August 8. The materiality of the immaterial. Encounter with Mijo Miquel

Thursday, August 8, 19:00
The materiality of the immaterial
Encounter with Mijo Miquel

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” —Carl Sagan[1]

“The broomsticks are part of a tree, we are all and everything at the same time” —Issa Samb[2]

This text tries to combine the evolutionist vision of hard sciences with a certain universalist animism that, in the hands of people like Jane Bennet or Issa Samb, questions the implacable taxonomic ordering of reality that, since the Enlightenment, meant the conceptual separation of humanity from the rest of the world. This notion implicit in the new materialisms can be applied to the social sciences by questioning the anthropocentric and dematerialized analysis we make of our behaviours, even of that which we call consciousness and which sustains our fundamental theoretical difference with the rest of living matter. In this way, we can question our weight in the world and try to understand the inertias that are leading us to a situation in which our life force puts at risk our continuity as a species on the planet, as well as that of many other living beings.

[1] Documentary series Cosmos (1980), first episode, “On the shore of the cosmic ocean”, 00:01:04.
[2] “La Coquille. Conversation entre Issa samb et Antje Majewski”, Dakar 2010 in How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions. Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2019.

Mijo Miquel
Translator, independent cultural manager and professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Fine Arts) since 2003. Degree in Modern Languages as well as in Fine Arts. PHD in Public Art (2013). Cofounder of various collectives such as Barra Diagonal, AutoFormato and Entrebarris, she has specialized since 2000 in the organization of meetings and conferences related to the creation of critical sphere. She collaborates with the CSIC being part of the Social and Human Sciences Center. As a researcher, her activity focuses on the city as a privileged space for social innovation as well as the redefinition of “urban quality” criteria. She teaches as well in different officials Masters of the UPV (Ecology, Art Production, Urban Regeneration).