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The symposium of Frestas – Trienal de Artes sheds light on reflections engendered by the affirmation that the nonexistent is an insistence in various – and, at first sight, perhaps disparate – centers of interest.

Frestas Triennial Symposium

The inexistent is an insistence

23rd, 24th and 25th April 2015

Artistic practice itself is marked by transdisciplinarity and, therefore, revolves around various areas of knowledge: from power to poetry, from citizenship to the process of subjectification, from history to agroecology. Based on this particularity of current art, the symposium is intended to be a detonator of possible dialogic encounters between art and contemporary life.

Concept

Throughout three days of meetings, insistence will be the focus of the symposium held at Frestas – Trienal de Artes. It will be understood as an alternative for producing some polyphonic and heterogeneous thoughts about the nature and multiple identities that constitute the inexistent, and about those who seek to live with it – either voluntarily or involuntarily. The project’s first aim is to redefine its relation with the things that exist, which in large part are responsible for the insistence that defines absence, ignorance and lack, among other subjects that manipulate the values of that which is lacking in the real. It is structured in a way to foster thinking about how art conceives the inexistent, without entering into considerations that would qualify it as an obstacle, castration or intangibility. To this end, thinking about the inexistent as an insistence is the way to perceive the conceivable and the inconceivable, the idealizable and the impractical, the tangible and intangible, the real and the unreal, as well as other apparent polarities, elements for the elaboration of the poetic, social, political or spiritual realities, all situated in the expanded field of meanings which are made to fit into the world by means of art.

In this sense, the symposium recognizes that the statement that names it is a way of questioning the natural state of the things that do not exist, since it is through them that, in large part, the world is structured. Therefore, at the same time that the subject actively participates in the elaboration of the identity of the inexistent, he sees himself being invented by that which was previously only an insistence. It is the crossing between the invention and the inventor that makes it possible to imagine the ambiguous place they both occupy in the world. That is, since the inventor of something inexistent is someone who has lived with the insistence of that which gained a determined configuration in the world, his invention and posture in regard to the inexistent real are constitutive elements of a considerable part of his own identity.In short, by inventing the inexistent, the subject is himself reinvented by it. Insofar as it is an insistence,  the sentence that describes it (or the object that defines it),  the declaration that conceives it, and the shout that broadcasts it to the world are fields imbued by both power and poetry.

For this reason, when the artists cross dissimilar subjects, involving them in apparently unlikely dialogues; when these “fortuitous encounters” propose discussions between agroecology and the process of subjectification, or when they participate in the construction of projects of citizenship, elaborated with the help of anachronistic fragments of history or with fictional accounts; when what is being questioned is the current nature of education or spirituality (both increasingly involved in contradictions produced by capital and by the excessive compulsion for measuring results), the transmission of knowledge and manipulation of feeling, seeing them all overlapped in negotiations based on currencies that transform these values into another product of the financial market; when all of this becomes a material for dealing with the inexistent, art and the debate produced around it gain the ability to foster possible dialogic encounters with contemporary life. Which naturally does not discredit the negotiation that the present maintains with inexistent temporalities, in this case the past and the future, insofar as that the subject’s experience of the contemporary has always been the anachronistic exercise of considering insistent temporalities that generally define the scenario and the established relations nowadays as a reaction to some of the civilizing, geopolitical and symbolic projects that have marked humanity.

Whether they were failures, successful, unfounded or repressed, the way the subject lives together with projects that define his place in the world can be an alternative for rethinking the inexistent. Or, as stated by Paulo Freire in one of his mandatory thoughts about the inexistent: “If reality hinders man from being more fully human, it is up to him to change that reality.” Reticent in regard to the foreseeability of the future and to the way in which certain situations, scenarios and relations that are yet to come into existence can be calculated or couched in the real, the artists resort to inventiveness, resistance and happenings in which the poetic language gains space to carry out the dialogue with the world, which would not be what it is without the things that do not exist.