Affection in Re-Existence
20 people
People with migrant and/or racialised backgrounds or experiences who are interested in reflecting on their life experiences; activists from different associative-collaborative backgrounds who wish to politicise affection; cross-border people and dissidents of desire, sexuality and identities; people seeking spaces of self-care and healing justice through art and (psycho) drama…
The level of interest in the programme content will be assessed above all else. Although the workshop is designed as a mixed, open space, priority will be given to non-EU migrants and racialised people.
Selected participants will receive a confirmation email on 18 March 2019.
Affection in Re-Existence is a project developed by the research group Situated Feminisms, associated with the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre and made up of researchers Elisa Fuenzalida and Jeannette Tineo.
Affection in Re-Existence constitutes an invitation to encounter the affective pathways that envelop migrant memory in Spain. This participatory and open workshop seeks to contextualise conversations and collective learning from an ethical, critical and situated perspective of black, cross-border and decolonial feminism. Its aim is to politicise the different paradoxes shrouding migrant and/or racialised affectivity, acknowledging re-existence as a daily strategy enabling space and time to be creatively inhabited and developed from the experience of transit, body movements and collective memory that knits together the here and there, according to the idiosyncrasies of living in Madrid.
The workshop’s methodological approach is from participatory research/action, employing elements of popular education and combining them with different tools: some start out from the theories and proposals aligned with the decolonisation of the self and the affective shift of social sciences; others stem from art and enable movement in the vague territory of the inside-outside. These politics of space, affective-physical geography and common colonial memory untangle re-existence, encompassing the multiple intersections between the public and the private. Thus, the aim is to question the Eurocentric values that demarcate emotional aspects as an opposite space of reason and, from this register, reveal the ‘Latin drama’, the tenderness, rage, that which is deemed sentimental, pain, cannibalism and stigmatised subjects in urgency, sweetness, and bitterness shrouding everyday dispossession: food, dance, music (bachata, salsa, huayno, cumbia, etc.) as moments of displacement, from what Enrique Dussel calls the European conquiro (‘I conquer’) ego.
Participants
Designed and conducted by:
Elisa Fuenzalida is a feminist migrant and student in the MA in Advanced Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Complutense University of Madrid. She coordinates the Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre’s Aníbal Quijano Chair with anthropologist Rita Segato.
Jeannette Tineo Durán has worked in the psychosocial field, and research and teaching in the Dominican Republic, the Caribbean and Latin America, and has professional experience in popular education, and anti-racist and decolonial feminism. She is currently conducting PhD research into Dominican diaspora in Madrid,
With the collaboration of:
Héctor Acuña/Frau Diamanda is a translator, writer, self-taught audiovisual artist, drag performer, independent curator, cultural infector and DJ who has recently finished the 2017–18 Programme of Independent Studies (PEI) at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona (MACBA).
Programa
The first two sessions aim to place the diverse nature of migrant, deterritorialised and racialised identifications through the practices of conversation and the construction of narratives.
The second block of sessions explores how the recognition of links and relations of interdependence are produced, and how they are addressed and cultivated through the joyful and melodramatic exploration of affective and activist migrant aesthetics, traversing the ‘migrant struggle’ through the soap opera, music, food, etc.
Session 5 is set up as a ‘talk show’ with guest Hector Acuña/Frau Diamanda, moving towards the (characteristic) rhetoric of the affective migrant and racialised fabrics in re-existence, and towards shared living.
Session 6 focuses on playing and reinventing and is set forth as a loom or collective weft, whereby participants map out their own experiences, making use of different tools and collectively laying out their memories and desires. This encounter is in the mould of a party, a commemoration of our co-existence in Madrid.