PRESENTATION

Presentation  

The submission of politics to capital, the supremacy of neoliberal rationality over democratic rationality, the judicialisation of politics… the loss of sovereign power in nation states, and the erosion produced by globalisation in the sovereignty of those very states, are crucial issues in the present de-democratisation of the West Wendy Brown

On Capital and Territory, within the UNIA arteypensamiento programme, emerged as a research project in process at a time when townplanning strategies and the development model were characterised by speculative mega-projects, ‘specific, fragmented and emblematic interventions, lacking in social reason, the main argument of which was profitability, an ethics of activity,’ as defined by professor Arantxa Rodríguez. This model was sustained by a logic of accumulation and reinvestment that did not take into consideration the possible longterm effects its actions could have on citizens, the environment and the very capitalist economic system.

Three years after we held the last conference those predictions have been totally exposed. The total collapse of credit, drastic budgetary cuts, mass destruction of jobs and social rights, the rise of racism, the shift in decision-making from representative institutions to other powers that are not subject to any form of control, etc., have drawn a bleak picture, the ‘suspended democracy’ in which we find ourselves.

However, the dominant scale of values places capitalism as the only possible economic regime, the only form that is able to guarantee a solution to this unbearable situation. In spite of the evidence against it, capitalism is presented by both the parliamentary right and left as a system that has worked well and will soon do so again if we manage to free ourselves of the excesses committed by others with our complicity and responsibility. The differences between the two positions reside solely in the type of technical measures introduced for the machine to function normally again: for some they will be cuts; for others, measures designed to encourage growth; and for all, budgetary discipline and the safeguard of the financial system.

It is accepted that they may have committed mistakes as regards overexploitation and deregularisation, but both those most in favour of the free market and those who champion a ‘socially responsible form of ecocapitalism’ agree on presenting the capitalist system as a ‘neutral productive machine’, the only means of production that simultaneously includes all those rights identified with democracy and provides certain levels of well-being.

Nonetheless, as Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, this anti-ideological description is patently false; ‘the very notion of capitalism as a neutral social mechanism is ideology in its purest expression (even utopian ideology).’ We must not forget that the rights recognised in liberal democracies have derived from the struggles carried out by the popular classes and the minorities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; therefore, as such, the presumed natural relation between rights and capitalism does not exist. Rather, when growth is arrested or collapses, the system actually destroys all that which it had permitted against the grain and now feels hindered by, as is taking place openly, in contrastwith a relative social passivity and a fresh outbreak of populist and racist logic.

The price entailed by this depoliticisation of economy, the acceptance of the fact that capitalism is here to stay, is that ‘the actual sphere of politics is depoliticised’, and therefore turns into a fight for specific struggles. As a result, decisive questions we must ask ourselves are how to reinvent political space in today’s conditions of globalisation, economic crisis and suppression of rights, and how to solve the paradox of universalising various specific struggles at a time when capitalism works as a huge machine, a global company.

The dimension of the universal when it is identified with the imbalance as regards existing order is opposed to, and transcends, globalism, and is recognised by the point of exclusion common to all those who do not have an appropriate position in the social hierarchy or in the global order, and for this reason precisely represent a potential threat to the capitalist mode of production. The problem lies in the fact that with its ongoing transformation into a ‘post-political regime’, the capitalist system is able to neutralise specific demands and integrate them into the form of identities, lifestyles, cultural difference… Consequently, as Žižek has pointed out, it is a question of ‘promoting “the return to the supremacy of the economy”, without detriment to the demands made by post-modern forms of politicisation but rather to create the conditions that will allow a more efficient fulfilment of those demands.’ In other words, insisting not on the differential aspects of these political practices—be they ecologist, local, feminist, anti-copyright or queer—but on the aspects they all have in common and that protest against and undermine the capitalist mode of production.

Similarly, David Harvey states that due to our fear of economism, we stop thinking of political economy which, in his opinion, is the greatest problem faced by the left in its inability to define an alternative political economy to that of capitalism. ‘[W]ithout defining it, we will never attain the necessary political conditions to embark on any kind of emancipating project.’

‘On Capital and Territory III’ intends to pick up the discussions at the point where they stood at the end of the last edition in 2009, and begin others starting from both the new sociopolitical events and from the resistance and new proactive proposals that have emerged since then, following the same working methodology as the one used in previous editions and continuing to intersect thought, action and creation starting from the convergence of the gazes of critical theory, experience and artistic practice. Such a plurality of voices seeks a new meaning for ‘the common’, new questions, statements, representations and alternatives to the capitalist system of production and consumption, financial speculation, the accumulative processes of capital and the dogma of growth, and to the processes of social exclusion and restriction of rights that are emerging in this stage of speculative capitalism.

This third edition is structured around a research group based in a workshop and a laboratory, a conference and an exhibition. 

WORKSHOP

Workshop Unearthing our feet. Tackling the crisis from alternative practices

Process
On 18 April 2012 the first meeting between UNIA arteypensamiento and the Casa Pumarejo Association was held, inviting us to take part in ‘On Capital and Territory III’. We discussed the current ‘crisis’ that is not only affecting us at the economic and political levels but also as regards the loss or weakening of initiatives that aspire to survive within today’s mainstream trends. The representatives of UNIA arteypensamiento felt that the Casa Pumarejo Association was a long-lasting example (of what) that after twelve years of conflict and permanent creation, therefore the experience could be taken as a basis for confirming others that emerge from citizens themselves. We even put forward a possible title, ‘Collective Creation of Support Tools in the Face of the ‘”Crisis”’. And we suggested that the objective could be showing the work of those groups that continue to pose alternatives, alongside new proposals that inhabit specific projects and are left out of ‘unique solutions’—being in favour or against the present system. In the prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty, we believe that this common reflexive activity can prove useful to both Casa Pumarejo and the UNIA arteypensamiento programme.

The Context in Which We Unearth Our Feet
Despite the fact that, in conventional terms, the present crisis is explained as a process limited to the socioeconomic and labour fields, the truth is that we find ourselves before a crisis of civilisation that has political, economic, environmental and cultural dimensions; it is not expressed so much by the collapse of the financial system as in the way in which it has been dealt with. Capitalism, far from having been called into question, still presents itself today as a superior (scientific) form of social organisation. The neo-liberal utopia has been strengthened after the financial collapse of 2008, revealing something that literature has been warning us about for some time: the progressive extrapolation of mercantilist rationales in all spheres of everyday life.

