Desire, in whatever dimension it is considered, is never an undifferentiated energy, it is never a disorder. There are no universals, there is no bestial essence of desire. Desire is always the mode of production of something, desire is always the mode of construction of something.

Félix Guattari

The main objective of this elective Seminar that can also be registered as an Internship Seminar is twofold. As the title announces, we will be attending the conceptual proposal of the digital platform of contemporary art Backroom Caracas, as well as an exploration of the archival instinct and a look towards the cities of the future.

The main objective of this elective seminar, which can also be an internship seminar, is twofold. As the title announces, we will be attending the conceptual proposal of the digital contemporary art platform Backroom Caracas, as well as an exploration of the archival instinct and a look towards the cities of the future.

The student will enjoy two directions whose probable articulations will move her to different urban settings, from where she will raise and demarcate her field of work and research. On the one hand, we will hold discussions framed within the program of Backroom Caracas, which we will excavate, potentially, in terms of the contemporary break and the city that summons us. In the same way, we will generate singularities of creation to investigate and produce content for this art platform, which “emerged in 2013 as a digital publication to contribute to the discernment of the arts from conversations with creators and thinkers… Today …it is a hybrid platform that hosts and shares the work of national and international artists through our program of exhibitions… The fertility of creators and the complex moment of Venezuelan reality is the formula that encourages our projects.” On the other hand, rooting ourselves in our School, we will delve into the archival instinct and the cities of the future.

The participants will thus be offered a hybrid program of various semiotic flows that will seek to stimulate them and lead them into the final project. One will be that of encounters and creations with Backroom, its guests, and the Caracas that the platform projects today from its technological, artistic and didactic devices, with the clear intention of constructing a desiring, interactive audience, capable of generating answers: true processes of singularization and the micropolitical, considering that «every micropolitical problem consists precisely in trying to organize the processes of singularization at the very level at which they emerge» (Guattari and Rolnik). Secondly, the students will follow a series of sessions on the contemporary notion of archive (Spieker, Derrida, Benjamin, Foster, Foucault, Rancière, Appadurai, Chakrabarti) and on Caracas in terms of image.

The final work will be a recording or a sketch of the searches inside the ludic archives that the participants will generate ––their specific strokes at stake, their own mapping of desire: exploratory works, articulated directly from the agencies, the syntax (writings), and modes of semiotization about the past, the present, and the imminent future of Caracas in the image of each student.

School of Literature – UCV and Backroom Caracas

Elective Seminar / Second Semester of Literature

(Also Academic Research Internship Seminar)

Imparted by professors Camila Pulgar and Natasha Tiniacos (until August)

Semester 01-2016