Paz Rojo, within the framework OCUPACIONES / La Porta, invites us for a weekend to experience the question "what, why, who, where, what for, how we live the tension between individuation and the necessity of collectivity?” The scenario in which we place this question is in the relationship between the notions of "body, occupation and brand."
Body: we’d like to re-situate the body as a political challenge. We think that the sensible, the corporeal and unspeakable is the battlefield where to challenge our existence. This relationship with the sensible has to do with the implication of the realm of the corporeal in the sense of its thinkable, experienciable, liveable matter. To this end, we propose to experience the body as the very battlefield where the "somatic" prime on the "cognitive" where "creation" prime on the "creative" and where softness, empathy and dispersion prime over self-representation, self-management and self-control.
Occupation: the sphere of labour has become a vain search for employment, or the search for precarious ways to occupy ourselves with something (as we know, this is due to the socio-economic circumstances and policies that we currently live). These circumstances leave us without any structural guarantee (either there is not enough work for everybody; or it is very precarious; or when we have it, we do not know if what we do is to work or to have the free time that is given to us without having chosen for it). The question about the impossibility of distinguishing the use and value of time in between work-occupation-employment- from the sites, of unemployment and therefore invisibility, have become a condition of our existence; condition that we take as a problem to be reformulated in order to experience with other types of values different to the possibles ones with which we are accustomed.
In this sense and, taking the categories of employment and unemployment or having something to be occupied with or not; the challenge we propose is to ask: what are the conditions and tools to make these categories "unemployable"? How to leave them out of its usual signification and of any identification? We propose an "off game" or "out of-joint" that will allow us to experience, move with, desert from, and open the places of employment and occupation that usually represent us.
By addressing this question, we are certainly aware that we need a collective space to reappropriate the unemployable, though essential for life (body, time, space) its engagements and affections beyond what defines them in the market where they are located. To this end, we propose to “give a break” to the time, the use and value of what we are used to be occupied with and therefore to what usually represent us in this economy. We pretend to become a kind of "minority doing”, establishing specific practices, games and experiments in an "open" without identifiable employment, that may allow us to investigate what tools facilitate the creation of coagulated, uncertain, diffused, confused and useless areas in order to liberate the “common sense” of what, what for, to whom we work today.
Brand: "The brand is never a transparent element, like any other interface compresses a variable amount of heterogeneous production systems and, in each time decides how much information must be received from abroad. The brands, across the different constituent elements that compose it (logos, jingles, colours, smells, sounds, fonts, etc.) articulate a kind of space mark (brandspace) along with which circulate the objects and goods that the different companies try to sell. The subject-company also needs to build a space in the market since its very presence is already a source of value for the brand. The mark isolates, " (Jaron Rowan 2011).
In the first place and, to challenge what occupies our brands (or space marks), we will identify its areas of effort, fitness, obligation, culture and isolation. Secondly, we will move its comfort zones, putting them at work, injecting them of sensations rather than sensationalism. The big challenge will be to "involved the mark" in a sort of "open body operation." By making a sort of reflection (a bit bizarre nevertheless exciting), we’ll ask: is it possible to think ourselves from the production of twin brands? That is, can we think of the brand from the bond of indistinction and similarity? Could we think then a brand whose struggle is the fight for singularity, yet knowing that its primary condition is that it exists in plural? What does rehearsing WE means? What, who, what for WE is? From there, could we take up the space, with / in which we move, as a common place which belongs equally to everybody and each one of us? If so, how this space can be sustained and given by everybody and each one of us? What are the conditions that make possible the creation of the common, without a realizable plan, made or to be done but doing itself continuously?
Who: This call is absolutely open. And from that opening, the first condition will be that those that self-called are available in that "open". To experience the questions we want to address, is not necessary or desired, to be a specialist of (any) “movement”, but it is necessary to have a certain sensitivity to what moves us, in short, this open-call is addressed to those that want to experience their bodies in order to live.
What: we’d like to involve ourselves in a call that throws problems and try to create places through which to experience, what is the movement and the tonality of a “mark-space” verbalized in plural? Where and how does this experience leave our I-is (“eyes”, or sum of “I”) and those of the institutions, regulations and rules through which we are engaged with and, by which we let ourselves to be represented by? Which are their challenges?
How: This initiative is publicly released without any payment or remuneration. In that sense, it costs nothing (just your time, your desires and what you would like to do with them), nor need of any “motivation letter” as well. We’d rather like to invite you to come with your questions and with a comfortable out-fit to engage with them (needless sweatpants, or multicolour tights, nor to go barefoot -as the contemporary dancer type). Yet "bring the what (s) and what (s) for" to put into play as you wish, while making sure that you are comfortable (such any type clothing you consider, and objects that have accompanied, concepts, things you read, announcements, statements of newspapers and magazines, images, texts, references and questions that problematize you and that keep occupying and concerning you at the moment) in order to ask and share in common ...
If you want to come, please contact at: info@laportabcn.com
Looking forward!
Paz Rojo, OCUPACIONES / La Porta