Loïc Wacquant has recently described this process. Being as it is a political project, neo-liberalism manages to appropriate itself of the public sphere by means of the articulation of three basic institutional bodies: the state, the market and citizenship. Thus, the pressure it exerts over the first enables it to shape the third according to the logic of the second (Wacquant, 2012), which implies redesigning the state starting from the idea that the mechanisms of the capitalist market are the ideal and most efficient means for redistributing resources and rewards. According to this maxim, the systems of social protection that are guaranteed as a constitutional right are displaced by others of a welfare nature, conditioned by the acceptance of a flexible labour regime and by an established framework of forms of behaviour (labour training courses, job seeking strategies, forced labour). Parallel to this, a punitive system is developed that is designed to placate the emerging disorder and dramatise the power of the state over the spheres of everyday life that it begins to control (civic ordinances, laws for controlling access to the Internet, persecution of civil disobedience). All this is drawn together through the metaphor of individual responsibility, a legitimating and motivating discourse (Wacquant, 2010).

The transformation consolidates a trend already perceived by authors such as Foucault, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, who mention this invasion of mercantilist logic in all aspects of life in the move from the disciplinary society to the control society. Control society, they say, establishes mechanisms of total control, ‘mechanisms by means of which all that constitutes the fundamental biological traits of the human species can be a part of a politics, a political strategy, a general strategy of power.’ (Foucault, 2007). This way of exerting domination has been defined by the term bio-power which, to quote Hardt, implies ‘a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, re-articulating it. Power can only attain an effective control over the lives of the population when it constitutes a vital, integral function that each individual supports or reactivates at will. The highest function of this power is that of enclosing life on all sides, and its main task is to administrate life. Bio-power, therefore, refers to a situation in which the production and reproduction of life itself is at stake.’ (Hardt et al., 2002).

This form of politics is based on total control over the body, appropriating itself of the physical body, the social body and the body as a sign (Matos Barreiro, 2004), i.e., embedding itself in the social field, in people’s brains and organisms. The mechanisms of integrationconfinement are now internalised, corporealised and therefore reproduced in our everyday practices.

Initiatives that Unearth Our Feet
In the face of this change of paradigm, a number of responses have emerged over the past decade that are more than mere forms of resistance, appearing as proactive alternatives that aspire to generate community practices, retrieving forms of capital reviled by the totalising political programme of neo-liberalism and revaluing the notion of the common, recovering the uses of territory linked to an oikonomy based on satisfaction of sustenance and counting on the (re) construction of sustainability infrastructure linked to these uses or generating new uses. These new groups orient their everyday praxis abandoning (albeit not completely) the spectacularity characterising political action since the sixties, and emerging as audiences proposing alternatives through practice(s) in continual dialogue with the local and the global. It is in this sense that we could call these responses proactive bio-political activisms (Barraquero, 2012), insofar as they introduce creative, emerging and therefore biopolitical production as a form of opposition, for they seek to subvert bio-power from its very essence, in other words, understanding the body and everyday life as cores of political action. They can be seen, somehow, as the recursive publics defined by anthropologist Christopher Kelty, that is, publics ‘interested in practical and material maintenance, and in the modification of the technical, legal, practical and conceptual means that shape its very existence as public; a group independent of other forms of established power that is capable of conversing with other pre-existing forms of power through the production of real alternatives’ (Kelty, 2009).

So, this series of activist experiences would be characterised by the fact that they transcend the sectorial approach and become struggles for life; they would be experiences rooted in a certain territory and therefore have a very strong local component that would not prevent them from having a global vision beyond that territory. Such proactive experiences would not only be based on the opposition to hegemonic power on the discursive plane, or on the generation of conflicts starting from official or extra official channels of citizen participation; they would have a propositional, creative approach, concentrating their energy on the construction of alternatives consolidated through practice. From a practical perspective, implicit in these activisms is a political discourse projected externally, an advocacy with a transformative social vocation.

Marcel Mauss taught us that endowments operate in all societies as a total social institution; in other words, the exchanges and communication implicit in all human groups generate forms of capital. In this sense, the basic trait of these proactive bio-political activisms isn’t just carrying out practices that transform social order through everyday activity, but generating new networks that (re)create other forms of capital.

We speak of attention, affections, learning, mutual support, common assets reviled by neo-classical economic theories. Today, in a scenario such as the one previously described, we find initiatives of collective action that emerge with a double projection: on the one hand they generate procommon and, on the other, they generate alternatives to forms of organisation governed by mercantilist rationales.

These are the initiatives that are ‘stepping out of place’ and that we have chosen for the third edition of ‘On Capital and Territory’. The workshop entitled ‘Stepping Out of Place’ aspires to be a space of meeting, debate, reflection, entanglement and collective creation between people taking part in such experiences; people belonging to the academic world and the world of art. On the purely speculative plane, since their origin the social sciences have been based on purely lucubratory knowledge, the sleep of universal reason. However, from our point of view what is interesting is that knowledge is generated from below, enacted by people who are carrying out new proposals. This is why we intend to organise two encounters around two verbs (actions) that prove essential for the development of ‘good living’, caring and supporting, that we believe superficially meet the needs generated in the present context of crisis. Our idea is to defend what we consider to be the core of the workshop, i.e., the joint creation of alternative notions of capital in the territory of Andalusia by groups or initiatives based on everyday practice as a form of political action.

Unearthing our Feet. Grounding: Two Bio-political Dimensions

Supporting
The first encounter, held on 25 October 2012 at the Pumarejo Community Centre, was structured around the notion of supporting. Together with Julio Gisbert, deliberately invited to introduce this concept, the meeting counted on the participation of representatives of sixteen groups connected with different territorial realities and different spheres of action and influence: Asamblea 15M Alcosa, Banco de Tiempo Aljarafe, Banco de Tiempo 15M Triana, Diagonal Periódico, El enjambre sin reina, Huerta de Chiclana - ‘Jandita’ Moneda Social, ODS - Oficina de Derechos Sociales de Sevilla, Platapuma, Red de Cultivadores Dulce Revolución,Red de Decrecimiento de Sevilla, Red de Economía Vecinal de Cádiz, Red de Moneda Local ‘Zoquito’, Red de Moneda Social ‘Puma’, Red de Trueque Aljarafe-Moneda Social ‘Jara’, Salero-Puerto de Santa María and Taraceas Sociedad Cooperativa.

