Materia Abierta 2022 - Public program

Materia Abierta is a summer school on theory, art, and technology based in Mexico City.

For more information:
materiaabierta.com
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Conceived as a space to reflect on the ethics of the present and future, the program aims to interrogate the political, economic, and ideological forces that condition contemporary cultural production and to favor other forms of action and knowledge.

As part of its third edition, The Rise of the Coyote, a series of activities open to the general public will be presented. These will be carried out in person during the month of August. The program is developed with the support from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in coordination with Cultura UNAM, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Casa del Lago UNAM, and Cátedra Extraordinaria Max Aub, Transdisciplina en Arte y Tecnología.

Thursday August 4, 7 p.m
Public lecture: Storytelling Between Art and Ecology
Pedro Neves Marques
Location: Casa del Lago UNAM (Sala Rosario Castellanos)

Pedro Neves Marques will be presenting their film work and writings, with a focus on their current exhibition titled Vampires in Space as the Portuguese Official Representation at the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as the recent films Becoming Male in the Middle Ages and The Bite. This will also be an opportunity to hear Neves Marques on the role of poetry, as well as how their written theoretical work dialogues with their image-making and storytelling practice around gender, ecology, and science fiction.

Monday August 8, 5 p.m.
Public lecture: Sobre los pies del Teuhtli: Tizacalco, patrimonio arqueológico de Milpa Alta
Calpulli Tecalco
Locación: MUAC (Sala de conferencias)

During this event, Angelica Palma Rodríiguez will present the work of Calpulli Tecalco, an organization established in the town of San Pedro Atócpan in Milpa Alta, that has been dedicated to the study and preservation of the region’s ancestral knowledge for more than twenty years. Specifically, they will present the results of a research project on the archeological traces recently identified on the slopes of the Teuhtli volcano. These studies are collected in the book Sobre los pies del Teuhtli: Tizacalco, patrimonio arqueológico de Milpa Alta, published in 2021. During the presentation, archaeologist Luis Alberto Martos López will address characteristic aspects of the Mesoamerican town of Tizacalco and biologist Héctor Celedón will speak of the terraced agricultural system associated with the worldview of ancient people. These community efforts represent the first research effort into the history of Tizacalco, integrating knowledge of archaeology, architecture, biology and soil science, and putting into perspective the importance of the biocultural heritage of Milpa Alta.

Thursday August 11, 5 p.m.
Public lecture: Vegetal Politics: A Sketch
Michael Marder
Location: MUAC (Auditorium)

In this talk, Michael Marder will imagine a post-metaphysical shape of politics along the many lines drawn by (and deduced from) vegetal beings. After a brief reflection on the notion of the future, unavoidably steered by plants, the talk will delineate seven basic traits of vegetal politics: being-sessile, exposure, anarchic growth and decay, modularity, non-oppositionality, mutability, and hylomorphism. These traits provide an interpretation of both progressive political movements (such as Occupy!) and phenomena such as opportunism, corruption, and identitarianism, each of which may be internally transformed, once it is uncoupled from the metaphysical, anti-vegetal ideal of immutable being.

Thursday August 18, 7 p.m.
Public lecture: Reenacting the Robopocalypse
Paula Gaetano Adi
Location: Casa del Lago UNAM (Sala Rosario Castellanos)

In this public talk artist Paula Gaetano Adi will share her practice of making robots and will present preliminary ideas/provocations to reimagine robotics as an embodied technological practice of dissent. Considering the powerful role of robotics in shaping our understandings of the human, Gaetano Adi’s work invites us to consider robotics as a re-futuring practice that explore the poetics and politics of technology by resisting the apocalyptic scientific conventions that dictates how to make, think, circulate, and operate technology and calls us to speculate of robots as our comrades in the fight for repairing our planet.

Wednesday August 24, 5 p.m.
Public lecture: Trans-hemispheric Thinking: Knowing and Doing at the Intersection
Chakanetsa Mavhunga
Location: MUAC (Auditorium)

By trans-hemispheric thinking, Chakanetsa Mavhunga means thinking at the intersection of mutually respectful conversations between constituencies that seldom talk to or do with each other, each bringing its ways of seeing, thinking, knowing, and doing to the matrix, to mutually inform one another, to make together. The idea is to build qualitative — not just quantitative — diversity, what he calls diversity as method. That is: going beyond counting the numbers of people of color on campus or in institutions and access to services (the US approach), toward focusing more sharply on diversity of cosmologies, knowledges, experiences, and doings. The opposite of trans-hemispheric thinking is hemispheric thinking, which Chakanetsa defines as exclusionary ideologies that monopolize what can and cannot be knowledge, whereas trans-hemispheric thinking is a conversation between different ways of being, seeing, knowing, making, and feeling.

Friday August 26, 5 p.m.
Public concert: Moor Mother
Location: Casa del Lago UNAM (Foro Alicia Urreta)

The poet, producer, activist, educator and screenplay writer, Camae Ayewa, better known as Moor Mother, arrives at Casa de Lago UNAM as part of Materia Abierta 2022. It will be a spoken word bomb over a musical background that ranges from the most furious free jazz to electronic dissonance that will connect us with the Afro-futurist tradition and the fight for civil rights.

Saturday August 27, 12 p.m.
Public lecture: Undesigning Systemic Time for Temporal Liberation
Black Quantum Futurism
Location: MUAC (Auditorium)

Systemic time is typically mapped as objective time onto clocks, watches, and other artifacts of mechanical clock time, synchronized to a master time that lives at the Greenwich Prime Meridian. The presentation will consider Western linear clock time as a chrono-oppressive system of surveillance, labor regulation, objectification, and punishment for marginalized Black communities specifically, and the temporal technologies Black people have developed to subvert, re-envision, reclaim, redesign, undesign, and dismantle the material realities of clock time and culture in their lives and communities. The presentation will highlight recent projects by Rasheedah Phillips and Black Quantum Futurism Collective, such as Time Zone Protocols, Project: Time Capsule, Mmere Dane: Black Time Belt, and CPT Symmetry and Violations that meditate Black temporal liberation and spatial agency.

For more information visit materiaabierta.com and follow @materiaabierta on Twitter and Instagram.