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11/01/2020

We are nourished by parties, and from parties we live

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We are nourished by parties, and from parties we live

This January the LGBTI center in Barcelona is celebrating its first anniversary. For the occasion, in collaboration with Hamaca, we have commissioned screenings/films/projections that address the value of “the party” as a rite of irreversible transformation and cohesion from subversive and therapeutic perspectives.

“Frente a un arte cada vez más especializado como adorno de lo existente, un verdadero cambio social necesita prácticas culturales capaces de poner fin a la escasez y la austeridad de la cotidianidad, asumir la prodigalidad y el derroche, atacar las obligaciones.”

Henri Lefebvre, La vida cotidiana en el mundo moderno, 1968

“En una fiesta puede explosionar ese repertorio de deseos, fantasías y sueños a menudo adormecido en el fondo de nuestras subjetividades, y también se pueden generar nuevas ideas, valores y apetitos enfrentados a la racionalidad impuesta.”

Massimiliano Casu y Vanesa Viloria, en Diez ideas sobre el arte de la fiesta

We are nourished by parties, and from parties we live is a commissioned proposal of film screenings examining the value that parties have as a source of nourishment in our lives. Parties, celebrations of leisure, were ancestrally defined as a rite of irreversible cohesion, like a repetitive exception which establishes new pockets of contrast to the normalcy of the everyday while at the same time establishing connections, social norms and functions in the social fabric. Since ancient times they have served both as organizers of the social order (the state, the church, the academy) as well as radical disturbances to the status quo whose  interplay is an attempt to mesh the imaginary with reality; a kind of feedback loop where bodies, territories, subjective experiences and relationships are affected and transformed in irreversible ways and will never be the same again.

Understood in this way, parties serve as political spaces of transformation– as forces which go beyond discursive  language and penetrate the realms of the poetic, the bodily, the undefinable, and enable the construction of other sensitive worlds,  allow us to ask ourselves not only what we’re doing but also what we could make happen to our bodies, our appearances, our spaces, our politics, our memories, our feelings, what we are missing– A multitude of unrestrained proposals tapping into the communal imagination have been generated and given a home in Barcelona with the goal of contradicting the dissenting positions, abilities, origins, emotions, norms, aesthetics…

But parties today are not only organized to serve as projects of insurrection, but also as projects of survival. In the globalizing neoliberal project that we inhabit, especially in the context of big metropolitan cities like Barcelona– so many factors are exacerbated– including rivalry, competition, financial insecurity, and the sense of drowning in the continuous frustrating bind between promises of progress and being newly indebted to expenses that draw from our smaller and smaller savings. Also, our feelings of disconnection from the rest of the planet are normalized and we get used to a constant state of anxiety, we make ourselves build our identities through our work and our stress becomes chronic. In this state of crisis, parties become complementary — often predominant–  tools for many groups to acquire the resources which they need to live. Parties serve us in this way, as a tool, because for the social majority parties serve as a contrast and a mental and social escape from the distrustful, desperate and fearful way in which we relate to the world,  places for obscene unproductivity.

In a subjective evaluation of what gives us what we need to live, we could consider not only the labor practices through which we make money, but also all of the activities and exchanges by which we acquire non-economic richness for living together as diverse individuals who are nurtured,  responsible and constantly transforming. According to this imprecise calculation we are also fueled, we are also given what we need to live, what we eat, our shelters, our landscapes,  tenderness, conflict, our political projects, our desires, our care structures, our commitments… following this subversive and therapeutic take on parties: we are nourished by parties, and thanks to parties we live.

The audiovisual pieces which were projected draw from diverse ideas, aesthetics, observations and perspectives around parties as approaches to a dissenting insurrection.

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