Audiovisual programs

SUBTRAMAS (SUBPLOTS), Radical Pedagogies, Politics and Gender Narratives offers a film and video programme that contemplates image production as a political tool within current educational processes. By this we mean learning processes that generate awareness and critical standpoints with respect to the normalization of the culture of spectacle and its modus operandi in shaping behaviour and instituting social values.  

PROGRAMME

SUBTRAMAS adopts a discursive approach to the politicization of gender narratives and the construction of subjectivity. A selection of film practices traces the evolution of pedagogical ventures that link shared knowledge, social aesthetics and art. In this way, SUBTRAMAS is inscribed within what are known as radical/critical pedagogies of representation, tools for learning and for discussion. The programme is structured as a journey through a series of poetic narratives that defend education as a democratic process, aesthetic experiences as opposition to the entertainments of spectacle culture, audiovisual literacy as critical distance, the accounting of events as tools for awakening knowledge and image politics as a politics of desire.

The programme owes much to those audiovisual practices that have addressed knowledge/power relations in order to forge a path into a politically aware aesthetic experimentation. This involves the exchange of knowledge across the spheres of art, visual representation, democracy, education and everyday life. Collaborative art practices – a key element in the development of critical pedagogies of representation – have engaged in a discussion of other ways of seeing and knowing that short-circuit the hegemonies of gendered knowledge and suggest possible approaches to an ethics of difference. 

The films that make up this programme develop a series of key points that offer a concept of education expanded into knowledge of social practice.

Danièle Huillet and Jean Marie Straubs’ En rachâchant, Marta de Gonzalo-Publio Pérez Prieto’s La Intención, Petra Bauer’s Rana and Hito Steyerl’s Journal nº 1 – An Artist’s Impression, offer strategies and forms of knowledge centred on the field of visualization, the image as knowledge-map and filmmaking as a language of experiment.  The school, the university, the workplace – repressive organs of education ­– are shown as sites that might be reconfigured, taken over and rethought.

SUBTRAMAS also recoups earlier films such as Helke Sander’s Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure or Adriana Monti’s Scuola senza fine, offering an opportunity to trace and examine the links between the attempts to generate a emancipatory cultural politics in universities and factories during the nineteen seventies and the early eighties and more recent experiences of self-organization and self-learning documented in Marisa Maza’s Stadt Chronik which, in the face of the current regulatory regimes of post-Fordist flexibility, advocate renewed and open-ended forms of a shared, collective production and transmission of critical knowledge.