The only exists if political

equality is thought in aesthetic terms, from the equality of force.

Political equality is an aesthetic thought.

Christoph Menke, The Force of Art

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... ix

Introduction ............................................................................................... xi

Chapter One .............................................................................................. 1

The Geoasthetic Hypothesis:
Constructing and Deconstructing Territories

Overview of Global Territorialities:

From Empire to Anti-Globalization ...................................................... 3
Anna Maria Guasch

Disaster does not Recognise Territories ............................................. 21

Paloma Villalobos

Memories of the Glo-Ba-na-na-Lization.

Geoeconomy and Contemporary Art in Central America ................... 27
Sergio Villena Fiengo

Thinking in Labyrinth.
Cartographic Behaviour in Times of Delocated Capitalism ............... 47
Diana Padrón Alonso

Chapter Two ........................................................................................... 61

Creativity and Dissent: The Future as a Contested Territory

The Art of Occupation:

Four Ways of Reading Protest Camps through the Lens of Art .......... 63
Julia Ramírez Blanco

The Emergence of Artistic Multitude. Redrawing Cartographies

of Art and Politics in the Liquid Global City ...................................... 89
Pascal Gielen
viii Table of Contents

Abandoned Futures. Tomorrow Was Already the Question .............. 111

Martí Peran

Speculative Realism/Materialism and #Accelerationism

as a Theoretical Framework for a Critical Response
to the Aestheticization of Everyday Life ........................................... 131
Federica Matelli

Chapter Three ........................................................................................ 145

Value, Labour and Gender: Spaces of (Un)Recognition

The Value Horizon: On the Subject of Labour in the Art Field ......... 147
Angela Dimitrakaki

The Personal Is Political.

Who Cares for Babies, the Sick and the Elderly? .............................. 163
Laia Manonelles Moner

Re-presenting the Partial Citizen. The Changing Iconography

of Domestic Labor Behind and Beyond the Lens .............................. 179
Alice Sarmiento

You Never Stop, You Never Stop.

Work and Women in Feminist Artistic practice since the 1970s ....... 189
Juan Vicente Aliaga

Audio Visual Creation as an Activist and Educational Tool

against Gender Inequality: A Case Study .......................................... 203
Mau Monleón Pradas

Contributors ............................................................................................. 227

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been made possible thanks to the contribution of a large
group of people and institutions that we would like to thank here. First of
all, Anna Maria Guasch and all the members of the Research Group Art
Globalization Interculturality / Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in
the Global Age
Contemporani de Barcelona, the Fabra i Coats ,
and all the people who participated in the conference: most of them are the
authors who have made this book possible with their articles. To all the
artists and the cultural workers especially the precarious labour force of
the art system and the academic field for their implication in the project
and for granting the images reproduced here. And obviously, to Cambridge
Scholars Publishing in particular Victoria Carruthers for their
commitment and professionalism to materialize all of this in the best of
ways.
 INTRODUCTION

In October of 2015, the Research Group Art, Globalization,

Interculturality of the University of Barcelona organized the Second
International Congress with the subject Critical Cartography of Art and
Visuality in the Global Age, two years after the first one1. The objective was
to address or in a certain way, to return to questions that from our
academic viewpoint are crucial to approach art, visuality, cultural policies
and the main global paradigms of contemporaneity; a commitment that, as
the name of the congress underlines, is based on critical positioning.
Unlike the first congress, the second one opted for a greater focus
especially in spatial and material reality, considering cultural praxis and
global processes as inseparable from its physical dimension. This is why we
began with a threefold framework that related to the interests of the
Research Group: territorial dimension, artistic practices and labour
transformations are central issues, with a particular emphasis in this case on
feminism due to its impact on material production and the construction of
the socially shared space.
Obviously, territory is not viewed as a two-dimensional space that can
be abstracted into a map; it rather emerges as a multidimensional place of
proximity and difference, of consensus and conflict, of hegemonies and
dissent. It expands in social terms from the private space of domestic
labour to the public field of politics; rather than treating them as separate
fields, they are viewed as a complex continuum, where the narratives of
displacement, dissent and utopia are being interwoven. In order to
understand its multiple dimensions and problematics (cultural, political,
social), we have favoured an interdisciplinary approach, that extends
beyond art theory and aesthetics, into the realm of economics, geography
and political theory. In this way, the three panels of the congress, reflected
in the general chapters of this book, are formulated under this approach: The
Geoasthetic Hypothesis: Constructing and Deconstructing Territories;
Creativity and Dissent: The Future as a Contested Territory; Value, Labour
and Gender: Spaces of (Un) Recognition.

