Documenta 14 Daniel García Andújar (b. 1966, Almoradi, Spain) [caption id="attachment_2535" align="aligncenter" width="605"] Daniel García Andújar
(geb. 1966, Almoradi, Spanien)
The Disasters of War – Trojan Horse (2017)
Installation mit verschiedenen Materialien
Maße variabel[/caption] The Disasters of War, Metics Akademia (2017) Mixed-media installation Dimensions variable EMST—National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens The Disasters of War/Trojan Horse (2017) Mixed-media installation Dimensions variable Neue Neue Galerie (Neue Hauptpost), Kassel Burning the Canon Nordstadt Park Kassel June 23 Nordstadt Park 23rd June, 2017 From 20:00 (burning 23h aprox.) The Trojan Horse sculpture has been conceived as anti-monument reflecting on the “night games of war” (Reichs Veterans Day, Kassel, June 4 1939) developed in Germany during the Nazi period. The sculpture has been created by the artist with the aid of a software working with an aleatory combination of body types and then materially constructed by Taller Manolo Martín, a team of traditional craftsmen who produce Valencia’s Fallas puppets in Spain to be burned. Following this ritual, the sculpture will also be burn during the night of Saint John (also known as Jani, Adonia, Midsommar, Ivan Kupala Day, Juhannus Mittumari, etc.) as part of a pagan celebration aimed at letting go of what is no longer needed and saving what has to remain. Open Fire Party with: Daniel G. Andújar Manolo Martín Crier/performance by Daniel Cremer based in a text from María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco (Burn the canon?) Dolçaines by Cristina Martí Morell & Francesc Xavier Richart Peris Percussion by Pablo Lluis Llorca Pyrotechnics and fire by Fire, Ice and Magic Production by Carlota Gómez & Jorgina Stamogianni Curated by Paul B. Preciado The Disasters of War/Trojan Horse (2017) The Disasters of the War, Trojan Horse is a series of 82 “artifacts” constituting the second part of a project that started in Athens. The project itself travels hidden inside of a Trojan horse. These series evoke 82 engravings created by Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746-1828) between 1810 and 1820 secretly criticizing the violence deployed against the population during the wars between the Napoleonian Empire and Spain. Bringing Goya to the 3-D printer era, the project reflects on the politics of war, but also on the way war can continue through means of economic, cultural, and visual domination. Many wars are thus narrated here, in an attempt to resist its many forms of violence and explore strategies of visual and performative resistance. The project unfolds in different formats: an installation, a workshop, a performance, and a public action.

