NOSYMMETRIES / EXHIBITION
From 17.10.2024 to 20.11.2024
Place: La Capella (BARCELONA)
Organised by: IDENSITAT - La Capella

NOSYMMETRIES is a line of work of Idensitat, which, within the Creative Europe Care Ecologies programme, engages in research and the activation of artistic processes which tackle various kinds of social inequality. Based upon a residency, its following exhibition, and a seminar, we wished to explore the concepts of ​​critical imagination and social creativity, understanding the relationship between them as a collective process embracing a variety of perspectives. Dissidence, disputes, violence, participation, construction of the commons, visibility/invisibility, care, social justice, are just a few of the concepts which have emerged during the residencies, and which will be explored and expanded upon in the exhibition and the symposium.

NOSYMMETRIES / EXHIBITION
Opening  October 17th at 19h

NOSYMMETRIES/EXHIBITION features works produced as a result of an artistic residence founded on collective interaction between various participants. The working methodology proposed by Idensitat involved structuring a collaborative process and predefining four specific areas of research: inequality and entry into the labour market; sex work and dissidence; the structures of racism: capitalism, the patriarchy and colonialism; and inequality and the ecology of care. The exhibition is the outcome of this process and gives shape to some of the questions raised. The works displayed are by Xeito Fole - Andrea Corrales Devesa, BajoRufián, Cacao Díaz - iki yos piña narváez funes - Florencia Brizuela - Ainhoa Nadia Douhaibi, Gabriella Kiss – Impulsem - and Idensitat. Idensitat presents a work created on the basis of the questionings, reflections and tensions that have arisen in the framework of the residence, with an archive of voices in progress, the aim of which is to broaden the gaze between non-symmetry and the ecology of care. 

Gabriella Kiss with the collaboration of Impulsem. Our Common Spaces
It is well known that the environment exerts an enormous influence on us, which makes it difficult to perceive the need for change.
However, we can only help to shape our social environment by identifying areas that require improvements. This can be achieved
by means of observation, analysis, critical thinking, creativity and collaboration with others. The aim of Gabriella Kiss’s project is to design and build furnishing for community meetings in the space of the Impulsem organisation in collaboration with participants through a process founded on research and participative action.
During her collaboration, Kiss organised participative workshops and worked in close partnership with the organisation’s staff and former pupils of Impulsem in order to arrive at an understanding of how to visualise the shared space together. They also explored how the designed physical space could extend beyond itself to reveal and display wider social relations. The community led the entire participative project, from the formulation of an initial shared question to its implementation. As an artist, Kiss facilitated a shared imagination and a dialogue in the participative process. The construction of the planned space is still in progress.

Xeito Fole and Andrea Corrales Devesa. Cómo no ver como el Estado (How Not to See Like the State)
This work combines research and artistic production and focuses on expanding and altering imaginaries relating to sex work and pro-sex activism through aesthetic, political and historical alliances between sex work and sexual dissidence. Thinking and resistance around the intersection between sex work and affective, sexual and gender dissidence are a stance that challenges the current

divides produced by the juridical apparatus between sex works and sexual and gender dissidence in Spain.
Andrea Corrales Devesa and Xeito Fole, however, seek care practices in the way images are produced and ask: how do we generate images/produce imaginaries that do not put people in danger? Mindful that persecuted sexual practices are risky practices, the core of their research is focused – through a space for dialogue, resistance and critical practice – on generating visibilities that correspond to ethical and situated practices that are responsible towards communities.
Based on the analysis of statistical figures, censuses, archives, laws and reports that raise the visibility of/produce categories and social groups through the state’s repressive apparatus, they question the mechanisms of power that operate by means of the visualisation of data and technologies of control. They are keen to explore in depth techniques for producing truth based on the positivist imperative and operations of abstraction as a formula for concealing certain experiences that do not wish to be visible but protected. They seek to break with the single accounts and biased narratives that underpin the construction of state archives and statistics, erasing memories, lives and shared struggles.
 