Discussions focused on the practices, tools and world visions generated from the search for alternatives for an issue as basic as sustenance, understood as the key matter and energyto guarantee a ‘good living’ for all inhabitants of the planet (not just some), and a good living for the Earth’s actual system—in other words, respecting bio-physical limits. We are speaking, therefore, of food sovereignty, agro-ecology, alternatives to the agro-stockbreeding industry, fair networks of production and consumption (pro-sump), proximity channels for production and distribution, new initiatives for economic exchanges, local currencies, time banks, bartering networks, mutual support networks, alternative entrepreneurial models to public versus private and initiatives for energetic sovereignty, among others.

Caring
The second encounter, held on 11 December 2012 at Coop Tramallol, was structured around the notion of caring. Along with Marilyn Machado, representative of Procesos de Comunidades Negras en Colombia (PCN) and deliberately invited to introduce this idea, the same number of groups as took part in the previous encounter were present.

Debates centred on the practices being carried out in the areas of personal and community care, the way in which certain organisations and groups are working on the construction of dynamics committed to consolidating values, feelings, meanings that meet people’s needs in a comprehensive way. Our pledge is to relations of proximity and to forms of organisation that favour care. In this sense, we believe that affections, feelings, joy and fun can be used as elements of reference that restore our energy and potential as individuals and communities. We also believe that caring transcends the consideration of health as a palliative measure against illness and regards it holistically, keeping our balance as individuals but also as a part of a community and of the eco-system. We bear in mind the visions contributed by the feminist paradigm, showing the fundamental value of the tasks so far undertaken by women in the spheres of caring and upbringing, and highlight the synergies developed by groups and associations designed to generate networks linked to territories for the recovery of ties of vicinity, proximity and solidarity.

Asociación Casa Pumarejo/Red de Moneda Social "Puma"/GISAP, julio 2012

COORDINATION

Asociación Casa Pumarejo. This association was founded in 2007 in order to grant legal identity to the local and social movement that has emerged over the past few years to save Casa Pumarejo. The association embraces the demands previously made by the Platform for Casa Pumarejo, the most prominent elements of which were and still are the defence and recovery of the house, the permanence of its present inhabitants, respect for its traditionally established residential use and the creation of a range of new sociocultural uses inspired by the history of the house and counting on the participation of its inhabitants, valuing the architectural, ethnological and traditional features of the house and its surrounding neighbourhood. www.pumarejo.es/

Representative at ‘On Capital and Territory’:
Salvador García. A specialist in participative research, García has carried out his work chiefly around the platform and at present within the association. In his opinion, the Casa Pumarejo experience implies a new level of creation, a unique process designed starting from actual events that has proved capable of bringing the old to the new and of responding to the deep consequences entailed by the fragmentation of the population and the emptying of spaces.

GISAP-Grupo de Investigación Social y Acción Participativa. Currently composed of thirty-three members, most of whom are anthropologists linked to Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, GISAP is basically devoted to applied social research and theory. The group aspires to reinvest the knowledge acquired through research in the development of projects that will support endogenous actions designed to solve problems from within, using the resources and abilities of the actors. http://www.gisap.org/es/

Representatives at ‘On Capital and Territory’:
Luis Berraquero. BA in Humanities, in the fields of the conservation of cultural, ethnological and museographic heritage, and MA in Social Research applied to the Environment, Pablo de Olavide University, and in Sustainability Sciences for managing Global Change, International University of Andalusia. At present he is working on his PhD thesis, ‘Socio-Political Dimension of Resilient Cities. Contributions of Proactive Bio-political Activisms to the Socio-ecological Resilience of Urban Socio-ecosystems.

Javier Escalera. BA and PhD in Geography and History, University of Seville. Since 1990 Escalera is Reader in Social Anthropology at Pablo de Olavide University and since 1995 he is Director of GISAP. He has written numerous essays in political anthropology, sociability, associationism, natural spaces and the environment, tourism, participatory research, cultural heritage and collective identities.

Francisco Jesús Maya. BA in Geography and History and in Social Anthropology, MA in Social Research Applied to the Environment. Since 2010 Maya has held a PIF scholarship in the Department of Social Sciences at Pablo de Olavide University. His lines of research include sociability and local associationism in the reconstruction of stigmatised traditional neighbourhoods, taking the Pópulo district in Cádiz as a case study, the design of a theoretical-methodological framework, the gathering of data, information processing and communication of results.

Joan Vidal. Philosophy graduate from the University of Valladolid (2007) with a Doctorate in Environmental Studies from the University Pablo de Olavide, Seville. Joan carries out investigative work for the doctoral thesis Sowing the city. Living nature: the social construction of environment in urban and semi-urban orchards in Seville. He has a Masters in Social Investigation Applied to the Environment.

Red de Moneda Social "Puma". A network set up late in 2011 with the intention of creating a collective tool to empower a given community, in this case the area north of the centre of Seville. The system is complementary to the Euro and emerged from the community itself, that decided how to generate its value and how to attain its desired objectives. The project is set within the Red de Decrecimiento de Sevilla (RDS) and therefore introduces the theses of decrease in its lines of thought and action. In this context the PUMA social currency seeks to satisfy the needs of the community in a direct way, acting at once as consumers and producers, establishing relationships of trust and, above all, boosting our abilities, skills and forms of knowledge beyond our professional dedication. http://monedasocialpuma.wordpress.com/

Representative at ‘On Capital and Territory’:
Israel Sánchez Martín. Economist responsible for innovation projects at Cooperative Kpacita SCA. He works in breaking down the search for ways to empower our community. He is convinced that another economy is necessary and possible thanks to complementary monetary and social systems. A believer in organization from the bottom up, human development and decline he is open to new relationships and is a participant in the social tapestry workshop.

PARTICIPANTS

Julio Gisbert. Professionally linked to the world of banking and finance, Gisbert is considered to be an expert in labour economy, micro-currencies and social banking. He has written the book Vivir sin empleo, in which he analyses in great detail the most important forms of complementary economics: bartering networks, time banks, social currencies, the other bank and mutual aid systems. http://www.vivirsinempleo.org/

Marilyn Machado. Machado is a member of Procesos de Comunidades Negras in Colombia (PCN), made up of a hundred and twenty ethnical and territorial organisations, dedicated to defending the land and natural resources, the search for recognition of ethnic, cultural, territorial, social, economic and political rights of the afro-descendant population and the strengthening of independent organisational processes.

