Making Worlds. Implication Against Participation

Audio of the session:

Santi Eraso directed the Center for Contemporary Culture Arteleku (San Sebastian), funded by the Provincial Council of Guipúzcoa. Arteleku was a pioneer in many ways: its very conception as a space for work and experimentation, not only of exhibition, as a space of transit and under construction more than as a static place with a fixed protocol; looking for with critical projects and initiatives that radically problematize the different shapes of life in common; gladly lending itself to be pierced by the digital disorder that confuses the established models of authorship, production, consumption, property and identity; minding the small, the micro, the manifold layers of processes, and thinking of participation as the real and affective base of a culture understood more as experience than as entertainment. In the last years, Santi Eraso has coordinated the (selected) proposal of Donostia for the European Cultural Capital in 2016, where the elements of Arteleku have cohabited with a most spectacular cultural model, not without tensions or contradictions. Santiago Eraso will explain his work as cultural mediator in the contrast of both experiences.

Marina Garcés thinks of only one philosophical and political problem: what is, and how can we make exist, a common world. A common world is nobody’s property, we are all, and everything is, implicated; we do not choose in a sovereign manner, it precedes and constitutes us; it is not even exclusively human, it also encompasses all that is sensitive. But it is a world where, nowadays, the hardest thing to say is “we” and where the logic of property has privatized not only goods and resources, but also our own relationship with reality. In that sense, the thought of Marina Garcés impel the experience of implication: discovering ourselves already intertwined and interdependent; sinking the distances that separate us and leting ourselves be affected by what is common; learning to take charge of what binds us to others and to the world in the most collective way possible and, thus, in the most transformative way possible.