is the name of the research developed in Catalyst 1, where we work around the focus Coexistence spaces and uses of communal spaces.
GOZADERA explores the tools of resistance of dissident, racialized and allied bodies in the face of biocontrol policies and in response to necropolicies, denial of rights and a state of alarm that has failed to ensure any type of well-being, quite the opposite, it has highlighted a significant humanitarian and affective unrest, worsening the situation of inequality and isolation of those collectives. Moreover, its goal is to use those tools in collective imagination proposals and in the political potentialities that occur in the enjoyment of the bodies.
For the activation of this first Catalyst we invited Nancy Garín (working in the academic field), Lina Vanesa Lopez Ortiz (subaltern critic and social movements) and Isamit Morales (multidisciplinary and artistic practices). The Larre team has held meetings with them during the period October 2020-February 2021.
During the last year we have experienced how COVID-19 has directly affected how we relate to public and private spaces, with a number of free movement restrictions and social distancing imposed and sanctioned by homogenising health protocols, in a society that is, nevertheless, complex and diverse. This is a new scenario, and we believe that it is pertinent and necessary to point out two facts: on the one hand, public spaces have turned into control and asepsis locations with little room for the production of non-normative relations. On the other, private spaces, those in which we stayed during lockdown and in which we are still advised to stay, have reinforced and still do, in most cases, care-taking in family structures and ties of kinship.
One of the specificities of the GOZADERA research is its understanding and taking advantage of the in-COVID scenario as an opportunity for review, background exploration, proposition and transformation. Bearing in mind such motivation, this research has looked into:
(1) the opening and reclaiming of coexistence community spaces;
(2) the use of the non-normative body as interaction and experimentation medium for building communities;
(3) enjoying as a method for inhabiting and fostering communal management.
GOZADERA has been developing in direct connection to Barcelona’s migrant communities with a number of diverse agents and collectives, whose needs, claims, experiences and knowledges have been fundamental in the research process. These agents and collectives are the following:
Radio Cava-ret (communities building project), Karaoke Inmigrante (research and experimentation project started by Samu-el Céspedes, Violeta Ospina and Patricia del Razo), Miss ex la reina del electroguarritrop, Tic Tac (workshop for militant, antiracist, transfeminist and critical interventions), Kantina Migrante (Julieta Lara’s healthy food and self-management project born out of the urge for making tools from the migrants’ realities, times and capacities), Suversión Film Minuto (space for confluence, creation and production of emerging audiovisual processes based on trial and error), Ervin Collazos (dancer and choreographer-ethnopedagogue from Colombia), Héctor Acuña aka Frau diamanda (transvestite artist audiovisual-drag, independent curator and cultural infector), Veronika Arauzo (sex worker, transgender unionist and activist), Jesús Arpal Moya (artist, member of Equipo Jeleton and partner of La Caníbal cooperative, among other initiatives in which he participates), Diego Falconi (teacher, writer, human rights lawyer, with a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature), Espectros de lo urbano (research group on hegemonic discourses about the city and critical urban theory), Futch Club (queer day space), Diana Colta aka Xeno Bitch (performer, activist and cultural researcher from Romania), Alfred Martinez Venegas (anticolonial artivist, sudaka performer and dancer from Lima), Teresa Cienfuegos (dancer and music journalist from Valencia), Juan David Galindo (artist from Bogotá) and El Lokal (libertarian corner providing resources and infrastructures for movements and struggles for social transformation).
The Catalyst research has been collectivised and has been organised in Pre-Demonstration Session 1 and Session 2, and in the GOZADERA Demonstration, taking place in Barcelona last 20 February 2021. It is also presented and shared in the GOZADERA’s Manifest and other presentations of the materials and pulsions compiled during the collective research process of this first Catalyst.
Research carried out in this Catalyst GOZADERA has received the funding from the Research and Innovation Grants, in the field of Theory, of the Government of Catalonia (2020).
From experiences and knowledges exchanged and connected in the Catalyst GOZADERA, the open process of the theoretical and practical, collective and collaborative research keeps on evolving in the following CHAPTERS: