The Sensuous Transformation
Assemble, Patricia Esquivias, Javier Peñafiel & Rita Rakosnik, Julia Ramírez-Blanco & Paula García-Masedo.
Project developed by Oriol Fontdevila
What is the political value of beauty in the present day?
The Sensuous Transformation presents various proposals for the cohabitation of beauty: against the idea of individual taste or the aestheticization of social and thought systems, in this project beauty is understood as an organising principle and an energising force of knowledge.
Sensual pleasure leads to contact between bodies. This is the path of access, where we relate to each other with alterity, even though this makes us irremediably dependent and therefore vulnerable. Beauty is a provision that ensures life together between different species, while at the same time constituting an attack on any presumption of independence: once desire for another has been aroused, no form of autonomy is worth a thing.
The set of proposals produced for Sensuous Transformation understand beauty in consonance with the challenges of a shared world. Assemble Studio addresses the sensual qualities of environments as the basic principle for the development of ways of life; Patricia Esquivias studies the colonial implications of craft making, while evoking alternative relational possibilities; Javier Peñafiel & Rita Rakosnik set up a mail correspondence with human and non-human agents involved in various struggles that are simultaneously recognised as producers of beauty and political resistance; Júlia Ramírez-Blanco & Paula García-Masedo explore modes of self-organisation from the representations that these very communities, living as they do on the edge, have created for themselves.
