INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

The outside is not something that lies beyond a particular space: it is more a passage, an exterior that gives access. To a face, to an eidos. When we frame something, we are also opening out the space of the present. We open up presences that are traces, shadows, remnants – something is framed and in turn dissolves and gives shape to the exterior. The threshold as passage, as the start of the search for that face, making possible a gesture towards what may emerge.

About how life, placed at the centre of the diagram of a trap, has become a battlefield.

About the reasons why a technology of power – centred on life, our inside from the outside – operates through a set of institutions, medical, penal, and administrative, that transform existence into a political prey, contained and standardised.

About why life, as a target, is the result of the setting in motion of new political struggles: for life is the threshold between the exercise of (bio)power and the gymnastics of resistance.

About whether the mechanisms of the societies of domination we live in are sustained only by enclosure. Prisons, factories, schools and hospitals: are all these not institutions whose chief characteristic, a total inner world, already operates in the outer one? Is this fold in power relations due to the emergence of a new way of existence being governed? If the mechanisms of government are internalised and the barriers between inside and outside collapse, what effect does this breakdown of polarities have on our existence?

Prisons, hospitals, universities and factories, interfaces of control, appear as crucial expressions of our times. These institutions, which have ceased to be either total worlds or private ones, drive an incessant process of conjunction and conspiracy. At a micropolitical level, they are liminal institutions, as they participate in the process of disrupting a social polarity. They fool around with the boundaries and, in their shade, the limits of the reorganisation of contemporary sovereignty is at stake. They are thresholds where customs become rituals and any answering back – moral, expressive, temporal, symbolic, structural or organic – is disciplined. In their procedures for monitoring, capture and punishment they create degrees of obedience to the rule of order. What is the relationship between command and government?

Given the crisis in the efficiency of the government of these institutions, their failures and general slide, here is a proposal to analyse their limits, fronts and frontiers. Thresholds is a shared itineraries maps to help consider the metamorphosis of these institutions into laboratories turning out orderly, law-abiding lives. Opportunities to test the cracks that lie latent.

Dario Malventi, Coordinator of Thresholds

 

WORKSHOPS

WORKSHOPS
Venue: Rectory of the International University of Andalusia, C/ Américo Vespucio 2
(Isla de la Cartuja - Seville)
Time: 11.00 - 14.30 h.
Free entry until full

SESSION 1. Tuesday_3rd November 2009

Society’s Image of Prisons
Coordinator: Mónica Aranda Ocaña
Participants: Manuel Ledesma Moreno (Salhaketa), Jordi Arola (Oficina social) and Valentín Aguilar Villuendes (APDHA)

The idea of a prison as a lasting institution means we are faced with an urgent need to adjust our expectations to current reality, in an attempt to avoid constant frustration. The problem probably arises when this reality is hidden, stereotyped or, at worst, altered. This session aims to act as a tool to approach, if only on tiptoes, the reality of our prisons, attempting to decode the myths that each of the participants, from their different organisations, understand to inhabit the imagination of society.

Mónica Aranda Ocaña has a doctorate in Penal Law from the University of Barcelona (UB) and an MA in Penal Systems and Social Problems from the UB. She is head of the Deprivation of Liberty and Human Rights Department of the Penal System and Human Rights Observation Unit of the UB. She is also a member of the European Group for Prison Research.

Manuel Ledesma Moreno is a lawyer, coordinator of the penal mediation programme of the Provincial Court of Navarre and Coordinator of the Salhaketa Association (Pamplona). Founded in 1984, this association works to defend the rights of prisoners and their families, seeking alternatives to the deprivation of liberty as a sentence and running rehabilitation programmes in Pamplona prison. It currently runs two reception flats for long term stays and two social skills workshops in the young people’s unit and the women’s unit, all in Pamplona or its provincial prison.  www.salhaketa-nafarroa.com

Jordi Arola is a member of the anti-prison collective, the Social Anthropology and Prison Office. He has a degree in History and Anthropology and has helped organise several events on issues related to the world of prisons, at the University of Barcelona and other political arenas.

Valentín Aguilar Villuendas is a lawyer and mediator on the penal mediation for minors programme. He is a member of the Córdoba SOAJP, and a member and coordinator of the Prison Department of APDHA.