34 EXERCISES OF FREEDOM September 14­–24, 2016 at Parko Eleftherias Athens Municipality Arts Center You are invited to be part of the Parliament of Bodies documenta 14 public program, hosted in the Athens Municipality Arts Center at Parko Eleftherias in September 2016. What will happen here during ten days of programming is neither a conference nor an exhibition. We have avoided conventional museological names that establish distinctions between talk and performance, theory and action, criticism and art. Instead, we invited forty-five participants to “exercise freedom” within the building, which, not long ago, served as the headquarters of the military police during the dictatorship years. We understand freedom, with Foucault, as neither an individual property nor a natural right, but rather as a practice. We drift in history. There is a space. There are some bodies. There are some voices. But what does it mean to be together, here, now? What can be done? Who and what are made visible? Whose voices can be heard and which remain silent? How can the public sphere be reorganized? In the Parliament of Bodies, you will find neither individual chairs within the building nor a fixed architecture. We avoid positioning the audience as aesthetic visitors or neoliberal consumers. We also reject the democratic fiction of the semicircular amphitheater. We claim—with Oskar Hansen—the political potential of the “open form.” Andreas Angelidakis’s soft architecture consisting of sixty-eight blocks of ruins (the ruins of a democratic parliament?) can be assembled and re-arranged in endless ways, creating multiple and transient architectures for the Parliament of Bodies. You are invited to actively construct this political theater every day, interrogating location, hierarchy, visibility, scale… The 34 Exercises of Freedom aim to write a queer anticolonial symphony of Europe from the 1960s, scripting dialogue and giving visibility to dissident, heterogeneous, and minor narratives. We start by bringing together the radical left tradition with the anti-colonial fight for sovereignty of indigenous movements within Europe. The voice of Antonio Negri­­—one of the founders of the Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) group in 1969 and member of Autonomia Operaia in Italy—meets the voice of Niillas Somby—the political rights activist fighting for Sámi sovereignty in the north of Norway. Both were accused of different forms of terrorism during the 1970s. Sidestepping the established opposition of dictatorship and democracy, we try to understand the failures of transitioning to democracy within neoliberal regimes, not only in the case of Greece but also in Spain, Argentina, or Chile: how freedom was misunderstood as the free market. Whereas the 1980s are often portrayed as a time of decline for social emancipation movements, one that heralded the arrival of a new democratic consensus within capitalism—replacing ideological opposition with economic growth—anticolonial, feminist, queer, and anti-AIDS fights started to point out the cracks within western hegemonic discourse. Might it be possible to think the Greek notion of eleftheria (freedom) against the capitalist notion of freedom? Progressively during this ten-day dialogue we aim to introduce contemporary languages of resistance, from the Kurdish revolution in Rojava to the queer, transgender, sex-workers’, and migrant voices in Turkey, Greece, Mexico, or Brazil, from contemporary indigenous fights for restitution to new political and artistic practices dedicated to invent new forms of affect, knowledge, and political subjectivity, such as ecosex, queer-indigenism, and radical performativity. Together they draw a different political and poetic map of Europe than the one designed by the European Union. Participants: Adespotes Skiles, AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts), Andreas Angelidakis, Anna Apostolelli, Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI), Hawzhin Azeez, Angela Brouskou, Rüzgâr Buşki, Clémentine Deliss, Linnea Dick, Maria F. Dolores, Theatro Domatiou, Bonita Ely, Panayotis Evangelidis, Daniel García Andújar, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Stathis Gourgouris, Irena Haiduk, Jack Halberstam, Candice Hopkins, Regina José Galindo, Chief Robert Joseph, Nelli Kampouri, Vangelis Karamanolakis, Kostis Karpozilos, Kostis Kornetis, Sevval Kılıç, Katerina Labrinou, Quinn Latimer, Prasini Lesvia, Ana Longoni, MiniMaximum ImproVision, Naeem Mohaiemen, Antonio Negri, Gizem Oruç, Neni Panourgía, Anna Papaeti, Jørgen Flindt Pedersen, Paul B. Preciado, Judith Revel, Tasos Sakellaropoulos, Georgia Sagri, Niillas Somby, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Erik Stephensen, Adam Szymczyk, Diana Taylor, Prodromos Tsinikoris, Margarita Tsomou, Eirini Vakalopoulou, Ioanna Vogli, Tina Voreadi, Pantelis Voulgaris, and Sergio Zevallos   *** DEMOS is a space that materially and formally references two extremes of a spectrum that have been constitutive for the construction of Athens. On the one end of the spectrum are the ancient stone steps on the hill Pnyx, a modular typology and meeting place that can be said to have initiated the formation of democracy. On the other end you might find the modernist reinforced concrete frame, an architectural module used to democratize the way Athens was built. The steps on the Pnyx, along with most ancient Greek architecture, were borrowed by the world to form a global typology of spaces of authority such as parliaments, libraries, and courthouses. The reinforced concrete frame, which Greece borrowed from a modernized Europe, represents the anarchic, unauthorized construction that grew to define the Athens we witness today. While the building inhabited by documenta 14 housed the military police headquarters during the reign of the junta, the building behind it was used as a detention and torture facility. Currently it houses the Museum of Anti-dictatorial and Democratic Resistance, which is operated by the Association of Imprisoned and Exiled Resistance Fighters (1967–1974). The building allocated to documenta 14 has been used in recent years as an art venue and public gallery run by the Municipality of Athens. The building is treated as a historical artifact: as the site where democracy reached its lowest point in contemporary Greek history. As the DEMOS modules, inhabited by the Parliament of Bodies, negotiate the parameters of the Public Programs, the building launches into an investigative renovation of its own history. The practical demands of the program, such as the sourcing of natural light and technical repairs to the building, become part of an archaeological process, as the layers of exhibition architecture are peeled away to uncover past identities of the space. DEMOS creates a space as a programmable device with which to negotiate the relation between stage and audience, between performer and participant, between democracy and freedom. Each variation will be a demo for the Parliament of Bodies. Each demo will be “demolished” to make way for the next DEMOS. As the Public Program of d14 unfolds over time, the modules gradually form a language, each variation of the space a new definition of demos (Δήμος). —Andreas Angelidakis   *** 34 EXERCISES OF FREEDOM Program, September 14–24, 2016   Wednesday September 14 (7–11 pm) Introduction by Adam Szymczyk, artistic director, documenta14 Paul B. Preciado, curator of Public Programs, documenta 14 Andreas Angelidakis, architect/artist DEMOCRACY IS NOT FREEDOM. FREEDOM IS A PRACTICE Exercises: #1. Chief Robert Joseph, hereditary chief of the Gwawaenuk First Nation, ambassador for Reconciliation Canada, and a member of the Assembly of First Nations Elders Council, and Linnea Dick, writer, painter, and ceremonialist of Kawakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a and Tsimshian heritage #2. Antonio Negri, political theorist and philosopher #3. Niillas Somby, Sámi political rights activist, journalist, videographer, and photographer #4. Educación cívica / Civic Education Sergio Zevallos, artist   