El avance del conocimiento no disminuye la extensión de lo desconocido

Screening of Terra incógnita by Lluís Escartín with an intervention by Paula Pérez-Roda.

Terra Incógnita captures a few minutes of life-earth in the Penedés, some twenty years ago. Stopped in a synchrony at the end of the era, it shows spaces and activities in the last vestige of manual labour in the countryside. A scale made to measure for the body, followed by the regularisation of the countryside converted into industry. Today, on the threshold of imagining a plausible de-technification of the world, Terra Incognita can become the document of a collective memory of multiple interpretations. To try, (re/des)understand, (re/des)place, (re/des)absorb:

Re-understanding, re-placing and re-absorbing. On this path we ask ourselves about what is foreign to that which we assume as our own: occidentalities.

De-understanding, de-collating and de-absorbing. On this path we understand what is possible and proper to that which we feel as foreign: a body in its becoming rural.

The screening of this piece will be accompanied by an intervention by Paula Pérez-Roda, who will take Terra Incógnita as a starting point for a speculative exercise on the possibilities of articulating memory, perception & the future outside the discourses of identity.

"I read an interview in which the most famous cuir theorist said: 'we live in anti-intellectual times'. I don't think she was referring to a takeover of the public sphere by uneducated bodies, but to the way in which in the last decade educated bodies are furiously educating themselves in a way of thinking with pretensions to totality and self- and other-blame. That the advance of knowledge does not diminish the extent of the unknown means that difference and displacement are in constant supplementarity, as Derrida would say, and are therefore irreducible to grand frameworks. More like the microscope-telescope relationship: the stars do not deny the existence of cells".

Paula Pérez-Roda is a researcher, editor and cultural critic. She is working on a doctoral thesis at Princeton University on practices and theories of the verbal developed in Spain between 1909 and 1936. She has written essays and articles on the technologies, perceptions and interfaces of literate orders and the verbal and performative arts in specialised and general publications such as Revista Concreta, BeatBurguer, the Anuario de Literatura Comparada, the Anuario de Glotopolítica, Kamchatka or L/E/N/G/U/A/J/E/o, as well as different art books. He is part of the collective of selection of voices and sounds tacoderaya and of the public thought project BOYA~célula.

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