Bella Pi˜Neiro, Marıa. 2019. Returning Life to Life: the Factory of Cine Sin
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Bella Pineiro,˜ Mar´ıa. 2019. Returning Life to Life: The Factory of Cine sin Autor. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis] https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/27330/ The version presented here may differ from the published, performed or presented work. Please go to the persistent GRO record above for more information. If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Goldsmiths, University of London via the following email address: [email protected]. The item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. For more information, please contact the GRO team: [email protected] Returning Life to Life: The Factory of Cine sin Autor by María Bella Piñeiro Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 Curatorial/Knowledge Department of Visual Cultures Goldsmiths College University of London Supervised by Stefan Nowotny I hereby declare that the following work is my own. María Bella Piñeiro Corcubión, Spain: September 2019 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to various people. It is thanks to them all that I was able to embark on these intense, profound and engaging years of study. I would like to thank Irit Rogoff for challenging the curatorial, for encouraging professionals to rethink it as a field of knowledge and for making it happen by intervening the University. Thanks for having supported this space, time, colleagues, study, infrastructure, legitimacy and generosity with the help of many fellows. And many thanks for the freedom we have always been given to make our contributions. My special gratitude to Stefan Nowotny for guiding and taking care of me during these years of research and writing – for his consistency and dedication. I want to thank him and also celebrate our trust, commitment and solidarity, despite the conditions that surround a research process today. On a personal level, I also want to thank Frank for his unquestionable support, for putting his life in this and for doing so believing that this research is both meaningful and important despite the difficulties that a thesis entails. Because, beyond all the exhaustion, I have always found love. To Mateo and Helio this ‘book’ is like a mystery. I thank them for their constant admiring glances and their patience. Further thanks to my parents: to my father because he has always been supportive of my motivations; to my mother and brothers for their faith. And finally, I want to thank Eva Fernández and Gerardo Tudurí, for the courage and honesty with which they lived the Cine sin Autor project. Thanks also for their constantly welcoming attitude, their support and their trust. 3 ABSTRACT Returning life to life: the factory of Cine sin Autor is an invitation to pursue the curatorial in its capacity to reorganize production and challenge the logics that the project of capitalism has established and expanded in work, and in life through work. In so doing, technology will play a necessary and fundamental role for readdressing both work and life in production. Over the last centuries, emancipation has been paradoxically tied to production and production to economy and technology. Despite the strength with which production was introduced by political economy in early modernity as a power at men and women’s disposal, today it seems that such a power ever more enfeebles us, as though it were not on our side. This research looks to the production that was once at our disposal but that today appears lost. It does so in order to recall its potential from within the field of art to intervene the paradigm that political economy set in modernity to benefit capitalism. In this research, production is instantiated by the factory and the factory is presented as the model that inaugurated an archetype in production that ever since has being reiterated and expanded by employing work for capturing life; even to the extent that today we lack the knowledge about how to live. Through the artistic practice of the Cine sin Autor collective, and, more specifically, taking their proposal of an authorless cinematographic factory as the exemplary case study of this thesis, I problematize the archetype of production as determined by the industrial factory in modernity, reproduced and expanded today through the diffuse and the social factories. The Cine sin Autor model of production is presented and discussed in its capacity to intervene the modern factory archetype to reorganize production with the intention of returning life to life. Returning life to life means to be able to see life again, and in seeing life also recognize it, and in its recognition be able to take care of it. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Enquiring the curatorial 10 To read what was never written 11 Under Jupiter's transit 13 A refusal to live that way 15 Cine sin Autor (CsA) model of artistic production 17 The factory and the archetype 19 Human-machine agency 21 Gestures 22 FIRST PART A genealogy of the factory and the first archetype for production CHAPTER 1 The industrial factory: rendering the archetype 27 `Enhancing' work and life 33 The `power' of the industrial factory 38 Human-Machinic agency: technics and technology 42 Parasitism and punishment: enhancing technology 46 The technological lineage: continuities and discontinuities 50 CHAPTER 2 The diffuse factory and the social factory: the archetype expands 54 Exiting the factory as resistance 58 The diffuse scientific management 63 Art entering the factory 68 For a lead role in a cage 74 The social factory or surplus-value without doing any work 76 CHAPTER 3 The cinematographic factory 81 Cinema's lineage 86 The cinematographic human-machine-value agency 89 5 Vision of life 92 Cinema becomes a factory 95 Exiting the factory 99 Merging into computation 102 INTERMEZZO CHAPTER 4 Cine sin Autor. A decade of an authorless cinematographic practice 108 Pre-cinema 112 Giving vision to life 119 Entering the factory 125 SECOND PART The factory of CsA: a new archetype for production CHAPTER 5 The authorless gesture and language: dissolving power 133 The author(less) and the nos(otros) 137 Language as a common horizon 142 The authorless gesture of disappearance 145 Entering the `house of being' 148 The History of the first language of these lands 154 `Valorising' language 158 CHAPTER 6 The parrhesiastic gesture and the assembly: dissolvin g divisions 163 The assembly in relation to work and life 168 The experimental assembly against divisions and scientific management 171 The assembly in CsA's production 178 The parrhesiastic gesture 181 The risks behind the technological assemblies 187 6 CHAPTER 7 The cinematographic gesture and the experience of life: dissolving 196 subsumption A life 200 Giving vision to life 205 Life becoming technical 211 For returning life to life. The `essential paradox' 215 CONCLUSION 221 NegraBlanca. Nos llaman las estereras 224 Theory and practice 226 BIBLIOGRAPHY 229 7 LIST OF IMAGES Images 1 – 8: Photos of the process of Correspondencias. Video-letter project developed by Tudurí, Baixauli and Fernández with students from secondary schools in Valencia and Cuzco from 2006 to 2008. Images 9-18: Guión. Esto NO es una película. Fragments of the audiovisual documents of the first test of CsA methodology in the Patio Maravillas Social Centre in 2008. Images 19-23: Photos of the process of production of the film ¿De qué? Carried out with a group of teenagers of a secondary school in the Humanes borough in Madrid and released in 2011 at the Medialab-Prado Centre, Madrid. Images 24-29: Photos of the process of production of the film +101 conducted with a group of young people from the Adult Education Centre (CEPA) in Madrid. It is a fiction that portrays the students’ day-to-day concerns. Released in 2012 at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. Images 30-35: Photos of the filmic process Sinfonía tetuán. This is the first film made by neighbours in Tetuan, Madrid in 2009 following CsA’s methodology. Images 36-39: Photos of the process of production of the film Más allá de la verdad. This was the first film produced in the Factory of Cine sin Autor with Gioacchino Di Blassi and his family in 2013. It is a film about Gioacchino´s life. Images 36-39: Photos of Entre nosotros. A film about solitude made in the Factory of Cine sin Autor in 2013 by a group of young people. Images 40-47: Photos of Locura en el colegio. Around thirty children from the Crespo Primary School in Madrid collectively composed a ‘horror story’. Images 48-51: Photos of Vida fácil. A generational portrait in which a group of university students wanted to show their precarious and nomadic reality of residency and work. It started in 2012 as part of the production in the CsA Factory. Images 52-55: Photos of Mátame si puedes. Produced by a collectivity that came from a Psychosocial Rehabilitation Centre in Madrid, this ‘armamentistic comedy’ evolved into a Web-series. The collectivity were involved in production in the CsA Factory longer than any other group. Images 56: Cristobal Simancas (on the staircase) placing a movie screen, c. 1932. Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid. 8 9 INTRODUCTION Enquiring the curatorial 10 To read what was never written The opening title of this introduction is taken from Walter Benjamin’s text ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’. (2005 [1933]; p. 722) Alongside other investigations, Walter Benjamin contributed to the thinking of a philosophy of language by theorizing about language’s transformative abilities. Among the notions with which he engaged in this field and at different stages of his life (e.g.: Benjamin, 1996 [1916] or 1968 [1923]) there is one particular preoccupation that lies behind the provocative encouragement with which Benjamin proposes ‘to read what was never written’.