Reading Bodies, Affect

Reading Bodies takes the shape of a month-long workshop, for the Affect 2016 residency program at Agora. It is facilitated by Lorenzo Sandoval who invites participants to work on ways to approach libraries, archives and its potential performativities.

The first contribution to the AFFECT´s previous edition in 2015 was focused specifically on ways to understand the endotic, a concept introduced by George Perec opposed to the exotic to found our own anthropology.

The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER) is an artistic project initiated by Sandoval assembled to work as a host that brings different disciplines together, namely architecture, art, writing and curation, acting as a platform of encounters through the production of a fictional institution with an operative program of collaborations with other agents, composed with the help of architectural devices.

In 2016, TIER continues with its work on exploring the everyday life and the immediate surroundings but focusing in the body. Reading Bodies refers to a double meaning. In one hand, it refers to the body the body as the primary device to read from and with. In the other one, it talks about bodies that can be read, bodies as an archive. The very first access to immediate reality is always one’s body. Therefore, bodies themselves are mediums that work as a device and as a place of inscription. At the same time, they are mediators who have the ability of activating their political agency. Bodies are at once objects and subjects.

The act of reading is never a passive act. When one is reading, is unfolding all the cultural constraints, the previous gained references, and some times, the possibility of practicing the imagination and the critique. From that perspective, nevertheless, reading is a writing gesture.

In this first knot of relationships, the workshop is articulated around a suggested bibliography (Perec, Preciado, de Certeau, Mignolo, Groys, Pastor Mellado, Benjamin, Federicci, Malabou, etc.) – expanded with the contributions of the participants- that would compose a series of collective readings, together with a program of visits to spaces and artists of Berlin.

As a result of this process the group develops a weekend-long programme at Agora´s new space as final output on the with the construction of a negotiated library made of inner “s(h)elves”: a design of a series of displays in between a library, an exhibition and a program of performance events.

AFFECT is Agora’s Programme for Collaborative Artistic Practices, currently in its third edition.

Agora Collective e.V. is part of the the Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme which is supported through the EU Creative Europe Programme.