SESSION 2. Wednesday_4th November 2009

Limitless Deployment of Institutional Mechanisms: Education-Capture-Work
Coordinator: Claudio Ibarra Varas
Participants: Carlos Gomis (Oficina Social) and Cándido González Carnero (CSI)

Twisting our gaze towards marginal areas, zones on the edge where classical institutionalisation is barely discernible in spaces such as businesses-schools-prisons. A dislocation, or break with the past that allows us to address the issue of the strategies for control that orchestrate the subjective compositions of the capitalist concert. Meanwhile we watch out for the set of mechanisms deployed by the methods of governing life (containment, capture, confinement) in non institutional places as a background to the onslaught: school-street - prison -business. In these places the arguments are produced and reproduced, that “legitimize” the procedures for administering the mass social surplus that has to be classified, integrated, channelled, contained, not-tolerated and imprisoned. Thinking about the use of government mechanisms of socialisation and re-socialisation leads us to thresholds that hold us on the brink of the horizon of total captivity, where society is reconfigured by the machinery of capitalist control. We look at the problem through concepts such as exclusion, inclusion, rehabilitation, expulsion, desertion, containment and flight, on the periphery where educational, working and penal practices are formed. We allow ourselves to envisage links between the workings of education, work and captivity, in the effective connections between them, whether direct or indirect, contemplating a series of experimental transformations of the relations of production, organisation and management in the social laboratory of neo-liberalism.

Claudio Ibarra Varas has a degree in Education and teaches Philosophy (DEA in the History of Subjectivity). He teaches in the Philosophy Department at UMCE (Chile) and is Coordinator of the Research Group on Education and Power (GIEP).

Carlos Gomis is one of the founders of the Social Anthropology and Prison Office. He is a reader and philosopher of life, a lover music of the music of the 1960s, especially Woodstock. He has a few tales to tell about his years at the UTE (Therapeutic and Educational Unit), where they tried to convince him that his future lay in total submission to the institutional networks of therapy directing, controlling and supervising his life. He is still living with the consequences of it all.

Cándido González Carnero is a trade unionist, a member of CSI Asturias, of which he was General Secretary for six years, and a member of the work-place committee of the Gijón Naval Shipyard from 1978 to 2005, when he was forced into early retirement along with 72 other workers. CSI was founded in 1982, as an alternative trade union to the established model, democratic and based on assembly. Its strategy is pressure and negotiation: its main struggles in Asturias have been in the naval and mining sectors. As a result of campaigns in the naval sector, Cándido and one of his comrades (Morala) were sentenced to three years in prison. After 20 days inside, in the therapeutic unit of Villabona prison, they were set free due to mass protests against their imprisonment in the streets of Asturias and all over Spain. Both are currently waiting for a pardon that the government has not yet granted, so that they may still have to return to complete their sentences.

SESSION 3. Thursday_5th November 2009

NU Meio
Coordinator: Filipa Francisco
Participants: Ixiar Rozas, Wenceslao Galán (Espai in Blanc) and Albolote Prison Flamenco Workshop (Gregorio Rosillo, Víctor Vázquez Sánchez, inmates of the Albolote Prison and residents of the Granada Social Rehabilitation Centre)

 

As an artist, Filipa Francisco is interested in creating spaces to question things; making the arts accessible in improbable places; reflecting the world in her work; delving into the relationship between art and life. She is interested in building places for action, discussion, construction, resistance. She likes to encourage the discussion: “can dance be a force for change?” Throughout her career she has questioned and reflected deeply about the social and political function of art. She has taken part in artistic projects with groups in the prison environment and, recently, with young minors being rehabilitated at educational centres: the project Rexister with inmates of Castel Branco prison and the project Íman with young people at Cova da Moura. Both projects link teaching with artistic creation, reflecting a connection between art and life. All her projects are collaborative, promoting individual imagination and collective creation. Using her experience at Castel Branco, which lasted nine years, she hopes to create a space for reflection through small practical exercises (the ritual of warming up, voice and body, improvisation as discovery of the other within us), video shows and discussion. The experience will revolve around the question: can art open up spaces for resistance?

