BANQUETE
international traveling exhibition

Palau de la Virreina, Barcelona (January/March 2003)
ZKM - Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (May/August 2003)
Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid (September/November 2003)

Concept and direction:
Karin Ohlenschlager / Luis Rico

Curators:
Ivan de la Nuez / Karin Ohlenschlager / Luis Rico / Peter Weibel


Humanity is made up of an irregular tapestry of relations involving six
thousand million individuals who are co-evolving within an ecosystem of
limited resources. The complexity of contemporary experience, and the
diversity of sensibilities and outlooks mingling within this tapestry,
together with the vertiginous process of transformation in which we are
immersed on a global scale, have generated countless tensions and
uncertainties. "Their comprehension requires us to overcome lineal and
monosectorial technical schemas to arrive at a totally different
hermeneutics if we wish to approach this new reality". (Jose Vidal Beneyto).

In this context, banquete has been conceived of as an exploratory and
open conversation between art, science, thought and society. A
conversation understood as a process in which information and values,
experiences, knowledge and meanings flow, mingle and act reciprocally;
in which they are revealed by means of a metabolic process that
synthesises and transforms the abstract ingredients and materials that
shape daily experience. […]

The project banquete formulates the analogy between metabolism and
communication as a productive mechanism that makes it possible to carry
out a critical, and also propositional analysis of the models and
instruments that govern flows of food and information; study the
possible extrapolation of dynamics, processes and structures from one
field to another, for the purpose of determining some of the symptoms -
tensions, dysfunctions, contradictions, interferences or abuses, among
others - and also the potentialities that characterise a global
metabolic process that includes materials, information and energy, as
well as people, symbols, ideas and emotions.

Likewise, banquete proposes to establish relations between different
metabolic scales that range from endosomatic processes in the spheres of
physics, biology and the cognitive sciences, to social, political,
economic and cultural dimensions, interpreted as a species of
exosomatic, collective metabolism.

Overall, the aim of banquete is to articulate a choral seismograph
capable of registering new transdisciplinary cartographies; explore and
develop a multidimensional and interdependent dialogical vision of
interconnected processes, and try out new ways of thinking and
perceiving the world.


Invited artists:

Marina Abramovic (Holland/Serbia)
Joseph Beuys (Germany)
Mark Boswell (USA)
Tania Bruguera (Cuba)
Maureen Connor (USA)
Daniel Crooks (Australia)
Douglas Davis (USA)
Juan Downey (Chile)
Peter Fend (USA)
Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz (USA)
Daniel Garcia Andujar (Spain)
Ramon Guardans (Spain) & Adolf Mathias (Germany) & Martin Schuttler
(Germany)
Jenny Holzer (USA)
Knowbotic Research (Switzerland)
Hilla Lulu Lin (Israel)
Gordon Matta-Clark (USA)
Ryoichi Majima (Japan)
Lisa May Post (Holland)
Nicos Navridis (Greece)
Nam June Paik (South Korea/USA) & Charlotte Moorman (USA)
Oliver Ressler (Austria)
Jill Scott (Australia)
Paul Sermon (Great Britain)
Jiri Suruvka (Czech Republic)
Minnette Vari (South Africa)
Liu Wei (China)
Peter Weibel (Austria)


Oliver Ressler (Austria) is part of the exhibition with the work
THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!, 38 min, 2002

This video records a banned march against the World Economic Forum that
took place in Salzburg in July 2001.
The central theme of this documentary is the suspension of a basic
democratic right, that of protest, and reflection on the physical and
structural violence exercised by state power, and which in this case
took the shape of a seven-hour police siege of around 900 people.
The video also alludes to media manipulation, the tendency to
criminalise any expression of dissidence whilst legitimising a
supranational economic and financial structure that, although not
instituted democratically, nevertheless exercises power of decision over
millions of people all over the world.
Video material from Indymedia Austria, Filmliga Linz, Offscreen-Offenes
Film Forum Salzburg, UTV Vienna and Oliver Ressler.

http://www.t0.or.at/democracy