Thursday September 15 (7–11 pm) DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS… INTO NEOLIBERALISM Exercises: #5. Freedom as Market Value. Freedom as Practice of Resistance Judith Revel, philosophy professor, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and member of the scientific committee of the Centre Michel Foucault #6. Memory under Construction: Towards a Public Memory of Torture in Greece Kostis Kornetis, UC3M CONEX-Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of History, Carlos III University, Madrid #7. Your Neighbor’s Son: The Making of a Torturer, Jørgen Flindt Pedersen and Erik Stephensen, Denmark, 1981, 52 min Film screening #8. Soundscapes of Detention: Music and Torture under the Junta (1967–74) Anna Papaeti, independent researcher and musicologist #9. Between Terror and Revelry. Collective Strategies of Resistance during Dictatorships in Argentina and Brazil Ana Longoni, writer, curator, and professor of Art History, Universidad de Buenos Aires #10. DJ set Lies van Born, DJ   Friday September 16 (5:45–11 pm) Εxercises: #11. Torture and Freedom Tour of Athens (5:45–8:45 pm) Collective walk through the city of Athens exploring the historical traces of oppression, violence, and the quest for freedom during the military dictatorship of 1967–74 Tour in Greek Starting point: 5:45 pm at Polytechnion by the Tositsa Street entrance Ending point: Parko Eleftherias Τhe Greek tour is conducted by Vangelis Karamanolakis (historian, University of Athens) and Tasos Sakellaropoulos (historian, head of the Historical Archives, Benaki Museum, Athens) Tour in English Starting point: 6:15 pm at Polytechnion by the Tositsa Street entrance Ending point: Parko Eleftherias The English tour is conducted by Kostis Karpozilos (historian, director of the Contemporary Social History Archives–ASKI, Athens) and Katerina Labrinou (historian, Panteion University, Athens) Meanwhile at the Athens Municipality Art Center, Parko Eleftherias: #12. The Chronicle of the Dictatorship (1967–74), Pantelis Voulgaris, Greece, 37 min Film screening Εpitaph for Democracy (9:30–11 pm) #13. Epitafios II Angela Brouskou – Theatro Domatiou, theater group and MiniMaximum ImproVision, improvisational group of musicians   Saturday September 17 (7 pm)–Sunday, September 18 (10 pm) ARCHITECTURES OF TERROR, VOICES OF RESISTANCE Exercises: #14. Ojo de gusano: Don’t Look Down Regina José Galindo, artist #15. Chronotopes / Dystopic Geometries / Terrifying Geographies Neni Panourgia, anthropologist, visiting associate professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research, New York #16. Lingua Tertii Imperii Daniel García Andújar, artist #17. Red Star, Crescent Moon / after Sohail Daulatzai Naeem Mohaiemen, artist #18. This is not the Place. Four Visits to Villa Grimaldi: A Chilean Center for Torture and Detention  Diana Taylor, professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University #19. Attempt. Come Georgia Sagri, artist Note: Visitors can bring along sleeping bags, comfortable clothes, food, and water and may stay in the space for the twenty-four-hour duration of the piece. Smoking is not permitted. A public discussion with Georgia Sagri will follow the completion of the performance on Sunday night.   Tuesday September 20 (7–11 pm) SILENCE AND MASKS South as a State of Mind #7 [documenta 14 #2] Exercises: #20. Transgressive Listening Stathis Gourgouris, professor at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York #21. Outlawed Social Life Candice Hopkins, citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation, is an independent curator, writer, and curatorial advisor for documenta 14 based in Albuquerque, New Mexico #22. I Owe You Everything Clémentine Deliss, writer and curator, currently curating the Dilijan Art Initiative in Armenia. First act of giving in the series I Owe You Everything, in the presence of Chief Robert Joseph and Linnea Dick I Owe You Everything is a project that chooses and follows a series of contemporary thinkers, poets, and activists who are invited to construct a public “act of giving,” a critical and poetic ritual, in which they give “everything” to the Parliament of Bodies of documenta 14. The acts of giving explore different cultural and political economies such as debt, gift, potlatch, revenge, retribution, promise...   Wednesday September 21 (5–7 pm) STATE VIOLENCE / DOMESTIC VIOLENCE Exercise: #23. Interior Effects as an Outcome of War Workshop with Bonita Ely, artist You are invited to join artist Bonita Ely in a workshop to discuss the ongoing, inter-generational effects of undiagnosed, untreated posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffered by family members of returned soldiers. During the workshop, Ely shares her family’s experiences following her father’s return home after the Second World War. The artist has made these often tragic effects of undiagnosed PTSD the focus of her artistic work. Open to up to 20 participants, register at: program@documenta.de.   Thursday September 22 (7–10 pm) THE VIRAL 1980S: DEMOCRACY, NEOLIBERALISM, AIDS Exercise: #24. They Glow in the Dark, Panayotis Evangelidis, Greece, 2013, 69 min, Film screening and discussion with director Panayotis Evangelidis   Friday September 23 (7–11 pm) POST-PORN ACTIVISM AND ECOSEXUAL FREEDOM Exercises: #25. An Evening with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens and Wet Dreams Water Ritual Annie Sprinkle, activist, artist, and educator and Beth Stephens, ecosexual performance artist, filmmaker, activist, educator, founding director of the E.A.R.T.H. Lab and professor of Art, University of California, Santa Cruz. Together they authored the Ecosex Manifesto. Note: Please bring some water from your home or town/city for the water ritual. Wear the colors of water; aqua, blue, and black. Be costumed, naked, painted, adorned, or as you like. #26. The Waltz of the Dirty Streets Adespotes Skiles, self-organized music and theater collective   Saturday September 24 (7–11 pm) “APARTIDE” TRANSFEMINIST QUEER NIGHT Exercises: Organized in collaboration with AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts) #27. Decolonizing Memory: Vita Futurities in the Americas Macarena Gómez-Barris, chair of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, New York #28. Rojava’s Feminist Revolution Hawzhin Azeez, political theorist and activist, Kurd from south Kurdistan (northern Iraq) #29. Trans*: Bodies and Power in the Age of Transgenderism Jack Halberstam, visiting professor of English and Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University, New York #30. #Direnayol (#Resistayol), documentary by Rüzgâr Buşki, Turkey, 2016, 60 min Film premiere #31.Voices of Trans and Queer Politics in the Mediterranean with: Rüzgâr Buşki, multimedia artist and producer, member of Kanka Productions Gizem Oruç, musician, producer, and multimedia artist, member of Kanka Productions Şevval Kılıç, sex worker, queer and trans activist working in Istanbul Nelli Kampouri, gender scholar, Centre for Gender Studies, Panteion University Athens Margarita Tsomou, author, publisher, dramaturge, and curator based in Berlin Maria Mitsopoulou aka Maria F. Dolores, visual artist and performer, AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts) Anna Apostolelli, activist, currently a member of Beaver, a women’s co-op café in Athens, AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts) Tina Voreadi, visual artist and educator, AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts) #32. Queer Indie Gig Exercise of FreedomHTH Green to Blue Shock Treatment Prasini Lesvia, musician #33. DJ set Gizem Oruç, musician #34. The Epic of Eleftheria Irena Haiduk, artist and Eirini Vakalopoulou, writer and poet     General dramaturgy for the Exercises of Freedom: Prodromos Tsinikoris, artistic co-director of Experimental Stage -1 of the National Theatre, Athens.   Image: Athens Municipality Arts Center Parko Eleftherias DEMOS, Andreas Angelidakis, installation, 2016, dimensions variable. Photo: Stathis Mamalakis    
PUBLIC PROGRAMSPosted on 06.09.2016

