#will fredo

[willfredo247]

SHTV: EL ÚLTIMO TOUR DEL MUNDO at VIDEONALE19, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, 2023

[willfredo247]

SHTV: EL ÚLTIMO TOUR DEL MUNDO

My video installation is part at VIDEONALE19 at Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany, until 15 May 2023

"The sex industry as the ultimate allegory of the brutality of all other industries and the autopornographic self as a new force in the post-covid global economy"

This SHTV episode consists of BTS of OnlyFans star Leo Galileo's last tour in Spain before he quits his performing career. In it we discuss the mainstream s3x industry, platform economy, and neoliberalism in relation to theories of Paul B. Preciado in “Testo Junkie” as well as theories by Sascha Lobo, Deleuze and Guattari and Maurizio Lazzarato. Installed on a sling.

[willfredo247]

Laboratori de Transformació Subjetiva

 is the title of Will Fredo's solo booth with Mouches Volantes at SWAB Art Fair in Barcelona. The booth is a development of SHTV which is a work cycle dedicated to biopolitics in which dissident bodies are not identity signifiers but the basis for thought and care. The installation features a new video sculpture of one of the latest SHTV episodes. It was shot in Barcelona and follows the life of an OnlyFans Latinx adult content creator, in relation to Paul B. Preciado’s theories. The exhibition features additional mixed media paintings that question concepts of the “techno body” in relation to the pharma industry, safe substance use, orgasmic potential, and the discrepancy in HIV treatment between Global North and South, via Preciado’s concept of Potentia gaudendi.

Mixed media paintings of the series Potentia Gaudendi - the Price of Pleasure: The series of mixed-media paintings are inspired by bodily fluids and make references to Preciado’s concept of Potentia Gaudendi (orgasmic potential), the pharma industry, safe substance use and the discrepancy in HIV treatments options between Global North and South.

Potentia Gaudendi (orgasmic potential) - Paul B. Preciado’s concept Potentia gaudendi is the strength of a body’s excitation, its own extension in space and time. It is an event, relation, practice and evolutionary process; it is essentially impermanent and malleable. Potentia gaudendi depends on “techno-bodies”, half foetuses and half zombies, individual bodies as extensions of global communication technologies, oscillating between excitation and frustration. It is the planetary management of “naked technolife” through virtual audio-visual connections. (As described by Maria Lind.)

[willfredo247]

MILPA + X (video installation)

“MILPA + X" is a commission I developed for NATURE AND STATE, being shown at @kunsthallebadenbaden Germany Jul-Oct 2022. The video installation is an edited form of ongoing research and conversations, existing files and their rendered forms as well as statements about water politics, indigenous queer ecology, commodification of resources and indigenous rights. The research starts with Solway, a mining company based in Switzerland accused of polluting Lake Izabal in Guatemala since 2017, for which they blame algae. Lake Izabal is a significant resource, sacred place and heritage for several indigenous communities in east Guatemala including the Afro-Guatemalan Garifuna. Indigenous anthropologist Giovanni Batz critically calls this type of neoliberal megaprojects the “forth invasion” of Guatemala, and the several entanglements in this story, unfolding the mutations of European colonialism in the region. Bodies gather irl as well as social media to protest against these illegal acts and commercial interests for their own rights and resources. While the Maya K'iche' anthropologist Maria Jacinta Xon elucidates the sciences of indigenous women in spaces of resistance. Titled after the Milpa, a sustainable way of cultivating the land in Abya Yala (Central America) which consists of 12 crops instead of one, the work also presents the concept of Milpa as a way of thinking and living with plurality, solidarity and diversity - of crops, gender, sexuality and more. Curated by Cagla Ilk, Misal Adnan Yıldız, Christina Lehnert, sandeep sodhi

[willfredo247]

I’m showing MYTHOLOGIES IN TRANSIT, one of the two video works acquired by the German Federal Art Collection in this group exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, west Germany.

Jury of the Acquisitions Commission 2017–2021 / Curators Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwartskunst Berlin; Ulrike Groos, Kunstmusem Stuttgart; Friedrich Meschede, ehemals Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Roland Nachtigäller, Stiftung Insel Hombroich; Rein Wolfs, ehemals Bundeskunsthalle

Jury of the Acquisitions Commission NEUSTART KULTUR 2020–2021 / Curators Frédéric Bußmann, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz; Patrizia Dander, Museum Brandhorst München; Nadine Grünewald, Kunstverein für Mecklenburg & Vorpommern in Schwerin; Jule Hillgärtner, Kunstverein Braunschweig; Kristina Scepanski, Westfälischer Kunstverein Münster; Hilke Wagner, Albertinum Dresden; Stefanie Weber, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, München

Curator Bundeskunsthalle Susanne Kleine

[willfredo247]

Nature and State July 9–October 16, 2022

Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

With works and contributions by Michael Akstaller, Cansu Çakar, Olga Chernysheva, Ipek Duben, Alia Farid, Will Fredo, Nicole L’Huillier, Kavachi, Grada Kilomba, Robert Lippok, Constanza Macras, Silvina Der Meguerditchian, Hani Mojtahedy, Ersan Mondtag, Manuel Rossner, Christoph Schäfer, Muhannad Shono, Sorawit Songsataya, Ayman Zedani, a.o.