BajoRufián. Alianzas sexodisidentes de los trabajos sexuales (Sexually Dissident Alliances of Sex Work)
BajoRufián started with research into the sociopolitical alliances of the trans collective and sex work. Their aim is to achieve an exemplary reclaiming of history and, at the same time, to position us in the present and develop new collective imaginaries of empowerment and resistance that we can hold to.

In their piece Cartografía de los trabajos sexuales en Barcelona (Map of Sex Work in Barcelona), they reflect on belonging to the spaces of the trans community members who devote themselves to sex work in this city.
They gathered information from various archives, documentation centres and exhibitions, and thus discovered the places where these unions took place. This piece is presented as a cartographic archive that mutates and takes the form of spaces as real as they are fictitious, thereby coming close to a reading of the archive transported into the present.
Their work Carta a Kathy (Letter to Kathy) is the outcome of fieldwork conducted during the research, based on the writings found. A number of texts, books and exhibitions featured notes and images about Kathy, a trans person who moved from Cordoba to Barcelona, where she lived in the Cúpula Venus, where Pilar Aymerich took her photo in 1979. Due to the sensationalist and dehumanising treatment she received from people when they spoke about her, the decision was made to draft a letter and ingest it in order to turn the body into an archive that would sustain her in a dignified manner. This action aims to call into question the telling of the story and the subjects who have the privilege of doing so in institutional spaces.

Cacao Díaz and iki yos piña narváez funes. El susurro de las luciérnagas (The Whisper of the Fireflies)
This is a research initiative intended to construct anticolonial narratives based on exercises in critical fabulation and speculative fiction. El susurro de las luciérnagas consists of fictional capsule stories of escapism in colonial structures of domination: the sex- gender, cis-heterosexual matrix, the racial structuring of bodies and the construction of the system of borders in Fortress Europe.

The artistic research project grew out of the situated experiences of iki yos piña and Cacao Díaz as Black Caribbean migrant trans bodies that resist in this modern colonial world. Their existence involves the daily use of technologies of radical cross-dresser fabulation and imagination in order to shatter the canons of biology and the binary sex- gender colonial system, and to walk around the streets of Barcelona, which have a grammar that constantly reopens the colonial wound. It is impossible to draw lines of collective counter-colonial escape without having first radically imagined them.

Idensitat. (Un)Open Archive
(Un)Open Archive is an artistic and curatorial project that encompasses and presents a number of controversial concepts that help to strengthen the concept of the ecology of care. This first phase of the project features a series of voices from various projects connected with the cultural context of Barcelona. Each participant offers a political perspective, expanding the concept with new dimensions and meanings. The concepts addressed include legal antiracist networks, ‘circlusion,’ other vocabularies, inverted vulnerability, social justice, accessibility, collective work, self-transformation, art and care, institutional time, adaptability, flexibility, infrastructure and care, the end of institutions, reparations, other voices and borders. These concepts, contributed by numerous voices, create a multifaceted debate around the idea of care and illustrate its complexity and profundity in contemporary society.
 
With the support of Ane Rodríguez Armendáriz, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Ethel Baraona, Florencia Brizuela, Giuliana Racco, Larre, Laura Arensburg, Natalia Carminati, Staci Bu Shea, Wei Yang and Xavier de Luca.

It is presented in two main parts: the first, entitled ‘Ecologías artísticas de los cuidados’ (Artistic Ecologies of Care), explores production conditions, specific case studies and processual interactions in situated projects; the second, entitled ‘Commons of Care’, brings together contributions centred on the political and social dimensions of the concept of care.

NOSYMMETRIES/EXHIBITION is a project mounted by Idensitat in collaboration with Centre d’Art La Capella. It is supported by Creative Europe and the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya. It is part of the CARE ECOLOGIES 2023-2025 initiative, being run by G & A Mamidakis, State of Concept, Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices (Volos, Greece), WHW (Zagreb) and Idensitat (Barcelona).

DJ and VJ opening session with María Ramos and Xeito Fole - Andrea Corrales.