Filipa Francisco is a choreographer and performer. She believes that dance and movement can be a force for change. This has led her to develop projects in various different contexts and communities, in which she has worked intensively, questioning the relationship between art and life. These experiences have influenced her work as a choreographer, by allowing her to reflect about the world. For the last nine years she has been working on the project Rexistir, dance-drama and creation workshops with people who have been deprived of their liberty in the Castel Branco prison. With this group she has presented various shows both within the prison and outside: Peças para rir e chorar and Nus meios.

Ixiar Rozas is active in many interrelated fields. She is a writer, dramatist, documentary maker and researcher. She publishes articles, poetry, plays and fiction. Her most recent novel Negutegia (2006) has been translated into Italian and Spanish. She works with choreographers and artists to create scenes, and in this context is researching the relationship between voice, words and body in contemporary dance. She was co-founder and coordinator of Periferiak, encounters between critical thought and artistic practice in Italy and the Basque Country (2002-2007).

Wenceslao Galán is a member of the collective Espai en Blanc from Barcelona, a project that combines critical thought, political action and artistic involvement. With a long and varied career, Espai en Blanc creates spaces to explore the experiences which influence the political meaning of our lives today: the power of anonymity, the power of the therapeutic society, the battle of ideas, etc. Part of all this is collected in the publications of the group – reports, articles, etc. – and on their website. Galán personally has published several essays on the political meaning of words, such as the recent El fuego en la voz. Apuntes sobre la guerra del discurso (2007).

Albolote Prison Flamenco Workshop (GRANADA). Taking part are Gregorio Rosillo (from the Independent Theatre, who began his stage work in Granada Prison in 1983, setting up the audiovisual department of which he is currently in charge) and Víctor Vázquez Sánchez (master of prisons, leading member of the Federation of Flamenco Clubs of Granada and co-author of methods of reading-writing based on Flamenco and Caló), co-directors of the National Prison Flamenco Competition. Also taking part are inmates of the Albolote Prison and residents of the Granada Social Rehabilitation Centre..

SESSION 4. Friday_6th November 2009

Creativity as a Resource in Total Institutions
Coordinator: Nicola Valentino
Participants: Línea Paralela, Onda Cerebral and David Campos (Radio Nikosia)

Nicola Valentino, who was responsible for the “Archivo di scritture, scrizioni e arte irritata” by the Sensibili alle foglie cooperative, will illustrate, with the help of digital images, his research work and collection of pictures, manuscripts and drawings over the last 20 years, from various total institutions (prisons, lifers, death row, psychiatric judiciary, psychiatric institutions, concentration camps, old people’s homes and homes for the disabled). The archive currently contains 600 pieces by over 100 authors. One of the chief responses of people who have been locked away to the harmful effects of the total institution is to create symbolic worlds. In different languages of expression, whether drawing, painting or writing, the spontaneous creative act is a vital resource for the individual producing it and provides for society a significant document to describe the awful condition of institutionalisation. This research does not take the psychiatric or criminological approach, which would regard the work of inmates as signs of mental illness or criminal deviance, or for that matter a purely aesthetic approach, selecting them for their artistic merit.

Nicola Valentino is one of the founders of the cooperative Sensibili alle fogle, with which he has undertaken various research projects on total institutions, following a method of narrative socio-analysis. In this context, he coordinates the “Archivio di scritture, scrizioni e arte irritata”, a collection of paintings, manuscripts and drawings produced in total institutions, valuing spontaneous creativity as a vital resource. Recently he has organised socio-analytic workshops in hospital, geriatric and psychiatric wards.

Línea Paralela. In 1984 the "psychiatric reform" was introduced in Andalusia and mental asylums were closed. We are continuing the work of helping with social integration, fighting against ostracism...But we all know that the values and practices of the old institutions (exclusion, stereotypes of the role of the "mad", the "loony bin") are being reproduced in new guises. Changes and achievements do not excuse us from the need for constant review. What do the drawings of a person undergoing psychiatric treatment, done in the workshop of an asylum, have to tell us? What is the message of the artistic expression of suffering? And what are we, those watching or sharing, able to understand of this? How do we diminish a piece when we see it out of the institutional and social context of its creation? Is there any sense in talking of marginal art, centred on the life story of the author?