Interview with Daniel G. Andújar

Geert Lovink April 26, 2016 interview 5.029 words In April 2015 I had the honour to receive a private tour by the Spanish artist Daniel G. Andújar of his solo show, Operating System, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid.1 I know Daniel from the net.art days of 1996–1997 when he was running Technologies To The People® (TTTP) (1996), a work shared in Operating System. All these months later, as the works in the show stayed with me, I decided to contact Daniel and request an e-mail interview with him. What I appreciate in his work is the natural way in which his ‘new media arts’ background is woven into the broader visual arts context of a large museum such as Reina Sofía. The show brought together the real thing and its virtual double – as if the two have never been at odds. Operating System offered a mix of many things, such as playful net.art, a dark, hacker space installation, journalism investigating real estate projects (from the pre-2008 boom years), a colourful room filled with manipulated versions of political celebrity posters and an art historical investigation into Pablo Picasso. The exhibition seemed to find the ‘tactical’ equilibrium so many people have thrived on and thirsted for. When we have all moved on to become post-digital, where ‘analogue is the new digital,’ then why should we continue to marginalize those who experiment with the ‘new material’ in an evermore ironic fashion? It is time for the Great Synthesis. The historical compromise is there. Everyone prepares for the first post-digital Venice Biennale in 2017. Let’s enjoy the delicate mix between technology, politics and aesthetics in such a way that none of the three dominate, and let Andújar be our guide.

duration: 17.09.2015 - 15.11.2015

In his works, Spanish artist Daniel G. Andújar deals with political and social issues and reflects on the relationship between reality and its representation in digital worlds. He starts off with collections of various found media that he uses for his video and Internet projects, as well as arrangements of objects, prints and photographs.

