Discipline Launch and Professional Development Series: Ensayos Workshops

with Christy Gast and Camila Marambio

31 August, 2019

Please join us on Saturday, 31st August 2019 for an afternoon of making and talking to celebrate the launch of Discipline's fifth volume, a joint issue with the periodical Más allá del fin, published by the feminist research collective Ensayos.

12:30–2:00pm
Felting/Feeling, a wool felting workshop led by
Christy Gast

Open process-ing (making and talking): Wet felting of wool is a tactile process during which the animal fibres must be shocked, massaged, and submerged in hot and cold water repeatedly. Wool dyed with foraged, plant-derived colours will be shocked and bound into a subtle spectrum. What is shocking? Why does visibility matter?

Christy Gast is an artist whose work across media stems from extensive research and site visits to places she thinks of as ‘contested landscapes’. She is interested in places where there is evidence of conflict in human desires, which she traces, translates, or mirrors through her art practice.

2:30–4:00pm
Generative Writing, a poethical writing workshop led by
Camila Marambio

Inspired by the dramaturgical exercises of María Irene Fornés, the scholarly work of Nina Lykke, and the poems of Clara Brack, in this workshop we will tap into the potency of automatic writing and the subconscious. Bring your writer's block, a creative question, a writing task, a problem or a question to explore its language and what it wants.

Camila Marambio is a curator, founder of the nomadic collective research program Ensayos, and co-director of the web series DISTANCIA. She is co-author of the books Slow Down Fast, A Toda Raja with Cecilia Vicuña (Errant Bodies Press, 2019 ) and Sandcastles: Cancerous Bodies and their Necro/Powers with Nina Lykke (forthcoming 2020).

4:30pm
¡Ayayay! (From Eye to I to Ay!): Reflexive Translations
and Video Bodies in Downey’s Videos and Beyond by Carla Macchiavello

‘I wish to eroticise politics’, said Juan Downey in one of his notebooks when working on one of his best-known series of video works, Video Trans Americas (1973–79). Eroticism was here understood as a larger human project of survival, needing inter-species, human-machine collaborations. Feedback would meet eros, the thinking I/eye would meet the feeling body/¡ay!, looping desire, longing, bodies, memories … Downey’s works have been analysed as part of larger North American networks that created feedback loops between art and anthropology (as both were working with audiovisual technologies and reflexivity), art and television/agency of media, art and science. But the connections between politics and eroticism have been largely downplayed by scholars, as have been other networks of peripheral collaborations, translating desire across cultures and bodies, cannibalising received histories. From his early works with machines and perception to his late works in which the body beats to the sound of political dissent and indigenous drums, translating and transferring languages and pulsations, another perhaps erotic map of video networks might be traced.

Carla Macchiavello is an art historian specialising in Latin American contemporary art, performance, and video, who writes about the relations between art, politics, and performative practices. She is Assistant Professor in Art History at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY.

5:30pm
Discipline, Más allá del fin Launch!

	This program is supported by the Creative Sparks Fund. The Creative Sparks Fund is a partnership between the Queensland Government and Brisbane City Council to support local arts and culture in Brisbane.