Lorenza's Way: Functional diversity and aesthetic disobedience

Lecture by Paul B. Preciado
In English with ASL interpretation
Free, on Zoom

At the beginning of the 1980s, Lorenza Böttner, an art student at the School of Art of Kassel, wrote a thesis about non-conforming artists that she called almost satirically “Disabled?!” Questioning the possibility of using a medical category to unify and identify different practices of artist considered as disabled, Lorenza struggled to create a new critical and exhibition framework for her work to be seen and understood. Who has the right to represent and to exhibit? In which context have the works, practices and knowledges of those that have been considered “disabled” or gender “non-binary” been produced and exhibited? Can an image grant or deny a body political agency? How can a body construct an image to become a political subject? In what frame of representation can a body make itself visible as human? Is there any aesthetic difference between an image made with the hand and another made with the foot, or does this difference lie in a power relationship?

Taking as starting point the art and activist practice of Lorenza Böttner, this talk addresses the relationship between institutional narratives of art history and somatopolitical minorities and calls for a radical transformation of exhibition frameworks and critical discourses.

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About the speaker

Paul B. Preciado is a writer, philosopher, curator and one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and sexual politics. A Fulbright scholar he studied at the New School for Social Research in New York under Agnes Heller and Jacques Derrida. Later he obtained his doctorate in philosophy and the theory of architecture at Princeton University. Among his different assignments, he has been Curator of Public Programs of documenta 14 (Kassel/Athens), Head of Research of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) and has taught philosophy of the Body and Transfeminist Theory at Université Paris VIII-Saint Denis and at New York University.

Following in the footsteps of Michel Faucault, Monique Wittig, Judith Butler and Donna Haraway he is the author of Countersexual Manifesto (trans. 2018); Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in The Pharmacopornographic Era (trans. 2013); Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics (2019); An Apartment in Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (trans. 2020), which are key references for queer, trans and non-binary contemporary art and activism. His last book, Can the monster speak? will be published in English in 2021 by Semiotexte and Fitzcarraldo. He contributes on a regular basis to the print and online journals Libération and Médiapart. He was born in Spain and lives in Paris.