Session by Hamaca for the Santa Mònica Video Tuesdays.
Learning Physics (2012) is an audiovisual essay based on Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). The video raises the importance of reinterpreting history, of reading the present and its possible transformation as an exercise in questioning the experienced; and of vision – how do we see? what do we see for? who has the privilege of handling several points of view and why? why do some people blind others or why do some people deliberately cover their eyes? – When it comes to agreeing on the limits between the variable and the invariable in the imagination. The author, Diego del Pozo Barriuso, is moved and intrigued by the processes that are culturally and politically aimed at making us feel a certain emotion, everything that has to do with the programming and standardisation of emotions in today’s societies. He asks, for example: what affective policies does the economy generate?
The video will be accompanied by the intervention of Júlia Sánchez Cid, who will talk about transgenerational mourning -that is, the power of instincts and memory (collective-corporal-emotional) in the face of violence and imposed silences-; of learning about the pain and pleasure of the LGTBIQ+ collective in the face of rejection, death and loss; of the fallacy of progress and the individual, and the need to know that we are fragile, mortal and interdependent, claiming the creative force of fear and sadness, and the ancestral right to live spiritualities that care for and celebrate us.
As Diego del Pozo argues, paradigm shifts happen in realms other than the scientific and on scales other than the experimental when we change the position in which we collectively position ourselves in the face of fear. By connecting ideas about the detachment from a certain “I” and “we” that has already been, from the action of transitioning, of dying and of creating worlds, it is possible to vindicate the tremendous mobilising force of attending to the spirituality-politics axis.