Asamblea 15M Alcosa
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Asamblea-M15M-Alcosa/138392909571780

Banco de Tiempo Aljarafe
http://bancodeltiempoaljarafe.blogspot.com.es/

Banco de Tiempo 15M Triana
http://bancodeltiempotriana.blogspot.com.es/

Diagonal Periódico
http://www.diagonalperiodico.net/

El Enjambre sin reina
http://www.ecolocal.es/El%20Enjambre%20sin%20Reina.web.pdf

Huerta de Chiclana-Moneda Social "Jandita"

ODS-Oficina de Derechos Sociales de Sevilla
http://ods-sevilla.org/

Platapuma

Red de Cultivadores Dulce Revolución

Red de Decrecimiento de Sevilla
http://www.sevilladecrece.net/

Red de Economía Vecinal de Cádiz
http://redeconomiavecinal.wordpress.com/

Red de Moneda Local "Zoquito"
http://www.zoquito.org/

Red de Trueque Aljarafe-Moneda Social "Jara"
http://monedajara.blogspot.com.es/

Salero-Puerto de Santa María

Taraceas Sociedad Cooperativa
http://www.taraceas.es/

LABORATORY

Laboratory On Leviathan (Stopping the Train of History)

1. 

* Portada de Leviatán con el versículo del Libro de Job referido al monstruo bíblico

2.

3.

Leviatán is more than just the title of Thomas Hobbes’s most famous work; above all else it is a metaphorical figure that strives to capture, in allegorical terms, the nature of the state. Hobbes aspired to explain the fundamentals, characteristics and existential forms of the modern state that had emerged in the dawn of capitalism, which was a representation, i.e., an entity that appeared ‘in place of.

The information we have today tells us that capital’s train without brakes is leading us to a global collapse of unforeseeable proportions. Today we know that after two centuries of capitalist productivism, climatic balance is on the verge of a heart attack. Today we are fully aware that the present model seems to have reached its limits. So, how can we continue to believe in the fiction that conventional economy calls a growing ‘creation of value’?

De un día para otro la cuarta parte de la riqueza mundial se ha volatizado con la crisis financiera y bursátil de 2008. Pero esa anecdótica volatización no ha impedido que de nuevo el Capitalismo se reformule como tal. Para ello, nuestros representantes políticos han ordenado que la factura del desajuste financiero la pague la base de la pirámide capitalista: los de abajo.

Overnight, a fourth of the world’s richness has vanished into thin air as a result of the financial and stock-market crisis of 2008. However, this anecdotal vanishing hasn’t prevented capitalism from reformulating itself as such and our political representatives have ordered that the bill of the financial imbalance be paid by the base of the capitalist pyramid: those on the lower rungs. Until recently, the silent majority used to seeing how the desert knocked on its doors, while its social achievements were reduced in the name of the sacrosanct market, has remained stationary. However, a short time ago, those on the lower rungs have begun to mobilise on streets and squares. For many, this new scenario has meant the rebirth of their critical conscience, opening their eyes and questioning the bases on which the new god Money stands:

Rotten, How can we possibly love you, Or your rotten money If you always want to Oppress my people With your damn power?¹

Now, those on the lower rungs know that our hackneyed democracy is in the hands of that new god, and that the democratic system is warded. Like impassive statues of stone, they have witnessed a double spectacle: on the one hand, the collapse of the financial system, and on the other, its rebirth thanks to the injection of huge amounts of public money.

And yet this silent majority that seemed destined to play a merely legitimating role (thanks to regularly announced elections), seldom consulted in binding referendums on key themes (the European Constitution is a perfect example), is now waking up and is well aware that occupying streets and squares is the last democratic chance to derail the train.

How can we interrupt the train’s present dominant movement? If we find ourselves, as Alain Badiou suggests, in ‘stirring times’ that announce and produce an awakening of history against the repetition of what is plainly ‘the worst’, then time may be ripe for the submissive mass to start asking questions on the streets and squares.

4.

On 26 August 2011 the Socialist and Popular groups in the Spanish parliament jointly presented a proposition to reform article 135 of the Spanish Constitution. According to the motives explained by the signatories of the initiative, in the context of a deep and prolonged recession, the repercussions of economic and financial globalisation are increasingly obvious.

On 27 September 2011 Spain’s official state gazette (BOE)² published the definitive text of the reform of article 135. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s Socialist government modified the Constitution of the Kingdom of Spain to satisfy the demands of the European Union. Almost at the same time, Greece was becoming a laboratory for Europe. Methods that would immediately afterwards be applied to Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Italy, etc., were tested on human guinea pigs. The legion of ‘experts’ responsible for this experiment, the troika (European Commission, Central European Bank and International Money Fund), was devoted to capitalism (Walter Benjamin), a religion whose gods—the financial markets who make unforeseeable, arbitrary and irrational decisions, demand sacrifices (human sacrifices)³.

De facto, we have witnessed new modalities of mercantile coups d’état (in Greece and Italy), leading to the removal from office of their presidents (elected by suffrage). In their place, others would be appointed, who would satisfy the neo-liberal demands of the troika. Impassive and astonished, we witness the collapse of that ‘in place of’.

For the Spanish, such an important day was not a memorable event. If we were to carry out a small survey we would be hard pressed to find anyone able to explain what happened that 26 August 2011. Everything suggests there is something above Hobbes’s imagined Leviathan, something that approximately two hundred years ago Adam Smith called the invisible hand (The Invisible Hand of the Market), a runaway power that pulverised democratic European states.

On 8 July 2012, while the risk premium was about 562 points and the government of the Partido Popular refused to explain in the Spanish parliament the measures imposed by the European Union (thanks to the reformed article), the president of the government, Mariano Rajoy, travelled to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela to deliver the Calixtine Codice, a mediaeval text stolen a year before which conveniently appeared at just the right moment despite the fact that the police had been aware of its whereabouts for some months. A pious gesture that defines our economic present.

5.

On Thursday 12 March 2012, andin the light of recent economic events, the president of the government has appeared at last at an extraordinary full session in parliament to inform of the new economic adjustments that he would begin to apply in Spain (although it would be more appropriate to say impose). Faced with this new outlook, perhaps we should ask ourselves one last question: Are these measures, presented today outside parliament, somehow related to that market of death that Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics? Necropolítica?⁴.

6.

As a Brief Methodology

The laboratory rehearses a series of artistic practices that grant visibility to the new social climate emerged around what was not initially considered a crisis, and was then externalised with the reform of the constitution.