1For the First International Congress, see Nasheli Jímenez del Val and Anna Maria
Guasch, eds., Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age
(Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).
xii Introduction

This interdisciplinarity became the common ground that fomented a

dialogue among social theorists, researchers and artists, who brought their
background and experience to the table. The discourse was further enhanced
dialogue among young researchers at the
beginning of their careers with established academics whose trajectory has
received significant critical recognition. In this way, the meeting also
acquired a pedagogical dimension in its own organizational
configuration, based on the selection of the different interventions and
projects that made up the main panels. It is for this reason, that we have
decided that this kind of academic heterogeneity discursive and formal
should be reflected in the same structure of this book.
It should also be said that in this type of events, trajectories tend to
coincide with different interests and presentations that break free from
tone that results from varied approaches was
welcomed by the editors; it reflects our position that an excessive
theorization of art often results in predictable discursive formats, with little
regard to visual experimentation. This is why it would also be fair to point
was materialized thanks to some of the
interventions that cannot always be closely reproduced in the publication
format.
In any case, we believe that what can be reproduced or evoked are
the ideas, proposals and artistic works of all those who for two days came
from different universities of the world to the University of Barcelona and
the Museu Art Contemporani de Barcelona to think critically on art and
the cultural complexity of our contemporaneity. The intention of this
publication is to give an account, as much as possible, of much of what
happened at that meeting bearing in mind its link with concrete coordinates
spatial and temporal that have already taken place. As editors we hope
that the exciting debates of those days will be reflected in the selection of
texts that follow: seen retrospectively we are convinced that this is the case.

Rafael Pinilla Sánchez

Christina Grammatikopoulou

Barcelona, September 2017

 CHAPTER ONE

THE GEOASTHETIC HYPOTHESIS:

CONSTRUCTING AND
DECONSTRUCTING TERRITORIES
 THINKING IN LABYRINTH
CARTOGRAPHIC BEHAVIOUR IN TIMES
OF DELOCATED CAPITALISM

DIANA PADRÓN ALONSO

The fetishism of an abstract economics is being transformed into the

fetishism of an abstract economic space.1
Henri Lefebvre

To say that contemporary culture has shown interest in the

reconfiguration of the Western geographical imaginary in recent decades is
to state the obvious. Apart from certain precursors from the second half of
the 20th century, we have been witnessing an unquestionable proliferation
of artistic practices directed towards questioning the model of cartographic
representation of Modernity. A monocentric cartographic model, universal
and authoritative, which did not match the precepts of a new globalized
society, which is polycentric and multicultural. These artistic approaches
insisted on non-recognition with the image of a world standardized by the
processes of western colonizations, often through intervening with and
manipulating maps, at times even by using violence against the cartographic
object itself.
This phenomenon emerged within the setting of what Franco Farinelli
has called the risis of cartographic reason 2, which came to correspond
with the translation of poststructuralist criticism in the field of Social
Sciences. In this sense, the work of geographers such as Brian Harley and
David Woodward constituted a real landmark, which appealed to the
cartographic text 3 It was, in fact, within the
framework of the urn itself, where the question of geography

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1991), 351.

