In the exhibition La tempestad, the Asturian artist Avelino Sala confronts us with the violent and unpleasant reality of a world characterised by threat and fragility. The hyper-surveillance structures of a control society that seeks to monitor and programme human behaviour through the constant display of our images and an apocalyptic narrative of fear contrast in this exhibition with the word as a space for utopian construction.
Avelino’s references to literature and Lacanian psychoanalysis are present in this exhibition through works such as The Mirror Stage, Brave New World and Archaeological Museum of Our Time. The writer and psychoanalyst Alicia Valdés will lead a literary tour designed to show how these dark clouds are formed, with the aim of facilitating writing in the midst of the storm.
Session 1 – Particles in Suspension: How Does a Storm Take Shape? – Wednesday 4 November.
This first session will explore the various critical theoretical frameworks that analyse how the present has become a space-time corner characterised by surveillance, terror, violence and destruction.
Session 2 – Every ruin has something of a temple about it: the construction of the self in a fractured world – Wednesday 11 November.
Taking as our starting point the quotation from María Zambrano referred to in the piece Archaeological Museum of Our Time, we shall explore psychoanalysis. What are the mechanisms that construct and sustain a world-system against which so much criticism is levelled? What does a system such as neoliberal capitalism offer—and to whom? Through a psychoanalytic critique, we will analyse the way in which capitalism offers its own construction of the Self.
Session 3 – Stepping Away from the Storm: Is There Such a Thing as Utopian Artistic Creation? – Wednesday 18 November.
There is a clear trend towards artistic narratives linked to end-of-the-world stories and the cancellation of the future. Many of these narratives are built upon the theoretical frameworks analysed in our first session. This association between disaster, sadness, desolation and creation is a recurring theme in the Northern tradition. Is there scope for a different kind of literary creation?
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Course fee: 50 euros
Time: 6.00 pm to 7.30 pm