María Cañas, Francisco Contreras-Niño de Elche, Manuel Prados Sánchez, Inmaculada Salinas and I have explored different aspects of everyday life in the city of Seville, in order to shape a collective narrative starting from various multidimensional stories, uniting the subjects discussed both in the presentation of ‘On Capital and Territory III’ and in the text of the ‘Unearthing Our Feet’ workshop. In other words, creating a narrative that weaves together the loose ends of those minor everyday stories, shaping an account of the ideology underlying the economic. Ideology, as Terry Eagleton argues, is not ‘some body of doctrine, set of moralizing discourses or ideological ‘superstructure’ … it is the routine material logic of everyday life.’

We have set in motion a number of practices, developed from July to December, that take art to critically question the tools of the field of work to which they belong.

Our methodology has led us to pay special attention to the global scenario, in order to analyse the local scenario from these and other individual artistic positions. We have held work sessions for examining and discussing texts, news items, videos, etc., material which we can use to structure our work, and have considered the minor stories, almost marginal material, that best define the economic: those that people post almost anonymously on the web. The result is a cognitive map of videos, accessible at http://www.mapize.com/sevilla_videomap.

We have also paid special attention to words, to be more precise, to their semantic emptying: democracy, sustainable, governance, citizenship, excluded, resistance, etc., in short, those words that immediately set off sparks. In the jargon—or concepts, if we are to be more benevolent—we use, words such as universalism, meaning, pro-common, common, etc., continually appear. These words presumably guide our political and artistic activity, and yet, as is the case with neo-liberals and the words democracy, sustainable, governance, etc., the more they are used in one sense (and its opposite), the less meaningful they become. That is, as Jean-Luc Nancy has suggested, ‘they signify and embrace so many things that they unfortunately end up referring to the most absolute nothing.’

Can we possibly extract ourselves from this game of semantic emptying?

The laboratory hasits own blog, http://capitalyterritorio. wordpress.com that works as a hotchpotch of the various materials used by the artists taking part.

COORDINATION

Isaías Griñolo. A visual artist who lives and works in Seville, Huelva and Badajoz. Over the past few years he has been working on Asuntos internos. La cultura como cortina de humo and Escombros (imágenes, relatos y discursos de las prácticas ecologistas en Andalucía), artistic projects through which he approaches urban issues as a field of reflection, working on memory, ecology, economy, poetry and art. At present he is working on reverberación, for Campo Adentro (Spanish Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Agriculture and Environment, Madrid, 2013), and Contra a Tàpies (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2013). Griñolo is a member of the Platform for Reflection on Cultural Politics (PRPC)..

PARTICIPANTS

María Cañas. An artist, aka La Archivera de Sevilla, an audiovisual cannibal and iconoclast, Cañas practices a sort of ‘videomachy’ (militant cinephagia) that penetrates clichés and genres to destroy them from within. She directs Animalario TV Producciones, a creative space devoted to the culture of recycling, appropriationism and artistic experimentation. Her work is a resistance to distraction pursuing personal growth and the cultivation of inner fire, which she summarises with a phrase by Bukowski, ‘When everything turned bad, poetry was always there to save my ass.’

Niño de Elche. A flamenco singer who combines in his work traditional projects and forays into the world of the scenic arts (performance, theatre and activism). He has taken part in several events related to experimental music and sound art. At Seville’s 2012 Flamenco Biennial he presented the show entitled Vaconbacon. Cantar las fuerzas, with the bulos.net company.

Manuel Prados Sánchez. Artista y productor. Aborda ámbitos como la arqueología, la historia, la cultura visual o la música mediante trabajos audiovisuales, investigaciones, intervenciones o puestas en escena. Ha participado en proyectos y talleres a cargo de artistas y curadores como Antoni Muntadas, Ibon Aranberri, Cesare Pietroiusti, Valentín Roma o Pedro G. Romero. De 2005 a 2012 trabajó como productor cultural para BNV Producciones.

Inmaculada Salinas. A painter, whose work focuses on what has historically been defined as ‘the feminine’, how it is expressed and reflected in systems of representation. She has held a number of solo shows since 1992, including Prensadas (Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, 2011) and is currently collaborating with Concreta publishers on the making of an artists’ book and taking part in the exhibition entitled Narrativas domésticas. Más allá del álbum familiar (Diputación de Huesca, 2012). Salinas is a member of the Platform for Reflection on Cultural Politics (PRPC).

____________
1.- El dinero, a fandango sung by Manuel Jiménez.  [^]
2.- BOE No. 233, 27 September 2011: http://www.boe.es/diario_ boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2011-15210: http://www.boe.es/diario_boe/txt.php?id=BOE-A-2011-15210 .  [^]
3.- An idea suggested by Sayak Valencia in the essay entitled Capitalism Gore.  [^]
4.- The fourth world: a reference to the inhabitants of the first world who live in a state of absolute poverty, those who, having been expelled from the welfare society, live on its margins (prologue to Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe.  [^]

CONFERENCE

Conference On Capital and Territory III

The conference, held from 12 to 15 December 2012 at the Vice-Chancellor’s Office of the International University of Andalusia and at the Centro de las Artes in Seville, intends to present and compare theoretical analyses and referential poetic and political practices for the themes posed for discussion.

The programme includes a series of lectures; the presentation of the work carried out by the research group and of the communications received following an open call; the screening of the film essay The Forgotten Space, directed by Allan Sekula and Noël Burch; a performance by Niño de Elche and the special edition of a number of index cards from the F.X. Archive by Pedro G. Romero.

Series of lectures

We need to continue to reflect on the factors that in a short (or perhaps not so short) period of time have led us from an unprecedented situation of economic euphoria and speculative madness—a situation of postmodern capitalismin which money flowed and was invested and huge amounts were destined to civilian infrastructure, the building of houses, mega-projects, the production of cultural and leisure events and facilities, consumption incentives and technological optimism—to another similarly unprecedented situation of credit collapse, budgetary cuts, the suppression of rights, collective and individual dispossession, polarisation and social exclusion. In the current political and economic circumstances, before what Žižek calls ‘our desperate historical situation’, to what extent are the formulations of critical theory, enunciations and practices of yesterday still valid? This series has been proposed in order to continue to meditate on the violence of globalisation, on these questionings or other derived questionings and attend to other interpellations.

