el instituto, currently headquartered in Mexico City, is a not-for-profit organization that generates exhibitions, conferences, workshops, courses and platforms for other events. el instituto is committed to the exploration of the overlap between art, culture, politics, activism and human rights theory and practice, both locally and internationally. Having no physical site of its own, el instituto functions symbiotically, hosted by cultural or academic institutions, while also operating in less official spaces and capacities.
Not I: The Performative Speech Act and the Sovereign Subject
The research project Not I: The Performative Speech Act and the Sovereign Subject takes a look at the conditions - the who, why and where - in which one can speak and be heard. Not I proposes an analysis of different forms of speech acts and an exploration of the possibility of breaking with the inherent power relations, the "contextually bound formulas" and the conventions surrounding the right to successfully issue performative utterances.
The research project Not I: The Performative Speech Act and the Sovereign Subject takes a look at the conditions - the who, why and where - in which one can speak and be heard. Not I proposes an analysis of different forms of speech acts and an exploration of the possibility of breaking with the inherent power relations, the "contextually bound formulas" and the conventions surrounding the right to successfully issue performative utterances.
The project deals with human rights issues specifically through the lens of the politics of performativity and the performative speech act. Emerging from research on dissident political art practice in Latin America - specifically the contentious and heavily censored period of visual art practice in Argentina in and around 1968 and the response to the 1968 massacre of student activists at Tlatelolco in Mexico City - the project will involve extensive study of the work of international human rights activists and theorists and of cultural practitioners deeply committed to the political uses of social space and the complexity of enunciation within those spaces.
The project freely crosses disciplines and historical periods in an attempt to draw out the discourse of human rights activists around the construction and deconstruction of the 'subject' (the modern subject), and the subsequent study of the complex contemporary political subject, (looking critically at theoretical constructions around the notions of sovereignty, displacement, exile and nomadism, among others) and taking into account work in visual art, film and other cultural, spatial and political practices that attempt to complicate notions of performativity and human rights discourse and action.
The project is conceived of as an extended platform for research around these sets of issues and is comprised of conferences, workshops, performances, an exhibition and other events.
Programmed public events include a conference on March 25th hosted by UNAM's Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco in Mexico City; a series of workshops led by international human rights theorists, activists, architects and artists in the autumn of 2011; and a large scale exhibition, also hosted by Tlatelolco, in March of 2012.
Research towards this project has been made possible by a Curatorial Research Fellowship awarded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts.
"Untethering the speech act from the sovereign subject founds an alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of responsibility..."
- Judith Butler: Excitable Speech Acts, 1997
Not I: un encuentro sobre arte y politica
Not I: a conference on art and politics
March 25, 2011
10am - 1pm, 4pm - 7pm
Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco
Ricardo Flores Magon 1, col. Nonoalco-Tlatelolco
To be held at UNAM's Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco in Mexico City is the first element of el instituto's Not I project.
Invited speakers include Maria Berrios, Avery Gordon, Pablo Lafuente and Javier Toscano.
Conference topics include:
Maria Berrios:
How to make a straight line invisible. On conceptual humour and the politics of vanishing;
Avery Gordon:
"Running Away.": Some brief thoughts on disobedience, running away and other promising conduits to abolishing the disposition to war.
Pablo Lafuente:
Can Emancipation Not Be Abstract?
Javier Toscano:
Resistance and Enunciation. The Drive to Anonymity
http://www.el-instituto.com/
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