2 Franco Farinelli Crisi della ragione cartográfica (Torino: Einaudi, 2009).
3 Cartographica 26 (2), (1989), 1-
20, and Brian Harley and David Woodward, The History of Cartography (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992).
48 Thinking in Labyrinth Cartographic Behaviour in Times
of Delocated Capitalism

and more particularly of cartography took its place as one of the main
problems affecting the question of language. Norman Malcon, a student and
biographer of Wittgenstein, told us how his mentor had formulated the

newspaper.4 According to Malcon, the map, which recreated the scene of a

traffic accident, unleashed the idea of the linguistic proposition in
. More recently, the so-called spatial turn has entered
the scene and, by highlighting the methodological focus that emanates from
the premise that cartography is a literary text, has attempted to influence the
spatial aspects of the political, taking into account the visual specificity of
cartographic language.

Fig. 1. Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America, 1987, commissioned by The Public Art
Fund for Spectacolor, Times Square, New York, courtesy of the artist.

With regards to this, Karl Schlögel has predicted that it will be precisely

from Geography to Semiotics, from the History of Art and Literature to

4See Norman Malcon, Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2000) and Franco Farinelli, Del mapa al laberinto (Barcelona: Icaria, 2013).
 Diana Padrón Alonso 49

Politics. 5 This has been the trigger for the approaches that have emerged
in the transversal framework of the incipient Cultural Studies, an
environment which has prospered a whole line of work named for now
Geoaesthetics. A line of work that has given its name to its own panel in
which the present article was framed in the International Conference
Critical Cartography of Art & Visuality in the Global Age echoing the
tests carried out by contemporary culture in order to cause a turn with
respect to the Euclidian conception of space, in favour of a sort of
polyphonic cartography . Nevertheless, an approach to this geoaesthetic
framework should not break away from criticism that considers the role that
the consolidation of delocated capitalism has played in discrediting the
modern map.

Fig. 2. Mark Lombardi, World Finance Corporation and Associates, c.1970-84,

Miami-Ajman-Bogota-Caracas (7th version) 1999, courtesy of Donald Lombardi
and Pierogi Gallery.

5Karl Schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and

Geopolitics (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2016), xx.
50 Thinking in Labyrinth Cartographic Behaviour in Times
of Delocated Capitalism

The new dominant ideology was consolidated after the geopolitical

reconfigurations resulting from the events of 1989 to 2001, and demanded
a new form of geographical imagination: a geographical imagination that
would generate a new cartographic paradigm. A plural, polycentric and
dislocated cartography; one no longer designed to reveal the extent of the
world as the physical distances have been overcome, nor to delimit
sovereign states as capital is constructed as a supranational power, nor to
given that the enemy is no longer localized, but
rather directed towards articulating financial and social relations around the
world. A new geographical imagination that takes form through a cognitive
cartography, to which certain formulations from the field of Philosophy of
Science have undoubtedly contributed, in particular the Theory of Complex
Systems, where the networks of flows constituted the basis of development
until the current virtual era. In fact, as Franco Farinelli would indicate, the
networks were born long before the Internet, or that which is the same: the
culture-Internet was already prefigured in the railway network and in the
metro flow diagrams.6
These new rhetorics awoke the sympathy of a good part of the critical
sphere, having in their space the concept of the rhizome that Deleuze and
Guattari defined as a ramified unit, with multiple vanishing lines and
changing directions, that did not have an established order, and which
responded to a heterogeneous and deterritorialized reality.7 Unlike the

connectable in all its dimensions, detachable, alterable, susceptible to

receiving constant modifications. 8 The rhizome is in fact the concept that
defines the Mille Plateux Project:

designate something very special: a continuous, self-vibrating region of

intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination
point or external end.
other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to
form or extend a rhizome.9

Del mapa al laberinto, 82.

7
See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 12.
8 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 12.
9 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 21-

22.
 Diana Padrón Alonso 51

Fig. 3. Mark Lombardi, Detail of World Finance Corporation and Associates, c.

1970-84, Miami-Ajman-Bogota-Caracas (7th version) 1999, courtesy of Donald
Lombardi and Pierogi Gallery.

