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Fellowship

Fellow 2019/2020

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow David Muñoz Alcántara at Propositions #9: Deserting from the Culture Wars, BAK, Utrecht, November 2019. Photo Tom Janssen.

David Muñoz Alcántara

Artist, architect, and researcher David Muñoz Alcántara’s inquiry deals with nomadism of thought and aesthetic praxis at the intersection of futurity and actuality. His recent work looks at militant poetics and radical critique through arts grounded in liberation struggles against class, gender, and racial enclosures. In practice, he produces contextually grounded installations often involving collective study, drawing, writing, and translation as spaces of politics. He has a DA in Contemporary Art Practice from Aalto University, Espoo; MA in Applied Art and Design at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki; and a license in Architecture from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. He is Founder of the research studio NÆS—Nomad Agency/Archive of Emergent Studies (2011–ongoing), which claims the political space of research, and is a member of the editorial committee of Rab-Rab Press. Muñoz Alcántara lives and works in Helsinki.

David Muñoz Alcántara

Artist, architect, and researcher David Muñoz Alcántara’s inquiry deals with nomadism of thought and aesthetic praxis at the intersection of futurity and actuality. His recent work looks at militant poetics and radical critique through arts grounded in liberation struggles against class, gender, and racial enclosures. In practice, he produces contextually grounded installations often involving collective study, drawing, writing, and translation as spaces of politics. He has a DA in Contemporary Art Practice from Aalto University, Espoo; MA in Applied Art and Design at the University of Helsinki, Helsinki; and a license in Architecture from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City. He is Founder of the research studio NÆS—Nomad Agency/Archive of Emergent Studies (2011–ongoing), which claims the political space of research, and is a member of the editorial committee of Rab-Rab Press. Muñoz Alcántara lives and works in Helsinki.

Fellowship Research Trajectory

David Muñoz Alcántara’s research contributes to debates on aesthetic praxis and addresses notions and theorizations of militancy as practical methodology. It engages contemporary analyses of artistic forms in their entanglement within revolutionary processes, self-determination, and liberation struggles, particularly focusing on the self-determination movements that emerged in arts, architecture, philosophy, and anthropology in 1970s Mexico. Accompanying the 1968 uprisings, concrete examples and exercises of non-fascist and non-dominant living took place, at the same time, challenging the solidity of institutional frameworks. Following their internationalist degree and resonances through the first-hand experience of their activists’ involvements, Muñoz Alcántara’s research intersects and learns from trans-geographic, practical contributions. Theoretically, it builds upon the propositions that art and philosophy are forms of class struggle, and engages art as advanced critical practice and future making. Specifically, Muñoz Alcántara addresses poetry—understood as embodied anti-disciplinary and trans-linguistic forms that move non-hegemonic philosophical debates in entanglements of ideas and emotions—as a historical revolutionary position of subversive interpellation; the relation of art to the care for and practice of truth; and the use of aesthetic positions to counteract ideological impositions. At the same time, his research zooms in on the contradictions and instrumentality of subaltern characters and dialectics around the concepts of people and autonomy. This project unfolds through two conceptual frameworks: the “workshop” as a site for encounters and the “exercise” as a site for activation, temporal-spatial manifestations of inquiring and learning.

Latitude On Air – Unsettling Power Relations

BAK 2019/2020 Fellow Diana McCarty works with Goethe-Institut and her project reboot.fm, both Berlin, to co-create a multi-day long experimental radio program Latitude On Air – Unsettling Power Relations (2020), and exploring ideas of locality, being together, and social justice and legacies of colonialism. As part of the program, co-Fellow David Muñoz Alcántara is commissioned […]

Aliens, Spacetime, Storytelling, and Infrastructure: December Fellows Intensive

In December 2019 the BAK 2019/2020 Fellows gather for their third Fellows Intensive, co-convened by Fellows Oleksiy Radynski, David Muñoz Alcántara, and Diana McCarty along with BAK. Synthesizing and pushing their own and each other’s individual research trajectories, in December the Fellows visit local institutions like IMPAKT, Casco Art Institute, and Universiteitsmuseum; create and participate […]

Program

sonic science fiction transmission

12 September 2020, 12.00-21.45

Propositions #12: Waves Breaking Walls, Futures in Movement

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