LARA GARCÍA DÍAZ: EMBODYING THRESHOLDS

Presentation by Lara García Díaz for her residency at Bulegoa z/b. Her proposal Encarnar los umbrales (Embodying Thresholds) was selected along with Envioletá by Javiera de la Fuente for our 2020 residency programme. The jury was comprised of Alejandro Alonso Díaz (curator, director of fluent), Miren Arenzana (artist) and the members of Bulegoa z/b.

EMBODYING THRESHOLDS
If we choose to understand the body not as a merely biological entity, but also as a codified being, “an interface, a threshold, a field of incessant forces into which many different codes are written”, acknowledging its boundaries and fractures becomes a moral and political demand. Rosi Braidotti considers that sustainability, seen as the art of building thresholds that will allow us to continue the common potentiality, is where recognising these aspects is the key to changing the relationships or connections that constitute us. Building these thresholds would entail being responsible enough as to not desertify the relational whole at the cost of one body, or explode in the course of an overly intense experience beyond what we can bear. But how to build sustainable thresholds through which to potentiate what each singularity is able, in such a way that the whole will not explode?

The mechanics of the fracture, as the study of the behaviour of a solid in the presence of a fissure, can tell us precisely how recognising fractures in a body is necessary for “the distribution of tensions and deformations occurring in a material containing fractures or discontinuities, submitted to a certain external tension”. By providing a series of parameters where the conditions and effects of fatigue in a body are measured in order to reduce the consequences of a possible fracture, the mechanics of fractures provides us with useful models for conceiving and visualising possible sustainable thresholds for potentiating the common.

Encarnar los Umbrales has been conceived as a device for ordering narrative, a sort of trial and error, which will try to conjugate knowledge from the philosophy of the mechanics of fractures, ordinary micro-practices in everyday life, and elements of ethical and moral philosophy, to sketch a speculative basis from which to potentiate the common by embodying our cracks and fractures.

Lara García Díaz’s residency will be visible at three moments: a public presentation on 10 February, a writing workshop on 24 February, and a closure in which some of the results of her residency will be presented.

To take part in the 10 February session in person or online, and/or the writing workshop on 24 February, please contact  bulegoa@bulegoa.org

ADMISSION: maximum of 15.

Lara García Díaz is a social theoretician, co-founder of the feminist cultural collective Larre and researcher at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (University of Antwerp). Her work addresses the politics of precarity in relation to cultural practices in the commons through feminist theory and theories of caring. Lara has contributed to books such as What’s the Use (Valiz, 2016), Commonism (Valiz, 2018), La cuestión es ir tirando (La Fábrica, 2019), and Textus (PAAC, 2020) as well as academic and cultural magazines including Frame (Utrecht University, 2017), Arte y Políticas de la Identidad (Universidad de Murcia, 2018), PUBJournal (Sandberg University, 2019), Terremoto (México, 2020) and Vesper (Universidad de Venecia, 2020). As a cultural researcher, she has taken part in Mostra Internazionale di Architettura (Venice, 2018), Integrated (Antwerp, 2019), Oslo Biennial (Oslo, 2019) and Zona MACO (Mexico City, 2020).