Wednesday_12 December 2012
Universidad Internacional de Andalucía

16:00 h.
Presentarion of On Capital and Territory III, by Mar Villaespesa and Joaquín Vázquez (BNV Producciones)

Presentation of wokshop ‘Unearthing Our Feet. Tackling the Crisis from Alternative Practices’, by Asociación Casa Pumarejo/GISAP/Red de Moneda Social "Puma"

Presentarion of laboratory On Leviathan (Stopping the Train of History), by Isaías Griñolo (coordintor), María Cañas, Niño de Elche, Manuel Prados Sánchez, Inmaculada Salinas

18:00 h.
‘Territory and Democracy’, by Saskia Sassen
The aim is to make visible that territory cannot be reduced to national territory nor to state territory, and thereby to give the category territory a measure of conceptual autonomy from the nation-state. Beyond an intellectual project, this analysis seeks to enable a practical mobilizing of territory as a complex capability with embedded logics of power/empowerment and claim making, some worthy and some more akin to power-grabs.”

Thursday_13 December 2012
Universidad Internacional de Andalucía

17:00 h.
‘Urban Territory and Cyber-territories: Isomorphisms, Convergences and Hybridisations’, Eduardo Serrano, by Eduardo Serrano
The Net presents a series of properties that are very similar to those of the urban system that has spread throughout the world since the nineteenth century. However, it does reveal clear incompatibilities with the way in which capital captures and manages urban territory, due to the genesis of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Nevertheless, this doesn’t preclude the emergence of cyber-capitalism that is particularly meaningful in social networks. The tensions, compromises and branches will continue to grow insofar as the connection between cyber-world and geo-world materialises; its future will depend, above all, on its inhabitants but also on the positioning of experts in the disciplinary fields that concern both worlds.

18:00 h
‘Spatial Practices, Everyday Pre-positions’, by Marta Pelegrín + Fernando Pérez/MEDIOMUNDO Arquitectos
The wave of evictions from public and private housing reveals that space, alongside coins and notes, is one of the most tangible products in global capitalism. The effort to proclaim the contemporary subject as a nomadic (Deleuze, Guattari), unstable (Virno), naked (Agamben), connected (Echeverría) crowd (Hardt, Negri) becomes a seeming depreciation of its medium, that endangers the value of one of the most coveted rights as a means of exchange: everyday space. An expression of intimacy and the body, a mediator in the relations between life and politics and a producer of the social space of confrontation between life and power, it becomes virtual, accumulated and proletarian (if we understand proletarianism as seizing the product of workers’ labour). Consequently, the construction of the subjectalso requires dealing with forms of production of space that enable the pre-positioning of another subject before this increasingly consolidated scenario. In other words, verifying (providing a different veracity) the pre-positions (about, above, across, after, against, along, among, as, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside… under, underneath, unlike, until, up, upon, versus, via, with, within, without) that structure our everyday space.

Friday_15 December 2012
Centro de las Artes de Sevilla

18:00 h.
'Value Is To Give When Necessary. Artistic Experiments in Exchange and Donation’, by Federico Guzmán
Developing artistic experience through various ‘economies of the imagination' in which to rehearse a range of possibilities of exchange and donation has led to a number of pioneering projects, from bartering to free knowledge and commons such as El museo de la calle, Copilandia and La magia saharaui del don. Art functions here as a laboratory for testing alternative, democratic, supportive and ecological visions that, unlike the so-called free markets, will once again place economic exchange in the service of the dignity of men, women, living creatures and the whole planet.

19:00 h.
'Interrupting the Meaning of the World', by Marina Garcés and Santiago López Petit
A world in crisis doesn’t let itself be thought. It asks to be rescued. And with it, we can only be saved or condemned. If critical thought can once again occupy a space today, its mission is to interrupt the meaning of the world and its seizure by the discourse of the crisis. To interrupt, empty and articulate are three moments of the present combat of thought in which what is at stake is the possibility of constructing a threatening position. Starting from the work developed in the publication of El pressentiment over the past year, we propose examining this new stance before the three issues: before identities, before alternatives and before everyday life.

Presentation of communications

Thursday 13 and Friday 14 December 2012
Centro de las Artes de Sevilla

11:00 h.
An open call has been made for the presentation of communications with the intention of opening up the forum understood as a square in which to discuss public affairs concerning ‘On Capital and Territory III’ and contribute to an updating/renewal and dissemination of thought in connection with the themes and contents of the present edition, expanding in a participatory manner its theoretical, social and creative foundations and thus amplifying forms of knowledge production and research methodologies.

Communications by Paula Álvarez Benítez; Jorge Benavides Solis; Manuel Benítez Brito; Fernando Cordero Múñoz; Ibán Díaz Parra; Pilar García Calero; María Dolores García Fuentes; Susana Jiménez Carmona; Alberto López Cuenca; Mikel Ochoteco Olazabal; Alessandra Olivi; Bilal Paladini San Martín; María Prieto Peinado; Francisco Rivero Pallarés; Inmaculada Rodríguez Cunill; José María Romero; Tomás Ruiz-Rivas Aguado; Juan Antonio Sánchez Muñoz; Antonio Tudela Sancho.

Audiovisual projection

Saturday_15 December 2012
Centro de las Artes de Sevilla

12:00 h.
Projection of the film essay The Forgotten Space, directed by Allan Sekula and Nöel Burch, 2010, 112 min, original soundtrack in English, Dutch, Spanish, Korean, Indonesian and Chinese with Spanish subtitles. Presented by Carles Guerra.

The Forgotten Space. Based on Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, The Forgotten Space is a film essay in which the sea is a recurrent motif, a spaceoften forgotten that is only taken into consideration when a disaster takes place. The film counts on the testimony of engineers, politicians and workers, but also of all those whose opinions are ignored by the system: displaced farmers from Belgium and Holland, Chinese workers whose low salaries are essential to the fragile balance of the world economy, and overexploited lorry drivers who are struggling to make ends meet in Los Angeles. Stopping over in the city of Bilbao, the film is a treatise on the crisis seen through the transportation of goods that follows the trace of large container freighters, trains and lorries in continual movement around the world.

Performance

Saturday_15 December 2012
Centro de las Artes de Sevilla

20:00 h.
To close the conference, Niño de Elche.

Special edition

In the framework of the conference a number of index cards from Pedro G. Romero’s F.X. Archive will be reproduced in order to favour their dissemination and present the Temporary Autonomous Zones as he traced them in anarchist towns during the Spanish Civil War. Such zones are described in the F.X. Archive as ‘A physical and virtual space of legal, economic and social relations aimed at building an economy without monetary accumulation founded on the existence of a fiduciary currency, the coining and circulation of which produces an independent social regulation.’

