What do we talk about when we talk about order?
Lecture/conversation/performance with Lali Barrière, Anabel de la Paz and Ishak Benavides
Mixed platters is a series of four thematic sessions based on concepts linked to Listening with Your Hands temporary exhibition, which invite us to rethink the value of the analog object in the current paradigm of the digital environment.
Arranging everything we produce is exhausting. So is living in disorder. When order collides with technological obsolescence, archives are victims of the inescapable laws of biology: they are born, grow, reproduce, perhaps emigrate and in the end die whether they restart their life cycle or not.
When archives tend to fragment or become disconnected from a common origin, the possibilities that open are nullified by our limited ability to live in a continuous palimpsest. We are hardly prepared to apply Aby Warburg’s good neighbor law, according to which in the perfect library, when you look for a book, you end up picking up the one next to it, which will surely be more useful than what you were initially looking for.
The session includes a guided tour to the exhibit Attuning. Aura Satz by Carolina Jiménez.
Lali Barrière is a mathematician and artist. In his artistic practice she uses programming as a tool for creation, which has led her to research the applications of mathematics and programming in art. Based on the book “How to organize a library”, by Roberto Calasso, she proposes a reflection on order. Does the order provide us with information? But what order? Is it possible an objective, absolute order?
Anabel de la Paz is responsible for the Archive, Library and Heritage of the Teatre Lliure in Barcelona. She is currently completing her PhD in Information and Communication (Universitat de Barcelona) focusing research on how to document the ephemeral. She is specialized in personal archives, libraries, and heritage collections. Her previous work involves the cataloging and organization of collections formed during colonization in the Philippines.
DJ Shak. Ishak Benavides has been part of the Barcelona scene since the 90s, as former spiritual co-founder of Wah Wah Discos, as an electronic musician with his project Lucius Works Here, as a sound artist, and as a DJ. He is currently the owner of the online radio TeslaFM.net. He is presenting a session, halfway between a DJ set and a sound collage, with audio files from obsolete media from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
