<div dir="ltr"><div><font size="2"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif"><a href="http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/mitra-azar/capsula">New podcast: </a> <b>The Italian artist Mitra Azar </b>talks about points of view and the disembodiment
of the gaze, drones, borders, nomadism, never-ending archives,
processes, the “artropocene”, and conflict zones as a breeding ground
for creative practices.<br><br><a href="http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/mitra-azar/capsula">Link: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/mitra-azar/capsula</a><br><br><b>Music samples by Filastine</b><br><br>Mitra Azar is not the real name
of the artist known as Mitra Azar. It is a pseudonym he took refuge in
after being arrested in Iran in 2009 in the middle of an artistic
project, which became one of the few records of the Iranian grassroots
movement and the violent repression by the Ahmadinejad government in the
lead up to his re-election.<br><br>Azar is a self-proclaimed
“eclectic-schizo-creative-nomadic-sponge”, a description that provides
some clues as to his work. His practice moves between a range of very
different formats including live cinema and documentary. He readily
mixes activist protest with theory and philosophy, generating an
infinite, networked (an)archive activated through live cinema. <br><br>Azar
explores personal, aesthetic, and geopolitical boundaries as part of
his practice-based mutant research. In his work, borders, censorship,
geological eras, personal comfort zones and humanitarian crises interact
with ideas based on the symbolic limits of images and the disembodiment
of the gaze. His activism is based on field work in the most literal
sense: a direct immersion in conflict zones that has led him into what
he says are “some of the strangest places on the planet”. This fatal
attraction for the aesthetics of crisis has taken him from Fukushima to
the Gaza Strip and from Lebanon to China as a way of bringing the border
– “a space that has had to forsake creativity” – back into the centre
of artistic production.<br><br>SON[I]A talks to Mitra Azar about points
of view and the disembodiment of the gaze, drones, borders, nomadism,
never-ending archives, processes, the “artropocene”, and conflict zones
as a breeding ground for creative practices. <br><br><b>Timeline</b><br><b>02:35</b> From thoughts to actions<br><b>03:40</b> Videoteppisti <br><b>04:12</b> Scars and borders<br><b>08:06</b> Live cinema: images resisting the will of the artist<br><b>11:52</b> Movie making as a live form and the archive as a trace<br><b>12:50</b> Artchaeology<br><b>14:00</b> The impossibility of finishing an art piece<br><b>14:32</b> Neologisms: words are missing<br><b>15:05</b> Making the archive visible: street screenings<br><b>18:16</b> An open archive<br><b>20:35</b> Art is about reacting, conflict and dissensus<br><b>22:30</b> An art producing the audience, le poble manque<br><b>23:00</b> Methodology: performativity, relationality, politicality, liminality, processuality and hapticity<br><b>24:42</b> Observation of uprises and revolutions<br><b>27:40</b> Gaze disembodiment<br><b>29:40</b> Selfies: the first step of disembodiment<br><b>31:00</b> P.O.V., F.P.V,, drones, CCTV.... Is it possible to inject agency into a disembodied image?<br><span style="color:rgb(255,0,255)"><br></span></span></font></div><font size="2"><span style="font-family:georgia,serif"><span style="color:rgb(255,0,255)">E/N/J/O/Y</span><br></span></font></div>