PARTICIPANTS

Nöel Burch. Principally known as a theorist, he has also set himself up as a film maker and has directed close to twenty films, most of which are documentaries. From 1967 to 1972 Burch collaborated with Janine Bazin andAndrè S. Labarthe on the series Film makers of our time in the heroic years of public French television, a period in which he was co-founder and director of the Institute of Cinematographic Training. His numerous published works include Theory of Film PracticeTo the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema. Among the Spanish editions Praxis del Cine and El Tragaluz del infinito (Contribución a la genealogía del lenguaje cinematográfico).

Pedro G. Romero. Having worked as an artist since 1985, he forms part of the PRPC (Cultural Politics Reflections Platform) and is a member of the UNIA artandthinking team. Since the end of the 90’s he has worked on two projects: F.X Archive and P.H. Machine form part of the first: The empty city, sponsored by the AntoniTàpies Foundation, and Zero economy, developed in Barcelona’s Picasso Museum under the exhibition Economy: Picasso and the anthology Wirtschaft, Ökonomie, Konjunktur, in WürttembergischerKunstverein, Stuttgart. The artistic management of the dancer Israel Galván, the curation of Ocaña, 1973-1983, performances, actions, activism and his participation in the setting up of the Independent Platform for Modern and Contemporary Flamenco Studies are all part of P.H. Machine.

Marina Garcés. Philosophy professor at the University of Zaragoza and author of books such as En lasprisiones de lo posible and Un mundo común,soon to be published. She has been a driving force behind the critical and collective thinking project Espai en Blanc and its publications. She has taken part in diverse experimental projects in the field of education and her work has been featured in magazines and collective publications such as Archipiélago, Zehar and Riff Raff to name but a few.

Carles Guerra. Head of Curation at Barcelona’s Museu d’Art Contemporani (MACBA). He was previously director of La Virreina Centre de la Imatge where he undertook projects such as Antifotoperiodismo and 1979, Un monumento a instantes radicales. Carles is the author of numerous essays and editions, the most noteworthy being N de Negri, Allan Sekula habla con Carles Guerra and Art & Language, Escritos. He has been associate professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra since 2005.

Federico Guzmán. An analytical, poetic visual artist, full of imagination. He combines individual and group projects and works in territories such as free culture, human rights and ecology. In 2012 he has taken part in exhibitions like El otro en desafío, Barranquilla; Artifariti VI, a meeting of art and human rights in Western Sahara and Episodioscríticos (1957-2011), Museu d´Art Contemporani, Barcelona. He has published recent texts such as The Art of Sahrawi Cooking, within the framework of dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, and for the project The Deconstruction and Construction of Territory IV, Universidad Complutense, Madrid.

Santiago López Petit. An activist in working class autonomy in the 70s, he worked as a chemist before later studying Philosophy. He has participated in resistance movements that have followed the Working Class Movement crisis. He is currently a Philosophy professor at the University of Barcelona. He is a driving force behind the platform Espai en Blanc (www.espaienblanc.net), whose objective is to promote critical and experimental thinking. His work has been translated into different languages and published in the following books: Entre el Ser y el Poder. Una apuesta por el querer vivir; Horror Vacui. La Travesía de la Noche del Siglo; El infinito y la nada. El querer vivir como desafío; Amar y pensar. El odio del querer vivir; La movilización global. Breve tratado para atacar la realidad. He has also collaborated on different collective books and magazines such as El Viejo Topo, Archipiélago, Riff Raff and FuturAntérieur.

Saskia Sassen. She is the Robert S. Lynd Porfessor of Sociology at Coumbia University and Co-Chair of The Committee on Global Thought. Her writing focuses on the new global dimensions of social processes. She is the author of numerous publications, many of which have been translated into Spanish: Territorio, autoridad, derechos: ensamblajes medievales y globales; Una sociología de la globalización; Contrageografías de la globalización. Género y ciudadanía en los circuitos transfronterizos; ¿Perdiendo el control? La soberanía en la era de la globalización; Ciudad y globalizacion, a collection of her most recent essays. Her worked has been translated into twenty-one languages and she has written for Le Monde, Newsweek Internacional and Clarín. She contributes regularly to www.opengemocracy.net y www.huffingtonpost.com

Marta Pelegrín + Fernando Pérez/MEDIOMUNDO Arquitectos. From a reflective, contemplative space which brings together professionals and agents, Marta Pelegrín and Fernando Pérez tackle architectural projects as a process in which to build contexts, support stands and spatially tangible mechanisms, proposing spaces which house information, transaction and creation. They put projects together for public spaces, and fit out cultural or educative buildings, doing research into urban issues (Atributos Urbanos, CAAC), Cooperativa y Vivienda (Vacío Positivo O+ y Proyecto CO-OP, Foro Barriadas, Junta Andalucía, COPT) y Trazabilidad y Práctica Material y Proceso en Arquitectura (Universidad Sevilla). They have been the guest editors of N3 (Neutra, COAS). Marta is a Professor at the ETS School of Architecture in Seville.

Allan Sekula. Photographer and theorist who has brought the Amercian tradition of documentary photography up to date. He has focused on economic systems and analysed capitalist logic around the world, and the movement of people within the sphere of work. Critical of the productivist model and the way it has conditioned us and how we live, he has photographed workers at huge maritime factories. Since the 70s, the work he has carried out with photographic sequences, texts and sound recordings has trodden a similar path to that of cinema. However, with the exception of a few videos, his work had little to do with the world of moving images until 2001 when he made the film Tsukiji, which was then followed by others such as A Short Film for Laos and Lottery of the Sea. Amongst his books are: Photography against the Grain, Fish Story, Dismal Science and Performance under Working Conditions.

Eduardo Serrano. Architect and town planner whose activities have mainly focused on the relationship between the built environment and its inhabitants, and what the concept of “territory” actually means, something which he addresses in his doctoral thesis Territories and Capitalism. He has developed an ongoing piece of work which could be called “social territory”: education, publications, knowledge diffusion and participation in social movements, all of which bring together knowledge from a wide range of sources to make the most of every opportunity to think creatively. He has taken part in the coordination of the rehabilitation group for the Casa Invisible de Málaga and also in the co-edition of the educative project about professional training in Albañil en bioconstrucción y patrimonio. A member of the RizomaFundación, Eduardo has participated (2012) in the international competition about the river bed of the River Guadalmedina, which has been promoted by Malaga city council.