Onda Cerebral. On the 3rd December 2008, the radio station ONDA CEREBRAL (Brain Wave), 107.8 FM was first broadcast in the Psychiatric Prison Hospital of Seville. The motive behind the project was to create a space where the processes of communication and social interaction made sense for the users themselves, a meeting place, a place where words are at the heart of the process of personal development, as a way of trying to understand one's own suffering. From the start, the project has tried to create a scenic space where "reality" is above "reality", where coming into contact with radio space gives a person another dimension apart from the "other", where words are the stars for those taking part.

David Campos is a member of Radio Nikosia, an alternative station broadcasting from “madness”, the first of its kind in Spain. Programmes made by people who have been “diagnosed” at some stage. Nikosia is a project in social communication, attempting to make a contribution towards preventative mental health, fighting the stigma that so called mental illnesses still carry today. It carries out all kinds of cultural projects to encourage creativity and personal expression by people who are affected, or have at some point been diagnosed, by psychiatric institutions.

 

LECTURES/DISCUSSIONS

LECTURES/DISCUSSIONS
Venue: Las Sirenas Civic Centre, Alameda de Hércules s/n, Seville
Time: 2, 3, 4, 5 November, 2009 at 19.00 h. | 6 November, 2009 at 18.00 h.
Free entry until full

Monday_2nd November 2009 

Andalucian Prisons and Violation of Human Rights, by Mª Isabel Mora Grande (lawyer, general coordinator of APDHA) and Jana Vidal Reigada (social worker, mediator and volunteer from the Prison Department, APDHA).

Andalusian Association for Human Rights (APDHA) has worked from the beginning in the field of rights and freedoms, in particular monitoring human rights in prisons. Their knowledge of what goes on in prisons from their work with prisoners and their families has led them to make many denunciations of serious violations of fundamental rights (hygiene, overcrowding, ill treatment…). They understand that politicians have an interest in selling a progressive image of jails, publicising innovative programmes of rehabilitation and even “cure”. The reality they find is very different and they urge us to think: what is going on in our prisons?

The Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de Andalucía (APDHA) is a private, not-for-profit organisation based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It aims to claim the fulfilment of the Declaration as a way to change the conscience of society. It therefore does not hesitate to denounce any infringement with all the means at its disposal. APDHA does not confine itself to abstract defence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but works for the least favoured sectors of society, people who are excluded and those who suffer the highest level of violations of their human rights.  www.apdha.org

Tuesday_3rd November 2009

aufBruch, by Peter Atanassow and Sibylle Arndt

Aufbruch, a word that means both “out” as “breakup”, is an independent theatre project inside the prison in Berlin. Presentation of the method and the artistical approach of the prison theatre project aufBruch by lecture, short trailers and photographs. Relevant aspects are the structure of the working process (Selection of the plays, of the team both, inmates and artists from outside -, the rehearsal procedure, the function of the public audience and the press, public relations, funding, networking) and the idea of the project: to establish a connection between the reality of the prison and an artistical statement, which is focused on the refurbishment of myths (German, European, ancient).

Co-Existence of Technologies: Pit, Fold, Distance, Threshold, Crisis, by Willy Thayer Morel

The Greek word for theatre (theatron) speaks of a voyeuristic unfolding, a perspective; of a sacrilege in which the immanent ritual, with no distance from itself, exceeds itself to its own surprise, a gulf of surprise creating a significant difference that breaks the sacred immanence of the ritual and displays it as a spectacle, a point of view, with a division of work between the action and its expectation. An instant in which the value of the cult, having reached zero, becomes a show, shoots up the curve of exhibitionism. The emergence of repetition, a copy of the event, its translation into a mediated form in which, precipitated outside itself, it returns to itself, re-forming itself a second time in the spectator, as though vacillating, reflecting, creating a dialectic between stage and audience, a division of work. This is theatre that can erupt in the victim when he looks for a second at his executioner or at himself, or the sacrificial scene of which he forms a part, split in two, in actor and spectator, before they split him, giving rise to the difference between stage and audience, to the re-presentation of the event.

After the talks there will be a discussion chaired by Esteban Zamora.