Key themes are the power structures in dominant, hierarchical social systems and the role of technology as an instrument of state control. Andújar uses the representation strategies of media in an ironic and critical manner, asking whether information and communication technologies truly uphold their stated commitment to democratic and egalitarian values. He thus points out the discrepancy between the utopian idea of the Internet as a democratic space, and its actual capabilities and limitations. Andújar thus keeps returning to subversive tactics of occupation and civil disobedience – tactics that use social networks and the Internet to reframe the concept of freedom.

With “Konfliktzonen / Zones of Conflict“ the HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) presents the artist’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland. The exhibition includes works created between 1998 and 2015 on themes related to conflicts, protest movements and geo-political crises. All invite the visitor to take a critical look at today’s communication media and technologies.

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Prophetia comprises works by twenty-five artists who have followed and addressed the formation of the European Community. The point of departure for the exhibition is a video by the Albanian artist Anri Sala, dating from 2002, that portrays the moment when the dream of Europe was still intact in some of the countries aspiring to enter the European Union. All the other works on exhibit are more recent and reflect the current sense of uncertainty concerning the European project. The diverse origins of the artists featured in the show lead to a confluence of very different points of view and sensibilities. As a whole, the Prophetia exhibition invites us to reflect upon the history and evolution of the European Union, with a special emphasis on the latest developments. Prophetia is structured around three concepts that are closely linked to the philosophical and ideological foundations of Europe: rape, correspondence and reciprocity, and responsibility. These three concepts also provide the backbone for the exhibition catalogue, which includes essays by Bojana Kunst, Ingrid Guardiola, Cécile Bourne Farrell, José Luis Corazón, Srecko Horvat, and Piedad Solans. The Prophetia project has been curated by Imma Prieto.

A*Desk 02 FEBRUARY 2015 JUANJO SANTOS The first solo exhibition of the year at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is “ Operating System”, by Daniel García Andújar. A large selection of earlier works is being shown alongside new creations that continue to explore the link between new technologies and society, intervening between the public and the private. We talk with an artist who considers his work to be more collective than individual. Your exhibition could also have been called "Inoperative system". In fact I’m into these analogies, very black or white. I make a lot of references, as happened in “Postcapital”, where I reduced language to colours, something symbolic but that is still there as part of the artistic language. In the artist’s toolbox there are all the languages used during the history of art, it would be absurd not to use them. I make an almost reductive use in this type of analogy, in this case of red, white and black. I make these analogies, as in operating system, in order to establish parallels with the political system. In line with the language of hacking, there is an endeavour to seek out the failures of the system, through the bug, and once on the inside to improve or repair it; this search is for a more democratic system, for a much more horizontal system. Through the hole opened up by the bug enters exploit, the programme that can be damaging or beneficial. I work with this idea, in fact I always explain the paradox of the knife: If we film a scene with a close up, a certain type of lighting, use certain dramatic recourses of film and a knife appears, we think one thing. But if later a hand and Ferran Adrià appear, we’ll be talking about cooking. Depending on how we use them, tools have one result or another. I’m in favour of a greater transparency and emancipation, and that what be criminalized be a bad use of this information. But they are criminalising or supervising us a priori, and don’t let us function as an emancipated society. You mentioned there are errors in the system. Do you think the way to solve them is through the participation of society? Undoubtedly. When I began to develop these operating systems and software, I talked about an emancipated citizen in this sense. If instead of society as a shapeless mass we have individuals who are trained, with a good stock of educational and pedagogical culture, we’d have a better society. Here I draw a parallel with the Spanish empire of Philip II, when thanks to the printing press, the word, in this case of God, the Bible, begins to be disseminated. There is a wider access to certain information and its interpretation. It’s there the developments began that led to the French Revolution, that first great emancipation of the bourgeoisie. I make an analogy with this huge divide that is currently forming, that ultimately is like a new social hierarchy, what in the 90’s was called info-rich and info-poor. The digital divide is growing increasingly wider, adding to a divide that was already there.

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