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 sixthousand million individuals who are co-evolving within an ecosystem oflimited resources. The complexity of contemporary experience, and thediversity of sensibilities and outlooks mingling within this tapestry,together with the vertiginous process of transformation in which we areimmersed on a global scale, have generated countless tensions anduncertainties. “Their comprehension requires us to overcome lineal andmonosectorial technical schemas to arrive at a totally differenthermeneutics if we wish to approach this new reality”. (Jose Vidal Beneyto).

In this context, banquete has been conceived of as an exploratory andopen conversation between art, science, thought and society. Aconversation 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 thatsynthesises and transforms the abstract ingredients and materials thatshape daily experience. […]

The project banquete formulates the analogy between metabolism andcommunication as a productive mechanism that makes it possible to carryout a critical, and also propositional analysis of the models andinstruments that govern flows of food and information; study thepossible extrapolation of dynamics, processes and structures from onefield to another, for the purpose of determining some of the symptoms -tensions, dysfunctions, contradictions, interferences or abuses, amongothers – and also the potentialities that characterise a globalmetabolic process that includes materials, information and energy, aswell as people, symbols, ideas and emotions.

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

Overall, the aim of banquete is to articulate a choral seismographcapable of registering new transdisciplinary cartographies; explore anddevelop a multidimensional and interdependent dialogical vision ofinterconnected processes, and try out new ways of thinking andperceiving 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)

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