LUIS GUERRA
Gestural Philosophy
Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, Austria.
2022 - 2023
The Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2022-23 at the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen explores various relevant issues for today, without directly addressing current events. A loose thematic thread that can be attributed to all the projects is the examination of the tension between the private and the public. For example, in the work of the pedagogue Fernand Deligny, whose practice Luis Guerra proposes to read as a process of artistic knowledge production, as “gestural philosophy”; in Bettina Knaup’s research on “common wastes,” which examines residencies, these art institutions of the “semi-private,” and waste infrastructures (such as landfills or recycling plants) in terms of relationships and processes of exchange; in Alice Sarmiento’s exploration of online memes in social media in the Philippines after the outbreak of COVID-19 – in a country where the concept of “public” has no spatial realization; or in Endi Tupja’s artistic investigation of bathroom ecologies associated with menstruation in communist Albania.
My project, Gestural Philosophy, focused on the work of the French pedagogue Fernand Deligny (1913–1996). Deligny’s work has been approached from three disciplinary areas in France and abroad: philosophy, pedagogy, and social work. In each of them, art in its various manifestations has only been considered a tool for exploration and representation, but not as the direct means of research. My research aims to develop a methodological framework grounded in practice and the material conditions that sustain and characterize Deligny’s archive, thereby exposing and unfolding the essential features of his practice as a procedure of artistic knowledge.
Deligny’s language over the years was sufficiently plastic, both in its fragmentation and elusiveness, to materialize in novels, poems, theoretical essays, letters, drawings, films, actions, and meetings. It seems to me that Deligny’s entire project embodies the state of the undomiciled in the sense of a practice based on a constant movement of avoidance.
Deligny avoids the norms we usually presuppose to give a form to something. In his view, we must start from an attitude of abandonment, which is then prolonged by promoting non-disciplinary solidarities. In his case, this means abandoning the university, then Armentières, and then La Borde, by running away, by turning away, by drifting. This will mark his gestural philosophy.
A gestural philosophy is brought about through minor gestures, becoming present through different materials; it happens in the act of forming a procedure that avoids any fixation.
1.
Lectures 2022-23
21.10.2022
https://www.buchsenhausen.at/en/event/start-up-lectures-2022-23/
2.
Building Spaces for Solidary Encounters: Bodies, Technologies and Performativity
Luis GUERRA (Fellow) in conversation with Citlali HERNÁNDEZ (visual artist and designer).
In Building Spaces for Solidary Encounters: Bodies, Technologies and Performativity, Citlali HERNÁNDEZ will present her artistic research, particularly her latest work produced during her research residency at Hangar Barcelona. After the presentation, Luis GUERRA and Hernández will discuss topics related to both Hernández’s practice and the conceptual framework of Guerra’s Gestural Philosophy.
At the center of the event will be an exploration of questions that cultural practitioners face in a world disrupted by industrial technologies. How can we find ways and means to interrupt the resulting disruption of the bodily experience? Together, we will explore the potential of art practices to create spaces for solidarity beyond the hegemonic politics of perpetual emergency. Perhaps it is time to build epistemologies of collaboration beyond and “against crisis epistemology” (Whyte, 2021: 84)?
Citlali Hernández (1986, Mexico City) is an artist who explores how social and technological codes are inscribed in the way the body inhabits itself within the framework of electronic and digital arts. From a transdisciplinary perspective, she seeks to experience the materialities of performance and its entanglements with wires, pixels, and circuits, thinking of the body as a field of potentialities.
Citlali Hernández is working on her doctoral thesis at BAU Design and Arts University Center, Barcelona, Spain, with the topic Body, Technology and Performativity: The Body in the Practices of New Media Art. She is also a University-level teacher of product design, digital manufacturing, and applied interaction issues. She is an active collaborator at Matics Barcelona (Digital Art Association) and an artist-in-residence, alongside Núria Nia, at Hangar.org, working on the project Cuerpo Satelital, supported by the Artistic Research Grant Fundación Banco Sabadell-Hangar.
https://www.turbulente.net/
3.