Peter Atanassow (Director) and Sibylle Arndt (Production Manager) are both artistic directors of aufBruch. The project started in 1997 in Berlin and has now produced over 20 pieces in several prisons in Germany and one in a Russian prison. The project enjoys a permanent growing public interest and is the most professional prison theatre project in Germany.  www.gefaengnistheater.de

Willy Thayer Morel teaches Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación de Chile (Metropolitan University of Educational Science of Chile), where he is head of the Philosophy department, and Theory of Art at the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the Universidad ARCIS (Fine Arts School of ARCIS University). He is on the examining panel for the Master of Visual Arts of the University of Chile. He is a visiting professor at Duke and Binghampton Universities in the USA. His publications include La crisis no Moderna de la Universidad Moderna (1996) and Escritura y temblor (2000), an edition of posthumous writings by Patricio Marchant and El fragmento repetido, escritos en estado de excepción (2006), as well as numerous articles in the local and regional press.

Esteban Zamora teaches Philosophy at the Metropolitan University of Educational Science of Chile. He has a degree in Philosophy from the ARCIS University in Chile and is studying for a doctorate in “History of Subjectivity” at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona. He edits VÍSCERA magazine and is a member of the Barcelona theatre company “Plan de Fugas” and the anti-prison collective Social Anthropology and Prison Office.

Wednesday_4th November 2009

Prison Genealogies: Archive and Debate

The violent expansion of prison systems in the last thirty years has made the place of prison in contemporary society problematical again. With a new kind of globalizing content, which allows for a wide range of practices from military treatment to therapy, prison channels other functions that are important for the make-up of sovereignty, but these are not functions of discipline. Contemporary prison has entered another frame, a post-panopticon scenario, dominated not, mainly, by an extrinsic (to train, to control) objective, but the creation of niches as a way of capturing and mobilising life. Does this contemporary face of prison mean a break between discipline and bio-politics? Could we say that we are passing from prison-territory to prison-life? Taking issue with these questions and looking into a genealogical interest, the intention of this discussion is to project the strategic functions of the present day prison onto the political plane.

The GIP: Information and Struggle in the Prison Situation. Lecture and Critique, by Philippe Artières
In its two years of existence (from 1971 to 1972), Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons did not make it its mission to speak for prisoners, but actually to let them speak; nor to produce knowledge, but to allow those with most interest in the matter to produce knowledge based on their experience. In this process of transforming information Foucault and the militants of the group made a series of kits, at once tools and weapons, particularly useful for the purpose. This talk will focus on them and how they were used.

Surveillance and Punishment beyond the Disciplinary Society , by Manuela Ivone Cunha
En Surveiller et Punir talks less about prison than about the (disciplinary) society of which it forms a part. The reality to which this book refers is more a rationale, a programme of practices, than the practices themselves. In the language of Foucault himself, the idea is to analyse, thirty years after its publication, the contemporary trail of Surveiller et Punir in two fields: prisons and penal. As far as prisons are concerned, we examine the aims and notions associated with the system, such as work and discipline, the part played by the idea of rehabilitation in a globalized market of penal products, and the de-ideologisation of the prison system, which can no longer be formulated in terms of a system. As for the penal area, this is problematic in the light of the blow that the vertiginous expansion in the prison population has dealt to the historic diagnosis contained in Surveiller et Punir, which saw prison as an institution in retreat, a prediction which chimes momentarily with the later extension of the network of external surveillance. Two views of punishment will be confronted: the modern one, aimed at individuals to be normalized, and the post-modern one, aimed at controlling populations. This latter view is expressed nowadays in a growing actuarial tendency, which has found an excellent compliment in the anti-modern tendency towards punitive populism. These two arguments combine and compliment one another in contemporary society in as much as both have nothing to do with a disciplinary society.

After the talks there will be a discussion chaired by Álvaro Garreaud.

Philippe Artières is a historian (with a doctorate from the Denis-Diderot University, Paris 7), CNRS researcher and president of the Michel Foucault Centre. Over the past 15 years he has produced a series of essays on “ordinary” forms of writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. Regarding writing as a liberating act, Artières has shown how it is expressed in relations between power and knowledge, which, far from forbidding or inhibiting it, make it possible in a certain way. Through re-workings of Foucault’s work on writing about the self, Artières has analysed how individuals are disposed to write and the methods of written resistance to capture. His research traces themes that cut across philosophy, literature and criminal anthropology. He has also reintroduced a properly historical approach to archives and their social, political and symbolic functions in contemporary society.

