Humanity is made up of an irregular tapestry of relations involving six thousand million individuals who are co-evolving within an ecosystem of limited resources. The complexity of contemporary experience, and the diversity of sensibilities and outlooks mingling within this tapestry, together with the vertiginous process of transformation in which we are immersed on a global scale, have generated countless tensions and uncertainties. "Their comprehension requires us to overcome lineal and monosectorial technical schemas to arrive at a totally different hermeneutics if we wish to approach this new reality". (José Vidal Beneyto).
In this context, banquete has been conceived of as an exploratory and open conversation between art, science, thought and society. A conversation understood as a process in which information and values, experiences, knowledge and meanings flow, mingle and act reciprocally; in which they are revealed by means of a metabolic process that synthesises and transforms the abstract ingredients and materials that shape daily experience.
The project banquete formulates the analogy between metabolism and communication as a productive mechanism that makes it possible to carry out a critical, and also propositional analysis of the models and instruments that govern flows of food and information; study the possible extrapolation of dynamics, processes and structures from one field to another, for the purpose of determining some of the symptoms - tensions, dysfunctions, contradictions, interferences or abuses, among others - and also the potentialities that characterise a global metabolic process that includes materials, information and energy, as well as people, symbols, ideas and emotions.
Likewise, banquete proposes to establish relations between different metabolic scales that range from endosomatic processes in the spheres of physics, biology and the cognitive sciences, to social, political, economic and cultural dimensions, interpreted as a species of exosomatic, collective metabolism.
Overall, the aim of banquete is to articulate a choral seismograph capable of registering new transdisciplinary cartographies; explore and develop a multidimensional and interdependent dialogical vision of interconnected processes, and try out new ways of thinking and perceiving the world.
Invited artists:
Marina Abramovic (Holland/Serbia)
Joseph Beuys (Germany)
Mark Boswell (USA)
Tania Bruguera (Cuba)
Maureen Connor (USA)
Daniel Crooks (Australia)
Douglas Davis (USA)
Juan Downey (Chile)
Peter Fend (USA)
Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz (USA)
Daniel García Andújar (Spain)
Ramon Guardans (Spain) & Adolf Mathias (Germany) & Martin Schüttler (Germany)
Jenny Holzer (USA)
Knowbotic Research (Switzerland)
Hilla Lulu Lin (Israel)
Gordon Matta-Clark (USA)
Ryoichi Majima (Japan)
Lisa May Post (Holland)
Nicos Navridis (Greece)
Nam June Paik (South Korea/USA) & Charlotte Moorman (USA)
Oliver Ressler (Austria)
Jill Scott (Australia)
Paul Sermon (Great Britain)
Jiri Suruvka (Czech Republic)
Minnette Vari (South Africa)
Liu Wei (China)
Peter Weibel (Austria)
Oliver Ressler (Austria) is part of the exhibition with the work
THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!, 38 min, 2002
This video records a banned march against the World Economic Forum that took place in Salzburg in July 2001.
The central theme of this documentary is the suspension of a basic democratic right, that of protest, and reflection on the physical and structural violence exercised by state power, and which in this case took the shape of a seven-hour police siege of around 900 people.
The video also alludes to media manipulation, the tendency to criminalise any expression of dissidence whilst legitimising a supranational economic and financial structure that, although not instituted democratically, nevertheless exercises power of decision over millions of people all over the world.
Video material from Indymedia Austria, Filmliga Linz, Offscreen-Offenes Film Forum Salzburg, UTV Vienna and Oliver Ressler.
IMAGE:
Oliver Ressler, (Austria)
THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!, 2002
Vídeo monocanal, 38:00 min.
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