Paradoxes of the Apparatus
Seminar with Mika ELO (professor of artistic research) and Luis GUERRA (Fellow)
The two-day seminar, "Paradoxes of the Apparatus," is part of Luis Guerra’s Gestural Philosophy research and explicitly engages with the complex relational status between artistic research and scientific public debate. It will also address the condition of the arts as sensible knowledge holder and the openness of their materialities in contemporary societies:
“In general terms, we can say that ‘art’ is a name for processes and articulations that take their material-discursive embeddedness seriously and commit themselves to developing a heightened sensitivity towards their own constraints and degrees of freedom within them. Artistic work, in other words, has tensional relation to presentation, since presentation itself is the medium through which the work proceeds and unfolds, and this requires appropriate ‘touch’. This ‘touch’ or sensitivity (which has physical, ideational and social aspects to it) cannot be reduced to a technical skill. It involves both epistemic impetus and aesthetic intensity, it is marked by a ‘pathic moment’, which means that it touches upon the limits of knowability.” (Elo, 2021: 23)
Paradoxes of the Apparatus consists of a two-day seminar (28 March and 29 March) of 2-3 hours per day. On the first day, Luis Guerra and his guest, Mika Elo, will introduce the conceptual tools and frameworks of the seminar. The second day proceeds with an in-depth discussion of the topic, and participants are invited to share their related ideas, questions, and writings. The seminar is open to academics, students, theoreticians, artists, activists, and the general public interested in artistic research, curatorial studies, performativity, technology, and philosophy.
DATES:
28 March 2023, 18.00 – 21.00
29 March 2023, 9.30 – 12.00
Mika Elo is a Professor of artistic research at the University of the Arts Helsinki. His research interests include photographic media theory, philosophical media theory, and epistemology of creative research. He participates in these discussions as curator, visual artist, and researcher. In 2018–2019, he led the Research Pavilion #3 project, which was realized in Helsinki and Venice within the context of the 58th Venice Biennale. From 2009 to 2011, he worked on the research project Figures of Touch. From 2012 to 2013, he co-curated the Finnish exhibition "Falling Trees" at the 55th Venice Biennale. Currently, he is the Principal Investigator of one of the research projects in the consortium Post-digital Epistemologies of the Photographic Image. He has also been a member of the editorial boards of RUUKKU (2012– ), tiede&edistys (2010–2020), and JAR (2010–2019). His most recent curatorial work was the exhibition "Paradoxes of Photography" (2022) at the Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki.
4. FAULTS AND BRIDGES
Prospecting Paths to Surmount Formative Antinomies of the Present
An exhibition of the Büchsenhausen Fellowship Program for Art and Theory 2022–23 | curated by Andrei Siclodi | with:
Bettina Knaup with contributions by Isabel Peterhans and Benjamin Zanon
Alice Sarmiento with Adam David and Josel Nicolas, with contributions by Mac Arboleda and Khalil Verzosa
The participants of the Fellowship Program 2022-23 present works and projects developed in Büchsenhausen that, with the involvement of other artists and experts, point to possible ways of understanding and surmounting formative antinomies of the present. The contributions address gestural performativity for interpreting the world, monumentality and memetic communication in dictatorial regime contexts and beyond, waste as a common good, as well as capitalist ‘cultural heritage’, and specific historical and geographical spaces by connecting political oppression and trauma with menstrual care.
My work for the exhibition is titled:
La trace, le geste et la mémoire. Pieces of a gestural philosophy
It consists of a small number of traced gestural memories that will participate in a future book on gestural philosophy. They have been traced both in the place and through my trips, after conversations, or during hours of contemplative practice within the studio. I will present a series of drawings forming a mind map of the research at the exhibition. They are traces of a path in progress. Here you can find some images and texts of the process and exhibition: