LUIS GUERRA

SEMINARI GRAMSCI

(Please scroll down to view the Spanish version)

 

​Seminari Gramsci is a processual work, a project based on the oral narration of an event which occurred previously: the delivery of a seminar on Gramsci by the Chilean Philosopher Pablo Oyarzún in the 1980s, during Chile's military dictatorship (1973-1989). On this basis, the project functions as a re-enactment of an event, perhaps trivial in factual terms, yet charged with symbolic and political significance in this historical context.

In the work presented at La Capella, what is merely an oral piece of information, bearing testimony to an apparently ahistorical event -that is to say, which occurred without a trace of an event in history-, becomes a space for reconstructing a scene for the present-day reality that is ours and is not far from the political, economic and social circumstances in which the seminar took place. In this regard, SEMINARI GRAMSCI also meets the urgent need to reconnect culture, analysis, debate, and reflection in a period characterised by instability and crisis.

Our time appears not as far in its political, economic, and social conditions from the one in which the “original” event of the Seminar took place. The situation from which the first Seminar was born in Chile has some coincidences with the current situation in Europe. The shock doctrine of the 80s was the tool through which South American societies were molded, changed, and extorted. Political persecution, torture, imprisonment, and highly socialized debts were the ways of controlling the population. Today we are witnessing again a shock doctrine being implemented by the Troika, not only through the restrictive economic decisions imposed against the Southern European countries, but also by a massive militarization of the police and the overwhelming violence against protests and the right of assembly. 

As claimed by the artist Carlos Altamirano*, just like in Chile's dictatorship period, today and in the throes of the economic-political crisis in Europe, it seems necessary and urgent for the art space to "lend" its space to the political realm to invent a means of political expression without talking about politics. Hence, creating a space of allegory in the words of Benjamin, and a space of oral and folkloric production in the words of Gramsci. A space in which the political split is formed in the very making of the cultural and in the very fabric of common sense.
The work is the actual reproduction of the seminar and, in turn, the exhibition of its historical context. It is a conceptual event that is a tangible manifestation of Gramsci's very discourse.
On this occasion, the seminar is reinstated in the public space, with a re-institutional operating mode, facilitating its reflective and critical deployment. In this manner, the exhibition space, without losing its aesthetic condition, changes from a space of/for intellectual production to a "factory of ideas". What is presented at La Capella, or once it is used, is a social machinery of the production of orality, craftsmanship, and dissidence.
 



Seminario Gramsci has been made possible thanks to the kind collaboration of:
Pablo Oyarzún, Philosopher (Chile)

Valentín Roma, Curator and thinker (Spain)

Marcelo Expósito, artist (Spain)

Andrea Soto, Philosopher (Chile)

Antonio Gómez, Philosopher (Spain)

Francesco Salvini, activist (Italy)

Pamela Desjardins, curator (Argentina)

Verónica Lahitte, artist (Argentina)

Lucia Egaña Rojas, artist (Chile)

Valentina Montero, theoritician (Chile)

Adriana Peláez, artist (Colombia)

Juan Martín Solesio, activist (Argentina)

Christelle Faucoulanche, filmmaker (France)

 

Special thanks to Soledad Gutierrez, Alex Brahim, Joan Morey, and all the people working at La Capella.