EXHIBITION

Exhibition On Capital and Terrirory
Centro de las Artes de Sevilla
14 December 2012 – 9 February 2013

On Capital and Territory first came to life in 2007, initiated as a long term investigative project, its objective being to analyse territorial planning, the production of space as a central aspect of the capitalist economy and the myths created about metropolitan space in the modern era around the suppositions about continuous progress and the absence of limits (amongst other topics), and from the conviction that “no alternative to the contemporary shape of globalization will be handed down to us from above”, but will instead have to arise from the combining of multiple local spaces in one much wider movement. From there, and through various seminars, courses, meetings and workshops, a piece of work involving discussion, contextualization, production and compilation of documents has been developed. This comes to life in the form of an exhibition held in the Arts Center of Seville, with the intention that the room where it is displayed should not be understood only as a display space but also as a working space, like a machine.

The works of art and documents are displayed in a certain chronological order, without following any kind of hierarchy, and are to be viewed as such.

However, as Georges Didi-Huberman points out, “you can’t dismiss the difference between fact and fiction; you have to know when you’re working with one and when with the other”. Accordingly, as the pluralists we are, we’ve decided not to choose but rather, using materials produced over the last few years, to construct a viral mechanism, through the use of different displayssupport stands, mediums and reproductive techniquescomputers, LCD screens, reprographics etc enables a trajectory spanning all sorts of collective narratives, generated by the poetic and political practices which have come together in the project, from the know-how and experiences gained from a diverse range of fields and spheres, disciplines and attitudes which have been contributed by each and every one of the people who have experienced them. The ways of working throughout the process have also been crucial. All of these things have joined together to result in a multiplicity of critical interpretations and new views.

The works of art displayed in On Capital and Territory are ones that have been presented or produced by artists who have participated in the three editions: (Archivo F.X., Daniel Alonso, Javier Andrada, Ibon Aranberri, Jorge Arévalo Crespo, Manuel Blanco, Eugenio A. Heredia (Bruyer), María Cañas, Isaías Griñolo, Federico Guzmán, Manuel León, Rogelio López Cuenca, Celia Macías, Niño de Elche, Carme Nogueira, Berta Orellana, Antonio Orihuela, Manuel Prados Sánchez, Inmaculada Salinas, Sitesize, Jorge Yeregui); documents produced or compiled by researchers and representatives of social movements in the workshop Capital and territory. The construction of a dream? and Unearthing our feet. Tackling the Crisis from Alternative Practices workshop (José Ignacio Aguilar, Eduardo Apellániz, Rosario Asián, Luis Berraquero, Antonio Cano, Daniel Coq, Claudia Delorenzi, Gwendoline de Oliveira, Manuel Delgado Cabeza, Javier Escalera, Begoña Gallardo, Salvador García, Víctor Fernández Salinas, Francisco Jesús Maya, Marta Reina, Israel Sánchez, Marta Soler, Joan Vidal, Luis Andrés Zambrana, Claudia Zavaleta de Sautu); the documentary made by José Luis Tirado and Manuel Pérez Vargas which records interviews with different participants; the video recording and the book of the poetry recital Paisajes de escombros coordinated by Isaías Griñolo and Antonio Orihuela (Juan Antonio Bermúdez, María Eloy-García, Antonio Orihuela, David Eloy Rodríguez, Eladio Orta, Isabel Pérez Montalbán, Jorge Riechmann); the video recording of the conferences and talks given by theorists, study group representatives and some of the artists already mentioned (Federico Aguilera, Manuel Delgado, Manuel Delgado Cabeza, Esteban de Manuel, David Harvey, Ramón Fernández Durán, Juliet Flower, Marina Garcés, Carles Guerra, Abel Lacalle, Lucy Lippard, Santiago López Petit, Dean MacCannell, José Manuel Naredo, Marta Pelegrín + Fernando Pérez/MEDIOMUNDO Arquitectos, Jorge Riechmann, Arantxa Rodríguez, José María Romero, Saskia Sassen, Eduardo Serrano, Pilar Vega); the materials, pasquinades, stickers, pamphlets and group bulletins (Agaden, Aljarable Habitable, Asamblea 15M Alcosa, Asociación Casa Pumarejo, Asociación Mesa de la Ría, Asociación Tarifa SÍ, Banco de Tiempo Aljarafe, Burla Negra, Liga de Inquilinos “La corriente”, ODS-Oficina de Derechos Sociales de Sevilla, Plataforma Ciudadana Refinería No, Plataforma Túmbala, Plataforma Valencina Habitable, Proceso de Comunidades Negras en Colombia-PCN, Red de Moneda Local “Zoquito”, Red de Moneda Social “Puma”).

PROGRAMME

Programme

Universidad Internacional de Andalucía
Monasterio Santa María de las Cuevas
C/ Américo Vespucio, 2 - Isla de la Cartuja, Sevilla

WEDNESDAY 12 DECEMBER 2012

16:00 h.
+ Presentation of On Capital and Territory III, by Mar Villaespesa and Joaquín Vázquez (BNV Producciones)
+ Presentation of wokshop ‘Unearthing Our Feet. Tackling the Crisis from Alternative Practices’, by Asociación Casa Pumarejo/GISAP/Red de Moneda Social "Puma"

+ Presentation of laboratory 'On Leviathan (Stopping the Train of History)', by Isaías Griñolo (coordinator), María Cañas, Niño de Elche, Manuel Prados Sánchez, Inmaculada Salinas

18:00 h.
‘Territory and Democracy’, by Saskia Sassen

19:00 h.
Debate

THURSDAY 13 DECEMBER 2012

17:00 h.
‘Urban Territory and Cyber-territories: Isomorphisms, Convergences and Hybridisations’, by Eduardo Serrano

18:00 h.
‘Spatial Practices, Everyday Pre-positions’, by Marta Pelegrín + Fernando Pérez/MEDIOMUNDO Arquitectos

19:00 h.
Debate

Centro de las Artes de Sevilla
C/ Torneo, 18

THURSDAY 13 DECEMBER 2012

11:00 h.
Presentation of communications

FRIDAY 14 DECEMBER 2012

11:00 h.
Presentation of communications

18:00 h.
'Value Is To Give When Necessary. Artistic Experiments in Exchange and Donation’, by Federico Guzmán

19:00 h.
'Interrupting the Meaning of the World', by Marina Garcés and Santiago López Petit

20:00 h.
Debate

20:30 h.
Opening of the exhibition On Capital and Territory

SATURDAY 15 DECEMBER 2012

12:00 h.
Projection of the film essay The Forgotten Space, directed by Allan Sekula and Nöel Burch, 2010, 112 min, original soundtrack in English, Dutch, Spanish, Korean, Indonesian and Chinese with Spanish subtitles. Presented by Carles Guerra

20:00 h.
Performance Niño de Elche