Free entry until all seats are filled. Spanish with simultaneous interpretation

Freedom is a very strange thing. Depending on where we situate it, it can be the greatest thing in the world or the worst. For instance, the freedom of historically oppressed people is not the same as market freedom. The same goes for power, in many ways. The power of a despotic sovereign has little to do with bringing creativity to power. But when we consider each of them carefully, both forms of power have been used to govern better. On the one hand, sovereign power governs by threatening to take the life of those who do not obey. On the other, socially distributed power lets us govern ourselves alone, within the pseudo-freedoms that capital grants us to live. They are forms of power with different strategies: forcing one to die or forcing one to live. Freedom and power are a trip.

This Audiovisual Source Code is an invitation to recover the ideas of power and freedom we find in a selection of cinematic narratives. From the desired power to conquer freedom to the dark freedom of exercising power over oneself, we will explore ways of being free or powerful in which we are all contingent, but you are necessary.

Rubén Martínez is member of La Hidra Cooperativa and the Observatorio Metropolitano de Barcelona. Both projects are part of Fundación de los Comunes, a network driven by various experiences of autonomous research, education, publishing and political intervention practiced in social movements in Spain. He is also an FPI Grant Fellow, linked with TRANSGOB research and he is currently pursuing his PhD at the Institute for Government and Public Policy (IGOP) at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. His research analyzes public policies that foster social innovation, their articulation with community based processes and changes in social power relations. Personal blog: http://leyseca.net

@rubenmartinez

What is an Audiovisual Source Code?

Our memories are fragments of a living archive. We are constantly producing and reinterpreting images. In fact, we are constituted by them. We feel the need to explain ourselves through audiovisual means.

The source code is a combination of lines of text that allow a computer to execute a program. Sharing source codes is the basis of free software. In this sense, the Audiovisual Source Code lies somewhere between the audiovisual conference talk and a film screening with commentary. It is neither a screening nor a conference, but a hybrid format: a game. It is a theatrical format in which the invited speaker delves into his or her audiovisual references to trace out an audiovisual taxonomy around a theme or research project. The Audiovisual Source Code mixes personal, biographical experience with the interpretation of audiovisual fragments in its search for a sort of common imaginary.