Manuela Ivone Cunha is an anthropologist and teacher at the Universidade do Minho. She is a member of CRIA-UM (Portugal) and IDEMEC-CNRS (France). Her interests centre around prisons and total institutions, the informal processes and comparative structure of drugs trade markets. She is currently working on a project on the body, vaccination and society. She has published Entre o Bairro e a Prisão: Tráfico e Trajectos (2002) and Malhas que a reclusão tece. Questões de identidade numa prisão feminina (1994). She edits Aquém e Além da Prisão. Cruzamentos e Perspectivas (2008). She coordinates many topics in the magazines Etnografica and Ethnography.

Álvaro Garreaud has carried out research in Chile, Mexico and Spain. His work as an anthropologist deals with the mutations of contemporary power through the study of political techniques formed in total institutions. He postulates the analysis of forms of power as a method of generating knowledge to confront them and so links his academic work with the political. He is a member of the collective Social Anthropology and Prison Office in Barcelona. In 2009 he has directed the Thresholds project in Berlin, where he currently lives.  www.cervantes.de/nueva/es/cultura/krise.php

Thursday_5th November 2009

On the threshold of subjectivity: regimes of visibility and techniques of enunciation

“The suffering of men should never be a dumb remnant of politics, rather, on the contrary, it is the basis of an absolute right to rise up and address those holding power”. (Foucault, The Life of Infamous Men)

Power relations are productive: one of their products, the law, as management of illegal acts, has the effect of governing the conventions of life of a population, its systems of values and degree of social sensitivity. The law is war, the dominant class exercising their power to impose relationships by force. On a journey into different mechanisms of governing life, the aim is to think about power in its two ways of making itself known: the visible and the enunciable. The visible regimes of this war, its devices and plans; the techniques for enunciating suffering, its fronts and resistance.

Drugs, Violence and Imprisonment in the United States, by Philippe Bourgois

Based on twelve years of ethnographic and photographic research to document the persistence of a social network of crack smokers and heroin injectors, this talk will analyse the increasing brutalisation of vulnerable sectors under punitive neoliberalism. On the streets of San Francisco, we see the intimate consequences of the war against drugs and imprisonment in the US. A “theory of brutish abuse” under punitive neoliberalism is proposed. Despite, or because of, its extraordinary economic resources, in the US vulnerable people experience especially grotesque subjective situations. That is to say that it has the highest rates of murder, imprisonment, mortality and disease in the industrialised world. Focussing on the relationship between private suffering and the political and economic forces operating on a macro level, allows us a critical view of the global effects of the version of advanced punitive neoliberalism that has been imposed in the US and that produces “pointless suffering” in the “grey zone” of its prison complex and urban ghettos.

Institutions, Mechanisms and A Few Stories, by Renato Curcio

The institution is a social process regulated by mechanisms in which two basic tensions confront each other: that which drives those who administer (govern) it and that which reacts in search of change. When the former impose totalitarian mechanisms the institution becomes a “total institution”. This can happen to any institution. The family too, or businesses, educational, therapeutic or service providing institutions can all follow this trend. The story of critical moments in the experience of people directly involved can provide a good analysis to make transparent the mechanisms that are at work and worked upon within institutional processes. This is what we try to do in workshops of narrative socio-analysis, whose aim is to relive collectively an experience lived individually, that is to say, take it to a wider level of awareness. The talk will attempt to illustrate how these workshops work by telling some emblematic story.

After the talks there will be a discussion chaired by Dario Malventi.

Philippe Bourgois has conducted fieldwork in Central America (Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Belize) and in the urban United States (East Harlem, New York and San Francisco). In Central America his research addresses the political mobilization of ethnicity, immigration and labour relations, political violence, popular resistance, and the social dislocation of street children. His research in the United States confronts inner-city social suffering and critiques the political economy and cultural contours of U.S. apartheid. He is also addressing gender power relations, and the intersections between structural and intimate violence. His most recent work focuses on substance abuse, violence, homelessness, and HIV-prevention.

