About the project

13/12/2009 | ABOUT THE PROJECT |

SOFT POWER OPEN ARCHIVE
On display from Saturday 15th December 2012.
Altes Finanzamt: Schönstedtstraße 7, Berlin.

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Soft Power is a curatorial project on biotechnology and life sciences.

With the development of genetic engineering and the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries, biotechnology has definitely entered everyday life. Today, we consume on a regular basis genetically modified food containing hormones, antibiotics and/or chemical substances. We design our bodies through prosthesis, implants, plastic surgery, anti-aging cosmetics. We modify our mental state and our behaviour with legal or illegal drugs and our sexuality with hormonal treatments like Viagra, contraceptive pills or testosterone. In 2003 the Human Genome Project completed the decodification of the human genome, indicating the beginning of what is already known as The Century of Biology, an age supposed to question the limits of the natural and the very idea of the living.

Biotechnology, embodied in the culture of the design of the self, takes us back to the old dream of a re-programmable subjectivity, the possibility of a destiny driven by genetics and life sciences. With its promise of a high-tech humanity, it opens a new chapter in the never-ending conversation initiated by Michel Foucault around the concept of biopolitics: the governance of population through the control of the body, the mind and every aspect of life, specially those directly related to subjectivity. Today the myth of the cyborg returns in the form of commodities supplied by the bioindustry global market. Research centers stock and classify biological resources like cells, seeds, sperm, ovules, organs and tissues. Intellectual property laws exclude them from the public domain while the pharmaceutical and agro-industrial complex patents, manipulates and distributes them in health centers and supermarket shelves. In the biotech age, we/cyborgs are not only the result of a set of technologies and scientific protocols but a compilation of cultural codes, as well as social and economic relations playing on a global ground. A biopolitical narrative that, in the last decade, has also been joined by the arts.Soft Power as a cultural program positions itself right in this frame, where artistic practices meet the new language of biopolitics. Practices exploring the interdisciplinary crossing of art and science, but also the real conditions of scientific research today: its impact on the lifestyles and the categories of imagination that are put into work by it and the international network of bioindustry.

Thanks to XL terrestrials for the proofreading!

Programme 2009
Exhibition with: subRosa, Bureau d’Etudes, Boryana Rossa, Rachel Mayeri, Sally Gutierrez.
Documentation display: CAE Defense Fund.
Documentary screenings: “We feed the world” by Erwin Wagenhofer, “The world according to Monsanto” by Marie-Monique Robin.
Talks and discussions: Bureau d’Etudes, subRosa, Beatriz Preciado.
Performances: subRosa, Pierre Bongiovanni.

Programme 2010
Workshops: subRosa, Beatriz Preciado, Maria Ptqk.
Screenings: “Organ Market” by Sally Gutierrez, “XXY” by Lucia Puenzo.
Talks and discussions: Ignacio Mendiola, Itziar Ziga.
Performance: Marianela Ruiz León.

Publication La Bella Durmiente
A newspaper by Bureau d´Etudes.

Catalogue
Maria Ptqk (Ed.)
Works and texts by: Beatriz Preciado, Boryana Rossa, Burreau d´Études, Critical Art Ensemble, Erwin Wagenhofer, Ignacio Mendiola, Itziar Ziga, Lucía Puenzo, Marianela Ruiz León, Marie-Monique Robin, Rachel Mayeri, Sally Gutierrez, subRosa, Vandana Shiva, Walter Mignolo.
Graphic design: Susanne Probst.
Published by consonni, 2012.

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