Interpretations of the Exhibition with Marta Echaves

In this session, Marta Echaves will offer their own reading of  The Assault of Illusion, connecting the works, mechanisms and strategies of representation that the exhibition proposes with the central debates in their field of research and practice.

In this talk, Marta Echaves will introduce the concepts of psychedelic fascism and psychedelic abstraction in order to explore ways of relating to images in a context where they have already lost all contact with reality. If post-truth established distortion as a legitimate political language, the normalization of the circulation of AI-generated images on platforms governed by technological oligarchies produces a sensibility whose logic is the hallucinatory intensification of a fascist consensus of reality. Faced with this crossroads, abstraction is proposed as a tactic of imperceptibility and a possible strategy of resistance.

The readings linked to the lecture are also inscribed in Situations (making) #10, Santa Mònica's collective learning and research programme, aimed at critically analysing how cultural devices configure illusions that shape our desire and our idea of reality.

This proposal forms part of the exhibition's public programme, which under the title Interpretations of the exhibition brings together seven contemporary voices to deepen and expand the questions raised by the project.

With the participation of Marta Echaves

Marta Echaves (Madrid, 1990) studied Philosophy and specialised in the Independent Studies Programme (PEI) at MACBA. Activities coordinator for the Caja Negra publishing house, she researches, writes and is a cultural programmer. She has written for catalogues and artists' books, has curated exhibitions and has been part of juries and accompaniment processes for creative residencies.