The entire activity of the AKMEKA research group is permeated by a series of key concepts and ideas that persistently question and reflect upon the margins of artistic practice and its relationship with social and cultural contexts. This involves critical speculation on the limits between disciplines, the idea of Art, the notion of authorship and the collective dimension of creation, including university research and artistic practices themselves as objects and subjects of investigation. The following lines of work, which are neither autonomous nor watertight spaces, emerge from all of this. On the contrary, they are porous areas that cross and contaminate each other, pervaded by the understanding of art as research, by a critical vision of technology and the media, and by an ideological positioning that questions with the intention to change the current system of production.
1.- Artistic practices in relation to memory, archive and context.
Our memory, both individual and collective, is constructed in multiple ways and with different layers using the active agents of images, artistic languages and tactile, visual or audio resources. This line of research explores and analyzes the role of art in the construction of memory (and memories) in two dimensions. It studies, on the one hand, how artistic practices themselves operate in the generation of imaginaries and, on the other hand, that which has to do with the archives of art in their different forms. Finally, the relationship with the context in which these practices are inscribed (social, cultural, economic, political) is also an object of study.
2.- Public space, collaborative practices and social involvement.
Art is a means of influencing public space, creating community and behaving as an active agent, which is far from the understanding of art as mere entertainment or ornament. This line of research rethinks the extended public sphere, from the physical of the urban and natural environment to the virtual of digital networks, and recovers memory from the commons, whether it be the street or social networks as places of interaction, activation and relationships, through transdisciplinary artistic projects.
3.- Critical and political positions on art, culture and the media.
Confrontation, dialogue and a reformulation of the formats of legitimacy and functions of criticism in artistic practice form the basis of this line of research. From Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1983) to the Aditivist Manifesto (2017), and from technological progression to the ideological regression of the Maker fairs, the loss of discourse is seen as a neutralizer to the making of art.
4.- Audiovisual technologies and networks: Experimentation and performativity.
This line of research explores transdisciplinary collaboration and experimentation networks through collaborative projects that reconstruct the narrative of the audiovisual image (cinema, video, interaction) and the register of performative and post-performative practices (actions, performances, relational and community-linked projects).
5- Knowledge and free culture.
We must not forget that the debate about the democratic access to culture and the free circulation of knowledge, which regains a remarkable topicality and prominence at this time and on different levels through the emergence of digital technologies and the Internet. This is especially true in the field of contemporary cultural production. This line of research permeates the whole of Akmeka’s production.