Gelatine 2019
Gelatine, the festival of art and thought that emphasises a nature constantly under construction, is back for a second year, bringing us narratives that question the very notion of the “individual” by admitting that the “alien” has always existed and is in fact a vital part of ourselves.
With a programme of talks, performances, workshops and concerts, Gelatine aims to appeal to a wide audience, offering them different tools with which to interpret (and create new forms of action for) a present marked by turbo-capitalist logics, accelerated technological development and anthropogenic toxicity.
Gelatine underscores the mutual colonisation of the technological and biological and introduces us to narratives that are changing the very notion of the “individual” and redrawing the boundaries between different life forms, as exemplified by inter-species genetic modification and manipulation or the growing awareness that the human body is largely occupied by non-human genomes, as the mutual constitution of different species permeates practically every known life form.
The festival also highlights the existence of other “ways of thinking”, looking beyond the classic concepts of anthropomorphic or brain-centred cognition to include plants, animals, fungi, bacteria and slime mould, as well as organic and synthetic (in the broadest sense of the word) species. In fact, phenomena such as the hyperstitional nature of the stock market reveal that algorithmic computing is not mere an abstract mathematical tool but an independent way of thinking, as its operations extend to abstract forms beyond direct human understanding and control.
Over the course of three days, we will engage in intense speculation on Gelatine’s chosen themes through talks and other activities, embracing fiction as a method that opens up new possibilities and can even shape the future. Accelerationism meets radical black philosophy in a 2.0 version of Afrofuturism; the planet becomes a laboratory; 3D bodies acquire volumes that challenge the very notion of “body”; jellyfish reveal the secret of their regenerative powers; and the use of medications not controlled by the pharmaceutical monopoly helps us to “plantamorphise”.
