Selves and Territories in Science Fiction

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Stitch and Split explores the joint, the interstices, between these two registers which might be considered opposed, science and fiction, and their reciprocal contamination. Science fiction as a zone of tension that amalgamates imaginary and real, utopia and dystopia, flesh and machine; the use of intrusion, incongruity and discrepancy as a system of resistance and a tool for questioning the present. Science fiction is not an oracle that can predict the future more or less exactly, but a critical, inventive, cross-genre/gender and cross-disciplinary discourse on the body, identity and contemporary territories.

 

Stitch and Split mixes ingredients to try to encourage fruitful movements from one to the other, starting from the idea that the most productive encounters take place through the qualities of individuals or groups who converse with one another regardless of any a priori linked to their place on the ladder of the elites or cultural capital. They also take place where the categories of seriousness, credibility, entertainment and absurdity become more complex.

After the first episode of Stitch and Split in Barcelona (Fundacio Antoni Tapies), the second episode in Seville (Universidad internacional de Andalucia), the third episode is taking place in Antwerp Belgium. If you want to know the programme of the coming events, click on programme!


And so Stitch and Split proposed in Spain :

– at Fundació Antoni Tàpies, a space with fluctuating functions:

>> encounters between participants of different origins and practices: scientists, fans, artists, critics, writers, etc.

>> books, videos and CD-ROM for consultation, plus accessible and distributable resources: photocopies, printouts to take away

>> video projections of experimental films and cartoons

- at the Filmoteca, showings where popular films are intermingled with experimental or scientific works

- an interactive internet database (http://www.stitch-and-split.org) which provides complementary resources and downloadable files

- a publication which, based on the same principle, will mix theory and fiction, texts by fans, theoreticians, writers, scientists (in preparation)

Through/between those processes, Stitch and Split will be exploring science fiction as an environment, a tool, a platform for thinking a situated present: the new forms of colonisation of territories and bodies, cyberspace as a ground of identity and not an abstraction without race or sex, encounters between the virtual, the organic and the mechanical, contemporary mythologies of procreation and otherness, cyborgs and androids as figures of the Other and of oneself, exploited work machine and reproductive machine, synonym of slave or freedom, the permeability and heterogeneity of identity, the body as the result of a scientific process of creation...

A second episode of Stitch and Split took place in Sevilla, 17-20 May 2004, part of the programme arteypensamiento of the International University of Andalucía (UNIA arteypensamiento).

Programme coordinated by BNV producciones.