ROBOTA MML

PREMIERE at e-flux, APRIL 2023, NYC

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Tuesday, April 4 at 7pm for a screening of Itziar Barrio’s Robota MML (2023, 62 minutes). The screening constitutes the full-length premiere of Robota MML, the second film in Barrio’s Material trilogy on view in its expanded iteration at Barrio’s solo exhibition did not feel low, was sleeping at Smack Mellon (March 11-April 23), employing speculative narratives and non-linear timelines to investigate the intersections between technology, labor, identity, and matter. The screening will be followed by an in-person conversation between Itziar Barrio and social scientist and design researcher Laura Forlano, who collaborated with the artist on a series of sculptures that accompany the film in the installation at Smack Mellon.

Robota MML looks at the many valences of work and traces the etymological origins of “robot.” Coined by Czech writer Karel Capek in his science-fiction play R.U.R. (1920), which is set in a factory where robots are built to free humans from work, the term derives from the word robota, meaning forced labor. Barrio relocates R.U.R.’s characters to a contemporary setting sensitive to biopower, class consciousness, identity, and gender fluidity. In Barrio’s interpretation, the agent capable of affecting the human psyche appears in physical form as smoke. Barrio complicates the narrative through a nonlinear narrative structure as well as aesthetic references to Géricault’s painting Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) and queer night clubs. Continuous with the rest of Barrio’s Material trilogy, this film involves collaborations with different experts including a robotics engineer and a professional bodybuilder.

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ROBOTA MML is a multimedia project by Itziar Barrio analyzing the intersection of robotics, workers struggles and identity. ROBOTA MML involves collaborations with different experts including an engineer in robotics and a professional bodybuilder among others. By utilizing video, robotics and sculpture ROBOTA MML rewrites dominant narratives. The film takes place in a temporality in which identity and gender are undefined and fluid, and where smoke is the materiality of an agency capable of affecting the human psyche. Barrio developed ROBOTA MML, as a member of the New Museum’s incubator NEW INC in NYC. ROBOTA MML is the second chapter of a trilogy of multi-disciplinary projects by Itziar Barrio exploring the intersection of labor, technology, identity, and matter.

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ROBOTA MML, Film shooting/Performance
Naves MATADERO MADRID, April 2019
https://www.mataderomadrid.org/en/schedule/robota-mml

ROBOTA MML is the shooting of a film, a remix of other films and cultural references that leads to an encounter.

The first time the term “robot” was coined was in a science fiction play called R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) written by Karel Capek in 1920 and premièred in New York in 1922. The word "Robot" was devised by the author's brother from the Czech word “robota”, which means “work”. R.U.R. takes place in a factory where they build robots to free human beings from work. And in Robota MML, Itziar Barrio relocates the characters in this work to a context that is sensitive to class consciousness and biopower. Another reference for ROBOTA MML is the work The Raft of the Medusa, painted by Théodore Géricault in 1819 and Luis Buñuel’s inspiration when he wrote The Exterminating Angel. In his painting, Géricault portrays survivors on a raft adrift in the middle of the ocean. While senior officials were most concerned about saving themselves first, they suffered from dehydration and resorted to cannibalism to survive. “All these references converge with contemporary gestures such as body-building and the use of burning objects in recent music videos,” explains Itziar Barrio. “ROBOTA MML addresses in an interrelated manner such issues as robotics, labour production mechanisms, and the deconstruction of cinematic apparatus. Using bodies, technology and smoke, we will construct a narrative over the course of two weeks in Nave 11, articulated through a process of execution, collaboration and meetings with the agents involved”, the artist sums up.

Itziar Barrio will work with a film crew and different collaborators, including the engineer and doctor in robotics Javier F Gorostiza (DART), bodybuilder José Cano, screenwriter Sonia Martí and María Jerez as acting and stage director.

During the final days, the process will be opened to the public thereby forming the piece ROBOTA MML.

CREDITS

Idea and direction: Itziar Barrio
Stage director: María Jerez
Scriptwriters: Sonia Martí Gallego and Itziar Barrio
Engineer in robotics: Javier F. Gorostiza
Performers: Ainhoa Hernández, Cuqui Jerez, Anto Rodríguez, Pepe Serrano, Cary Rosa Varona and Javier Vaquero Ollero
With the collaboration of: La Dalia Negra collective
Bodybuilder: José Cano
Director of photography: Sara Gallego
Second camera: Jorge Sirvent
Sound: Raúl Gómez
Costumes: Pablo Pelocodo
Still photography: Álvaro Hormiga
Lighting design: Víctor Colmenero
Set design: Itziar Barrio and Víctor Colmenero
Graphic design: Jaume Marco e Itziar Barrio
Production: Carolina Olivares and Tatiana Tarragó (CO Producciones), Naves MATADERO
“Sin tristesse”, poem by Mariano Mayer

A Naves MATADERO WORLD PREMIERE in collaboration with CO Producciones y ESNE