Renato Curcio is currently pursuing his socioanalytical activities as a member of the cooperative Sensibili alle foglie, in which he directs the “Social Research Notebooks” collection. In recent years he has coordinated research processes with male and female workers from the Grande Distribuzione Organizzata in Milan. More recently, he has worked with emigrant workers, legal and illegal, to uncover the unwritten codes of their situation, and with minors and young people on the roads leading to Milan.

Dario Malventi has a degree in Philosophy from the University of Philosophy and the Arts of Pisa, Italy. For four years (2003-2007) he has been conducting field work on the life, organisation and mechanisms of power at the Therapeutic and Educational Unit, UTE, of the Villabona prison in Asturias. His doctoral thesis, Curar y reinsertar, analyses this prototype prison as one of the main laboratories of therapeutic-penal governance promoted by the prison system in Spain. He obtained his doctorate from the Anthropology Department of the University of Barcelona. He is a member of the Grupo de Recerca Exclusión y Control, GRECS). In 2006 he helped set up the Social Anthropology and Prison Office, a group which intervenes critically in total institutions. He is co-founder and co-coordinator of the Periferiak encounters (2002-2007).  www.periferike.org

Friday_6th November 2009

Presentation of Module 0, by Vidajoc

Module 0 portrays, using a novel computer application, the latest model for therapeutic and educational modules in the prisons of this state. Module 0 is also a digital archive of unpublished documentation, in multimedia format; an application for interactive simulation. ASIs/These are made with free software that exploits the possibilities of the New Information Technologies to create interactions between different users who share links or interests. This is a shared virtual space where content and actions take place against a graphic setting, making non-linear navigation possible, with a map and a timeline, recreating a new world for each user.

The Vidajoc Association for education, games and cyberculture, was born at the beginning of 2008 as a result of the private experiences of a group of people interested in the development of tools and projects as an approach to social education on the internet. VidaJoc (VJ) is made up of people with technological, artistic and social skills and knowledge, who work directly on the development of the virtual platforms and other kinds of communicative projects and games. The VidaJoc collective produces communicative projects such as ASIs, shared virtual spaces where content and actions are linked on a geographical plane, enabling non linear navigation on a territory and with a timeline.

 

CLOSING CEREMONY

CLOSING CEREMONY
Venue: La Carbonería (C/ Levíes 18, Sevilla)
Time: 20.30 h.
Free entry until full

Friday_6th November de 2009

Other galleries. Quico Rivas, Prison and Fine Art, by José Luis Gallero

“As long as criticism has not turned itself into an art to match other arts, it will not cease to be mean, biased, unjust and undignified,” wrote Rilke in his Florentine Diary (1898). We do not think we are mistaken in affirming that this claim by the Austrian poet was fully shared by the man who has been considered the most lucid and demanding art critic of his generation. A veritable artist of criticism, Quico Rivas embodied the kind of writing that, as Joseph Brodsky wished, makes it possible to turn criticism into a literary genre in its own right. The best pages that he dedicated to recreating the work of countless artists over forty years, take the reader down an unpredictable path, where philosophy mingles with the everyday, politics with poetry, humour and gravity, the choice quote and the subtle dig, a literary formula of his invention, which he defined as “reflective ramblings of a moral nature.”

As suggested by the subtitle of this lecture, a collage -the technique he cultivated so enthusiastically over the years – will reconstruct a career with three main threads: biographical adventure, creative challenge and political experience. For the composition of this collage a set of documents and testimonies will be used– liable at any moment to be enlarged or rearranged - , including critical texts, lectures, interviews, letters, poems, memos, posthumous papers and diverse fragments. Wherever possible, Quico’s own words will be the basis for the story, without neglecting also to reproduce those of some of his travelling companions.

Rivas’ presence was decisive in two cultural revivals: that in Seville in the first half of the 1970s and that in Madrid in the second half of the decade and early 1980s. Despite often reneging on his job as a critic, an exquisite sense of humour – black when necessary – helped him keep intact his love of painting, literature and music. An organiser of legendary and wildly varied exhibitions, he also promoted incendiary pamphlets. Unpublished as a writer at his own wish, he founded imprints to distribute the work of other authors. A seeker of paradise, he more than once ended up in jail. An instinctive researcher, he often found himself carried away by his detective spirit far beyond what was wise. Despite his apparent wish not to conclude anything, he left his life perfectly finished.