„History shows us that we exist in a timeless state, constantly traveling between time and space…“ – Grada Kilomba 1

From climate change to drought, isolation politics to recession, armed conflicts to authoritarian regimes, many of our existential questions, planetary problems and global crises can be formulated only in reference to these two terms; nature and state.

Following last year’s exhibition State and Nature, a multi venue project that extended both terms within the contemporary canon, this year’s survey show at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden formulates a dialectical proposal with Nature and State. The investigation of continuity and disobedience, possible forms of transformation of the state and the genealogical relationships between future and past are at the center of this project.

The exhibition’s curatorial method is one of theater, using the script as a source of storytelling: The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, shifts the focus of our story to questioning the main idea of the state as a denial of the state of nature. Considering how prehistoric communities shaped their decision-making processes, Nature and State pursues the idea of our ancestors might have lived together better than us, and imagines different futures following early feminist science fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin.

This way, the new chapter peacefully departs from a quote by Ursula K. Le Guin: “(…) we have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars.” (The Dispossessed, 1974).

Nature and State is not meant to be a group show in its literal sense: it is an open process that investigates temporary structures, spaces and narratives through artistic perspectives that critically question how we are ruled, controlled and governed, as well as how we can share a common imagination of togetherness. Rather than a static form of exhibition-making, the new team of Kunsthalle Baden-Baden proposes a composition with fluid, versatile and shifting methods. It invites the public to join this process over the course of the upcoming months, in which the Kunsthalle will turn into an ongoing transformation of spaces and selves. Every weekend of July and October 2022 will be hosting a specific performative program, starting with the opening weekend from Friday, July 8 to Sunday, July 10.

For Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Grada Kilomba and Ersan Mondtag, leading actors of performative research as well as German and international theater, perform each on two occasions. O Barco/The Boat (2021) by Kilomba will be adapted for the public park surrounding Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. A newly commissioned installation by Ersan Mondtag will be activated by his likewise new performance Becoming Sculptures (2022), and further act as a stage, for artist talks during opening weekend and Hjirok (2022) by Hani Mojtahedy on July 15, 16 and 17.

At the very beginning of the exhibition course unfolds Grada Kilomba’s poetic imagination. Through the metaphor of a boat as part of a collective ceremony, Kilomba portrays the history of slavery and freedom in abstract poetry. Different tracks of storytelling on human existence and alien forms in various media are followed by an accumulation of acts, events, and discussions; all taking place in a humid temple architecture, a proposal for a temporary museum by Ersan Mondtag, that will dry out over time. The temple refers to ancient structures, where social, private, political and transcendent fields intersected. With queer statements by different artists scattered throughout it, future scenarios for our society are imagined.

The multi-layered projects of the exhibiting artists are connected through water as a leitmotif. The urgency of its politics and the location of the exhibition venue in the historical infrastructures in the city of Baden-Baden form the current projects‘ particular context, many reflecting on precious water resources.

Manuel Rossner’s digital intervention creates a critical perception of the exhibition architecture and institutional space that became an enduring geo-location while being designed for temporary shows. Through experiments of sonic intelligence, Robert Lippok, Michael Akstaller, and Nicole L’Huillier respond to the architectural, spatial and bodily senses of listening to our environments, whereas Muhannad Shono, Sorawit Songsataya, and Kavachi generate political narratives about other intelligences and interconnectedness. Ipek Duben, Olga Chernysheva and Silvina Der Meguerditchian respond with their decided female gaze to the realities of nature and state, while Cansu Çakar, Alia Farid, Will Fredo, and Christoph Schäfer directly and individually revisit the question of who owns water resources and lands, how are ecological commons shared and their reflections on our individual and collective lives imagined.

Eventually, the Kunsthalle becomes that dream we dream together; an oasis, desert, river, Black Forest or antipodean habitat, an ongoing transformation of spaces and selves… it cares for all possibilities of togetherness and sharing.

1 https://www.frieze.com/article/grada-kilombas-excavation-history, last accessed June 29, 2022.

[willfredo247]

Genealogía de Justicias Perras

Informed by neurocardiology in connection to pre-colonial African and Indigenous ways of thinking with the body, "Genealogía de Justicias Perras” is a performance and installation we did for Pagoda Imaginaria in Guatemala City in 2022 about the heart and the colon as muscles with their own central nervous systems and brains. Invited by Esvin Alarcon Lam Costume design Alexander Ayala Production assistance @thegflow Photography @purpura.purrr

[willfredo247]

MYTHOLOGIES IN TRANSIT, 2020

While borders were closed to everyone in the outbreak of Covid-19, closed are the only borders most subclass Africans have known. For this video made on an phone I went to Melilla, Spain's last African territory. The video is split into 3 parts, the first one being about life in the EU's most fortified city that has a public statue of a fascist dictator and a public Muslim holiday. In part 2 an avatar of myself created by Indra, the Spanish company responsible for the borders around Melilla, looks at the complicated dynamics between Spain and Morocco, the ambivalence of technology, and the EU's security industrial complex. And part 3 recontextualizes 2 bizarre surreal and myopic adverts of a border surveillance tech firm, named after the Hindu king of gods. Languages: Moroccan Darija, Spanish, English subtitles

10min

Watch trailer below