SummerLAB_Showcase 2011
4th Free Culture Encounter. Space for Information in Process
SummerLAB 2011. Photo: Noé Baranda
The dynamics of contemporary art have grown increasing more complex as they question, among many other aspects, the conventional methods for its documentation. And SummerLAB’s mandate is to examine and summarise these new ways of understanding art production and research.
SummerLAB can be viewed as a social and process-based living organism, as a territory where technology, science, art and nature converge; a place bringing together practitioners from a cross-section of different disciplines, countries and interests. A space defined by the absence of authorship, by non-linearity, by collaboration, by experimentation, by instinct, by a do-it-yourself meets do-it-with-others, by hacking, by mixing, by timelessness, by shared knowledge, by virtuality, by anarchism, by inclusion, by alchemy, by transparency, by horizontality.
For the duration of five days, performance, gender studies, free software, design, fabrication, recycling, electronics, social and institutional critique, visual and sound experimentation, geography, astronomy and biology, rub shoulders, mix it up, hybridise, blend and speak to these new forms of production in contemporary art.
While SummerLAB is organised within an institutional framework, it finds in its frontiers and limits the ideal growth medium for creation. Margins and periphery are diffused and here everything is interconnected, intertwined and intercommunicated. The results of this event are not finished museum objects, but instead the construction of critical, social and creative tools to change the paradigm of art and to experiment with new fields of creation and the transmission of knowledge.
The Anarchivo node, more than an external documentalist agent of events, wanted to be part of this immense performance, amalgamating ourselves in its rhizomatic rhythm, which produced traces of an infinity of dynamics and realities contributed by each participant. This exercise in documentation has no pretensions to freeze the memory of the event and reduce it to a video or image, it only offers fragmentary gazes which, by means of performativity and audience interaction, will gradually take on varied meanings, which in turn will activate readings and ways of thinking and inciting creation and proposing new forms of social-artistic exchange.
This show does no propose any kind of hierarchy, a premeditated parcours, a unique and linear reading; it is open to interpretations and connections. It is not a finished product but a space for information in process.