The reading has been organised into five blocks, in strictly chronological order: “As long as a song lasts” (1953-1980), “Prisons and Paradises” (1981-1996), “Laughing at Oneself” (1997-2007), “Other Galleries” (monographic interlude) and “The Last Lamp post” (2008…). At the start of this century, one of Quico’s most desired initiatives was on the point of taking shape: The Other galleries. Prison and Fine Art in the Modern Age, a visionary proposal for an exhibition in the old jail at Badajoz. The draft he prepared for this impossible project, to which he dedicated ten years of his life, will give us the opportunity to visit a show that never took place except in the imagination of Quico Rivas.

José Luis Gallero is a poet, editor and documenter. He is the author of Antología de poetas suicidas (1989), Ocho poetas raros (1992), Sólo se vive una vez. Esplendor y ruina de la movida madrileña (1992), 88 Fragmentos (2003), El camino más largo (2006) and Heráclito. Fragmentos e interpretaciones (2009). He edited the magazines Sur Exprés and El Europeo and has worked as a literary and art critic on Diario 16, ABC, El País and Le Monde Diplomatique.

 

PROGRAMME

PROGRAMME

Monday_2nd November 2009

· 19:00 h.
Presentation of Thresolds, by Dario Malventi and Álvaro Garreaud.

· 20:00 h.
Andalusian Prisons and Violation of Human Rights, By APDHA

Tuesday_3rd November 2009

· 11:00 - 14:30 h. 
Workshop. Society's Image of Prisons 
Coordinator: Mónica Aranda Ocaña
Participants: Manuel Ledesma Moreno (Salhaketa), Jordi Arola (Oficina Social) and Valentín Aguilar Villuendas (APDHA)

· 19:00 - 21:30 h.
aufBruch, by Peter Atanassow and Sibylle Arndt
Co-Existence of Technologies: Pit, Fold, Distance, Threshold, Crisis, by Willy Thayer Morel
After the talks there will be a discussion chaired by Esteban Zamora

Wednesday_4th November 2009

· 11:00 - 14:30 h. 
Workshop. Limitless Deployment of Institutional Mechanisms: Education-Capture-Work 
Coordinator: Claudio Ibarra Varas
Participants: Carlos Gomis (Oficina Social) and Cándido González Carnero (CSI)

· 19:00 - 21:30 h.
Prison Genealogies: Archive and Debate:
The GIP: Information and Struggle in the Prison Situation. Lecture and Critique, by Philippe Artières
Surveillance and Punishment beyond the Disciplinary Society, by Manuela Ivone Cunha
After the talks there will be a discussion chaired by Álvaro Garreaud

Thursday_5 November 2009

· 11:00 - 14:30 h.
Workshop. NU Meio
Coordinator: Filipa Francisco
Participants: Ixiar Rozas, Wenceslao Galán (Espai en Blanc) and Albolote Prison Flamenco Workshop (Gregorio Rosillo, Víctor Vázquez Sánchez, inmates of the Albolote Prison and residents of the Granada Social Rehabilitation Centre)

· 19:00 - 21:30 h. 
On the threshold of subjectivity: regimes of visibility and techniques of enunciation:
Drugs, Violence and Imprisonment in the United States, by Philippe Bourgois
Institutions, Mechanism  and a Few Stories, by Renato Curcio
After the talks there will be a discussion chaired by Dario Malventi

Friday_6 November 2009

· 11:00 - 14:30 h. 
Workshop. Creativity as a Resource in Total Institutions.
Coordinator: Nicola Valentino
Participants: Línea Paralela, Onda Cerebral and David Campos (Radio Nikosia)

· 18:00 h.
Presentation of Módule 0, by Vidajoc

· 20:30 h. Closing Ceremony.
Other galleries. Quico Rivas, Prison and Fine Art, by José Luis Gallero
 

Venue:
Workshops (mornings): Rectory of the International University of Andalusia, C/ Américo Vespucio 2 (Isla de la Cartuja - Seville)
Lectures and discussions: Las Sirenas Civic Centre, Alameda de Hércules s/n, Seville
Closing Ceremony: La Carbonería, C/Levíes 18, Seville