Nevertheless we could link the concept of deterritorialization with the

their context; the conception of the deterritorialized that Deleuze and

Guattari proposed is presented as a change of paradigm in cartographic
terms, as it alludes to not only a loss of territory, but rather to a loss in the
territory itself, in this way invalidating the idea of orientation that
characterized modern cartography and reactivating, as we will elaborate
upon hereinafter, the metaphor of the labyrinth.
The concept of deterritorialization was further reinforced by the
enthusiasm surrounding the idea of mobility and nomadism, which
particular interpretations have detached from the renowned chapter Treatise
on Nomadology by Deleuze and Guattari themselves.10 As Pascal Gielen
noted, the fragmentary appropriation and the positive aura currently given

10 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 351.

52 Thinking in Labyrinth Cartographic Behaviour in Times
of Delocated Capitalism

to these concepts, fundamentally by a wide sector of artists and curators,

Gielen:

A nomadic existence is extremely functional for an economy that is

progressively less driven by production, or we could even say by
consumption, and more by a hyper-dynamic of liquid assets. 11

Fig. 4. Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autorretrato ciego escapándome de mí mismo,

tratando de record , 2013, courtesy
of Kurimanzutto Gallery.

11 El
arte no es la política / la política no es el arte (Madrid: Brumaria, 2015).
 Diana Padrón Alonso 53

Fig. 5. Abraham Cruzvillegas, Detail of Autorretrato ciego escapándome de mí

mismo, tratando de record Mille plateaux , 2013,
courtesy of Kurimanzutto Gallery.

The economic abstraction that shapes liquid capital thus coincides with
the emergence of an abstract cartography which, due to not being
measurable in geometric terms, remains subordinate to the quantitative, as
Henri Lefebvre would suggest.12 The same author would have also have
asserted that the aforementioned cartographic abstraction would more
resemble a spider web than a drawing or plan.13 The geographical metaphor
of the rhizome as a centred space, with a non-hierarchical and non-
meaningful order; would coincide more with that which various theorists
come t -Chul Han:

12 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 352.

13 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 118.
54 Thinking in Labyrinth Cartographic Behaviour in Times
of Delocated Capitalism

That is why it is perceived as noise. By virtue of brevity, they do not develop

relations.14

Fig. 6. Eyal Weizman, Oush Grab military base, 2014,

Architecture documentary series, video directed by Ana de Sousa, courtesy of
Uncube Magazine.

Thus, different arguments that question the political possibilities of these

new cartographic forms are summarized, in their approximation to
neoliberal logic, in their ideological abstraction and in their operative
ambiguity. In this way, Eyal Weizman has linked the clear interest

with the new military techniques developed there. There would be nothing
new in establishing how the development of the latest cartography has often
advanced at the hand of the military. In this sense, the way in which Eyal
Weizman would define this new cartographic conception deserves our
attention:

-
l rent in spatial, organizational and temporal

14 Byung-Chul Han, En el enjambre (Barcelona: Herder, 2014).

 Diana Padrón Alonso 55

terms. In spatial terms in contrast to linear operations (what Naveh calls

authority of border lines, on a distinction between front, rear and depth, and
where military columns progress from outside into the city swarming
seeks to conduct its attacks from the inside out and in all directions
simultaneously. Lines of movements are not straight but tend to progress in
wild zig-zags to disorient the enemy. The traditional manoeuvre paradigm,
characterized by the simplified geometry of Euclidean order, is thus

fascination of the military with spatial models and modes of operation put
forth by theorists like Deleuze and Guattari, who themselves drew
inspiration from guerrilla organizations and nomadic wars.15

Fig. 7. Constant, New Babylon, 1963,

Collection. © Constant, VEGAP, 2017, picture by Tony Coll.

Thus, we understand how new military strategies are articulated as a

complex geometry, constituted by a network of systems, interwoven by
information technology which tries to describe military operations from the
logic of simultaneity, overlapping, asymmetry and imbalance.

