Events / Party Studies. Book launch / workshop with Víctor Aguado & Ramón del Buey
2021-12-06 - / , Madrid
6 and 7 December, 18hrs - 21hrs
El pisito* (Bretón de los Herreros 13, 4º, Madrid)
Join us for the presentation of Party Studies, vol. 1: on house parties, including a presentation of party studies as a project, as well as an open discussion and exploration of festive life - we'll cook dinner, share stories, and revel in hanging out.
Parties are dynamic events in which celebration and festivity shape an experience and construct of sociality. What kinds of lessons might be taken from engaging the party as an expression of togetherness, one that often steers us toward excess? Might the party be appreciated as lending to experimental understandings and practices of communalization?
Party Studies is conceived as a research framework for probing the party as a dynamic and complex expression. The party is posed as an experimental scene of togetherness where festivity, music, delirium, hospitality, aggression and intoxication are set loose as defining principles. As such, the party punctuates instances of passage, escape, bonding, and wreckage, moving from social ritual and ceremonial feasting to celebratory rupture; from small-scale get togethers to all-out raves, from weddings to birthdays, apartments to peripheral territories, parties are defining of sociality as more-than-linguistic.
For our first workshop we welcome participants to speculatively explore the party, and in particular, the theme of House Parties. We will consider the ways in which domestic space is reworked through the house party, often supporting the making of extended families as well as forms of resistance. This includes a consideration of how the party both enables as well as strains forms of sociability, where hospitality and the inhospitable, pain and pleasure interweave and intersect. In this sense, the common world that is a party is equally excessive, tending towards breakage, even violence, and the ache of the hangover. Defining a space of affinity, the party equally exceeds itself, giving way to an erotic intensity where relationality moves toward states of delirium. In addition, opening the home to others is often vital to maintaining forms of community and cultural vitality within contexts of social and political oppression, making of the home a precarious and urgent form of freedom.
Considering these perspectives, we will reflect upon the party and how it can be considered as a critical and creative space for reworking the orders of the (social and political) body, where night-life and the after hours become zones of transformation. In addition, we will also reflect upon the workshop itself as a form of partying, where coming together, discussing and cooking together in El pisito can be taken on as a festive gesture of communal co-creation.
**El pisito is a space of social coexistence and artist residency promoted by AMEE with the support of the Madrid City Council (“Subvención de Espacios Independientes de Creación Contemporánea 2020-2021”).
