” (Deleuze/Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 17)

Constellation: Rabih Mroué, Eran Schaerf, feminist activist hirak RIF, g. (responsible), Brigitta

Chapter two Cinema Machines

“If we regard cinema as mechanical and as intellectual automat, then it reflects itself in its own content, themes, situations and figures. However, the relationship is not a simple one, since this breach enables oppositions and reversals, dissolutions and reconciliations to the same extent.” (Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II)

Constellation: Cinema of Care, Brigitta (responsible), JP Bekolo, g., Anne Querrien, Marta Malo

Satellites: film programme?

Chapter three Schizo Machines

“Becoming-animal, becoming-molecular, becoming-inhuman, each involves a molar extension, a human hyperconcentration, or prepares the way for them. In Kafka, it is impossible to separate the erection of a great paranoid bureaucratic machine from the installation of little schizo machines of becoming-dog or becoming-beetle.” (Deleuze/Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 34)

Constellation: Stevphen (responsible), …

Transversal Chapter Queer(-feminist) Machines

“La femme ne parle jamais pareil. Ce qu’elle émet est fluent, fluctuant. Flouant. Et on ne l’écoute pas, sauf à y perdre le sens (du) propre. D’où les résistances à cette voix qui déborde le «sujet». Qu’il figera donc, glacera, dans ses catégories jusqu’à la paralyser dans son flux.“ (Luce Irigaray, “La mécanique des fluides“)