what is banquete_?

Since the early 1990s, the banquete_ project has evolved as an international network of conversations and actions among artists, scientists, technologists, and other producers of knowledge. Its objective is to explore the convergences among biological, social, technological, and cultural systems using a systemic, trans-disciplinary approach. This approach questions the prevailing model of thought, which is anthropocentric, linear, and dichotomous, and has political, social, economic, cultural and environmental consequences that call for an immediate shift in awareness, outlook, and course.

Conceived and directed by Karin Ohlenschläger and Luis Rico the project has brought together anthropologists, architects, biologists, philosophers, economists, neuroscientists and sociologists to reflect on the transformation patterns and processes governing tangible and intangible flows of matter, energy and information. During this period, the banquet_ project has structured and consolidated a collaboration environment, comprised of different centers of artistic and scientific research, production and divulgation for the purpose of bringing science and the humanities closer to each other and to society at large.

banquete_ tracks the art-life binomial in the light of techno-scientific breakthroughs and in relation to emerging languages linked to contemporary creation. Its scope of research and expression has expanded from the body to the gene, from the desk to the Web, and from local public space to the global media sphere.

banquete_ is an attempt at generating a collective creation process, able to structure dissociated elements and combine diverse types of knowledge, methods and practices. It arose out of the challenge shared by many people of conceiving of and constructing an ACTS (Art, Science, Technology and Society) interaction space to investigate new forms of creation and knowledge transfer.

In conclusion, banquete_ provides an open space based on complex dynamics that aim to transcend the conventional sequential compartmentalization of research, training, production and cultural divulgation processes; a context to practice transversal thought that explores the interaction among ecosystems, the techno-sphere, and the symbolic universes that define the collective imagination of contemporary societies.