15 Eyal Walking through walls. Soldiers as architects in the Israeli

in Radical Philosophy 136 (March/April 2006), 8-22.
56 Thinking in Labyrinth Cartographic Behaviour in Times
of Delocated Capitalism

Fig. 8. Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, The Network of
Global Corporate Control, 2011.16

One of the great projects of modern military cartography has been the
construction of a world map with the scale 1:1.000.000, as was the
International Map of the World sponsored by the League of Nations and
developed thanks to the Second World War17, but as Jorge Luis Borges
up
tearing apart that enlarged map. 18 The situacionists had already observed
the atomization and fragmentation of the everyday life to which what they
call la société du spectacle had arrived, in their cartographic experiments.
These experiments took form based on an anticipatory willingness, in
numerous urban maze projects, which were believed to be enforceable
. 19 Franco Farinelli has
plane

and the power of the city, represented in the figure of the Egyptian pyramid

In PLOS ONE (October 2011), online at:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0025995.
17
See Norman J.W. Thrower, Maps and Civilization. Cartography in the Culture
and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
18 Jorge Luis Borges Collected Ficciones (New
York: Penguin, 1998).
19 See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1970).
 Diana Padrón Alonso 57

or the Mesopotamian ziggurat20. Farinelli suggests that the labyrinth is thus

rigorous with the myth itself, we could say that both the situationists as well
as Franco Farinelli forget that the labyrinth is inhabited by the Minotaur.

Fig. 9. Libia Posada, Installation of Signos cardinales, 2008, courtesy of the artist.

If we take the metaphor developed by Yanis Varoufakis as a point of

reference, the labyrinth is the chaotic flow of the world economy, a chaotic
flow which, nevertheless, is tightly controlled by the Global Minotaur. The
Global Minotaur comes into play after Paul Volker, who was president of

Warwick University. That is, the process of indebtedness and the creation
of private money, which has come to be known as financialization.21 In a
more evident way, in the supposed cartographic democratization that new
tools such as Google, Facebook and Twitter offer us, we find ourselves lost
before a complex and controlled system of networks that make up the swarm
of the late-capitalist rhizosphere . Following these arguments, we could
even add that, in its entangled nature, capitalism developed as a form close
to the mafia: rhizome-like groups articulated in gangs and packs which,
paradoxically, Deleuze and Guattari proposed as the opposition to the type

20Farinelli, Crisi della ragione cartográfica, 192.

21See Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur. America, Europe and the Future of
Global Economy (New York: Zed Books, 2011).
58 Thinking in Labyrinth Cartographic Behaviour in Times
of Delocated Capitalism

of arborescent groups where the bodies of power are concentrated.22 In this

manner, the power of capital reaches its objective of ideological
concealment, departing from the ludic metaphor of the labyrinth. It is in the
labyrinth of the globalized world that that which Celeste Olalquiaga named
psychasthenia:
23
, has its place.

Fig. 10 & 11. Libia Posada, Details of Signos cardinales, 2008, courtesy of the artist.

the qualities of
the navigator must be recovered; we must learn, as Jacques Attali would
announce, to think in labyrinth.24 A pending exercise would be to address
the possibility of other cartographic behaviours based on the hermeneutics
of geographical experience, and from there, in the words of Éric Dardel
al understanding. 25
Cartographies of negativity, sedimented cartographies, cosmological
cartographies and other possible cartographies are still today waiting to be

22
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 365.
23
Quoted in Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000).
24 Quoted in Farinelli, Crisi della ragione cartográfica.
25 Éric Dardel, L'Homme et la Terre: nature de la réalité géographique (Paris:

Editions du CTHS, 1990).

 Diana Padrón Alonso 59

taken into consideration. The so-called embodied cartographies point to the

necessity of reterritorializing life, starting with the body as the first battle
field. But just as we propose in this brief communication, a critical drift
surrounding contemporary cartographic practice must obligatorily start with
an analysis that allows us to evidence how our own cultural production is
found combined in the inside of the narrative of the dominant culture. This
is perhaps what Jacques Attali was referring to when he encouraged us to
uding
to in an eloquent story included in the epilogue of his tale El hacedor:

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space
with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes,
rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he
dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of
his own face.26

26 Collected Ficciones.