“The machine is invented to respond to specific needs. Once it exists, the operator can go far beyond its original capacities: by breaking the rules imposed by the machine itself, creative outcomes emerge that were unimagined before using the machine, before breaking its rules.”
Felipe Ehrenberg
Our second open call borrows its title from the book by Stevphen Shukaitis, lmaginal Machines [1], to discuss the productive structures that operate on the basis of a radical and collective imagination. A mechanism that is activated by social self-determination and joint action and that is the fruit of sharing the experience, knowledge and techniques that ground us as a society.
We invite architects, researchers and writers to think about past and present “machines” that use architecture to work as tools of social analysis and production.
Leaving aside any deux ex machina mechanism, the structures we would like to assembie avoid a happy ending, where this is produced by standardized modes of operation. lmaginal machines help us to construct a vision of how to live together in the world, dismantling the state of comfortable individualism in which most of us live. Machines that are in a continuous state of trial and error, operating on the basis of their own dysfunctionality “lt might be that imaginal machines only work by breaking down. […] By reopening the question of recuperation, the inevitable drive to integrate the power of social insurgency back in to the werking of capital and the state.”[2] Only in this way can we create possibilities where the shared imagination can combine different ecologies of knowledge in the service of social change.
We are open to both real and/or imaginary projects that use installation, historica! documents and archive material, performance, or publications that refer to the creation of these imaginal machines within architecture as antagonists of the status quo, whether using specific cases or those under development.
The winner proposal would be shown in LIGA as part of the annual exhibitions program.
[1] Shukaitis, Stevphen. lmaginal Machines: Autonomy and Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Every Day Life. New York: Autonomedia, 2009
[2] lbid 1.
First Stage Jury
Iván López Munuera (ESP)
Fabrizio Gallanti (ITA)
Amaryllis Jacobs (BEL)
Camilo Restrepo (COL)
Rubén Valdéz (MEX)
Andrew Kovacs (Archive of Affinities) (EEUU)
Anna Junni (BRA)
Sandra Barclay (PER)
Second Stage Jury
Julieta González (VEN/MEX)
Rozana Montiel (MEX)
Natalia de la Rosa (MEX)
Amanda de la Garza (MEX)
Surella Segú (MEX)
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