| Biroul de Cercetari Melodramatice on Sun, 4 Nov 2012 20:48:30 +0100 (CET) |
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| [Nettime-ro] Protect Your Heart at Work & Biosorcery in Warsaw |
Protect Your Heart at Work The Bureau of Melodramatic Research and the Glass Lady 4th and 6th November 2012 at 4 pm Technical Museum, "Glass Lady" Hall, 2nd floor Palace of Culture and Science, pl. Defilad 1, Warsaw *admission on the basis of a ticket to the Technical Museum Biosorcery Florin Flueras and Alina Popa 5th November 2012 at 8 pm Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Education Room ul. JazdÃw 2, Warsaw *free admission Both performances are in English. Curator: Anna Ptak Protect Your Heart at Work A lecture performance of the Bureau of Melodramatic Research & the Glass Lady 4 and 6 of November 2012, 4 pm at Technical Museum, Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw. In the postindustrial economy the commodities are intangible: a feeling of well-being, the personal satisfaction, a sense of uniqueness and individuality, connectedness and protection. We produce emotions, trade in knowledge, invest on the market of ideas, speculate on compassion and monopolize happiness. Buy for a smile, sell for a laught. Affectivity, knowledge, communication, social skills, kinship, creativity, human contact, proximity, forms of life are at the heart of the mechanisms of production and valorization today. Under the present conditions, there is a high need to update the protection rules at the workplace. Since the workplace is everywhere and we embody the work, these rules become more and more important. What are the ergonomics of contemporary emotional work? How to avoid the repetitive strain injuries caused by recurrent smiling, compassionate inflections of the voice, endless nodding? We need new protection today because we no longer have a job, we are the job. The Glass Lady was presented in the Warsaw Technical Museum of Technology in 1972 at an educational exhibition called "Man and Work". Placed in an instructional room equipped with low benches and high spirits, she would arouse the workers' awareness of their own body and, consequently, an urge to protect it for further work. Raising her arms emphatically towards the spire of the Palace of Culture and Science, she displays a gesture of total surrender of her bare body to the spectator's gaze. We can see her, we can see through her. The Glass Woman would serve as a self-image of the workers' body, as an improved corporeal mirror, as a body with organs mapping the unknown inside them. In order to feel their organs, they, even as men, had to identify with the silent, stationary woman. She was prescient of the times to come when the so called "soft skills", the emotional work would be at the heart of economic production. Under electrical impulses, the Glass Woman performs for us an educational show whose multiple meanings and inflections we can re-interpret on and on. The Bureau of Melodramatic Research is a dependent institution engaged in examining how key elements of melodrama are currently at the core of economic production and political spectacle. BMR adopts melodramatic tactics to reveal and subvert patterns of valorization which are presently legitimizing and perpetuating the capitalist system by studying specific cases locally and abroad. Among its recent activity is the founding of the online Radio Prolife in Bucharest, hacking back the life from Prolife and expanding it to a non-reductionist spectrum - including both diverse forms of life, human and nonhuman and forms of death, biological and political. Other actions include a research on the Soul of Sustainability in Vienna and Bucharest, offering Creativity Counseling for Artists in Warsaw, surveying the Gross National Heel in Chisinau, Moldova and the revealing of the GhirÈoiu/StÄnescu Archive. Irina Gheorghe and Alina Popa founded BMR in 2009 and are contributing to several collective projects: Bezna zine, Presidential Candidacy and ArtLeaks. http://www.thebureauofmelodramaticresearch.blogspot.ro/ Biosorcery A lecture performance of Florin Flueras & Alina Popa 5.11.2012, 8pm at Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Education Room Paradoxically, we experience an infinite openness of the real, we are overwhelmed by the vastness of the possible and at the same time the reality is more and more a deja vue, something to consume in pre defined bits - packages of pre-fabricated, ready made life-slots. Without necessary knowing we are embedded in an economic logic that works as a religion, creating the forms of life that we are and that we experience around us. How to escape the mechanisms that are creating only one possible world, that are confining the virtual to an extent that any potential of variation is exhausted? How can we place ourselves in a position of self-fragilization, which allows a power to affect and a power to be affected? Sorcery was always the last resort for resisting this kind of religious take over of reality with its total organization of perceptions, behaviours and affects. Biosorcery is about production of new life from the precarious, bare life that inhabits us. It is about exhausting the spectacle potential, about achieving a affective bioattention as opposed to the current marketization of distracted affection and non-empathic attentiveness. Biosorcery is the displacement of the habitual microstructures from the monolithic body-home and their autonomization. When the body de-organizes and de-connects from its familiar structure, when its movements override the normative patterns coded by the economic logic then the human can become something else. Florin Flueras operates somewhere at the borders of contemporary art, performance, activism and theory. He is exploring and problematizing the political component of art and the aesthetic component of politics - mainly through practices and ideas around the concept of postspectacle. He also uses concepts and practices like subversive microbehaviors, bioaffection, biosorcery to develop an environment in which slightly different forms of life than the current Homo Economicus can appear. He is currently involved in projects like: Presidential Candidacy, Postspectacle, Romanian Dance History, Spatiu Comun, Bezna, Artleaks, Robin Hood Fund, Biosorcery. http://florinflueras.blogspot.com/?m=1 Alina Popa co-founded The Bureau of Melodramatic Research (BMR) in 2009. As part of BMR, she is currently interested in melodramatic practices that could overcome the controlled gestics and mimics by embodying pathetic rhythms and countenances. Since 2010 she has been researching the ideological ties of mountaineering and nationalism, the neoliberal landscape full of risk assessments and summits - both in Romania and Switzerland. In 2012 she started developing Biosorcery concepts and practices with Florin Flueras. She is interested in ways to de-link the body-psyche from the algorithmic modulation of mood imposed by neoliberalism, to de-institutionalize and overcome the impairment of compassion, to find the lively refrains in the general apatheia and post-crisis dominant state of depression. Alina Popa is contributing to several collective projects: Biosorcery, Presidential Candidacy, Bezna zine, Robin Hood Fund, ArtLeaks. http://affectivealgorithm.wordpress.com/  The artistic residency at A-I-R Laboratory and realization of the project has been made possible through the support of the City of Warsaw and the Romanian Cultural Institute. The project ÂProtect Your Heart at Work was carried out in co-operation of the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle and the Technical Museum in Warsaw. -- Biroul de Cercetari Melodramatice // The Bureau of Melodramatic Research http://thebureauofmelodramaticresearch.blogspot.com  Biroul de Cercetari Melodramatice //ÂThe Bureau of Melodramatic Research http://thebureauofmelodramaticresearch.blogspot.com/
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