Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti]

Expanded Violences is a project realized in the framework of Manifesta 8, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art.

IS VIOLENCE
THE ONLY MEANS TO CHANGE THIS
DEADLY WORLD?

Expanded  Violences

Throughout the past two years in Brumaria, we have been working on and over multifocal-terrorism art-war relations. A product of this has been a series of forays— Art and Terrorism, Iconoclasm-Iconolatry, and now Expanded Violences— which, by means of different formats—research projects, exhibition projects, artistic work, seminars and publications—have permitted us to affirm the amplitude of these topics and the conceptual, thematic, and discursive gaps that today persist in the art institution both in the Spanish region and in the world of global art.

We understand that we neither want nor are able to isolate contemporary art from the world in which it is produced, commercialized, or museumized, especially if we keep in mind the present characteristics of armed conflict and if we affirm that we live in a state of permanent war. Although in the past war (the institutionalized phase of violence) defined itself as a conflict among sovereign nation-states, given that in the last few decades this sovereign authority of the nation-state has been decaying in favour of the emergency of a supranational sovereignty, the nature and the conditions of both war and political violence in our present times have necessarily and considerably changed, leaving behind the memory of the defeated, the humiliated, the offended…the murdered. In our current environment war is a global phenomenon. We live in a state of ubiquitous, brutal, and permanent “civil war”: a new and monstrous state of exception.

Expanded Violences focuses its attention on a triangulation between violence as representation strategically administered by power, the operation by which mass media and the use of art form a critical vertex of this multiple dialectic. If it seems obvious that there exists interdependence between political and economic power and the strategic operations used in mass media, the role of art is not so clear in this context.

• Theodor W. Adorno & Max Horkheimer • Aeschylus • Giorgio Agamben • Louis Althusser • Anonymus (Deuteronomy) • Aristotle • Antonin Artaud • Graco Babeuf • Alain Badiou • Jean Baudrillard • Walter Benjamín • Ursula Biemann • Bertlolt Brecht • Pierre Bourdieu • Gustavo Bueno • Stokely Carmichael • Pedro Casaldáliga • Paul Celan • The Clash • Leonard Cohen • Alfredo Cramerotti • Noam Chomsky • Mike Davis • Guy Debord • Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari • Jacques Derrida • Terry Eagleton • Albert Einstein • Friedrich Engels • Euripides • Frantz Fanon • Michel Foucault • Sigmund Freud • Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi • Jean-Luc Godard • Antonio Gramsci • Peter Handke • G. W. F. Hegel • Jimi Hendrix • Eric Hobsbawm • Homer • Dolores Ibárruri • Peter Kropotkin • Jacques Lacan • Lao Tse • Sylvain Lazarus • Maurizio Lazzarato • Vladimir Ilyich Lenin • Robert Linhart • Lucretius • Rosa Luxemburg • Jean-François Lyotard • Malcolm X • Mao Zedong • Nicolò Machiavelli • Filippo Tommaso Marinetti • Karl Marx • Vladimir Mayakovsky • Mario Moretti • Muhammed • Jean Luc Nancy • Nawal El Saadawi • Antonio Negri • Friedrich Nietzsche • Anton Pannekoek • Cesare Pavese • Fernando Pessoa • Plato • Nicos Poulantzas • Khaled Ramadan • Jacques Rancière • Wilhelm Reich • RETORT • Los Reyes Católicos • Arthur Rimbaud • Maximilien Robespierre • Martha Rosler • Louis de Saint-Just • Saint Augustine • Saint Matthew • Saint Paul • Jean-Paul Sartre • Carl Schmitt • William Shakespeare • The Smiths • Sophocles • Susan Sontag • Baruch Spinoza • Hito Steyerl • Tacitus • Leon Trotsky • Tristan Tzara • Ramón María del Valle-Inclán • Víctor Hugo • Virgil • Paul Virilio • Paolo Virno • Oswald Wiener • Jean Ziegler • Slavoj Zizek • Joseba Zulaika •
With a foreword by Alejandro Arozamena, Darío Corbeira & Daniel Patrick Rodríguez
Brumaria works #1

– Double installation with moving images, sound and temperature.
– Two publications in English and Spanish.
– A seminar.