Since 2022, the School of Elephants in the Room has been dedicated to creating a space to collectively question the dense network of infrastructural dependencies in which cultural practices take place, on a daily and tremendously mundane scale. The school takes its name from a letter written by Constant - Association for Arts and Media l’any 2019, in which cultural and educational institutions are asked to take into account the influence of technological giants in their processes and practices. As the imaginaries of technology-based relationalities are increasingly flattened and conditioned by the limits and logic of Big Tech, the school addresses practices mediated by computing as cultural practices in and of themselves.
This third edition is marked in large part by the current rotation of the liberal world order, propelled by digitalization. It is motivated by the need for institutions, collectives and professionals to find collective responses to its uncontrolled violence and weaponized complexity. In response, the school transforms its usual character and becomes a translocal encounter about and for internationalist infrastructural resistance against deadly regimes and extractivist assumptions.
Over three consecutive half-days, the 2025 edition invites a series of agents who, from artistic practice, will engage with the concept of dual-use, a term that refers to technologies and materials that can have both military and civilian applications. At the same time, it creates a space to dedicate time to this concept and its implicit assumptions, and to politicize the issues that, in technology, dual-use categorizations entail, as a step towards a more solid and meaningful public debate. In other words, this reiteration of the school aims to collectively identify what it means to accept binary legal, transactional or ontological categories as structuring elements of our realities and daily lives.
The school is committed to a persistent spirit of building together possibilities for another technological practice.
Language/accessibility note: most of the interventions will be in English (for non-native speakers). Scripts and access copies will also be provided in Catalan and Spanish. The space is wheelchair accessible and has elevators and adapted toilets.
This activity is co-organized with the TITiPI (The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest)
Free activity, until capacity is reached.
PROGRAM
Thursday, July 3 [La Capella, espai Finestres]
17.30 - 18.15 h: Hans Lammerant. Dual use: a genealogy of the management of technologies and their military uses
18.15 - 18.30 h: conversation with Anti Devillet
18.30 - 19.00 h: break
19.00 - 19.45 h: Higo Mental (Marta Sesé and Ricardo Pérez-Hita). Higo Mental #34
19.45 - 20.00 h: conversation with Jara Rocha
Friday July 4 [La Capella, Finestres area]
17.30 - 18.15: Monica Basbous. Suspicious Sincerities
18.15 - 18.30: Conversation with Miriyam Aouragh
18.30 - 19.00: break
19.00 - 19.45: Miriyam Aouragh. Israeli propaganda and imperial infrastructures in times of genocide: Old wine in broken bottles
19.45 - 20.00: Conversation with Monica Basbous
Saturday 5th July [La Capella, espai Finestres]
1.30pm - 3pm: Marina Monsonís. Port lunch and memories of infrastructural resistance (Port lunch and memories of infrastructural resistance)
BIOS
Hans Lammerant: He works as a researcher and legal activist, specifically in the fields of the arms trade and business and human rights, in the Belgian pacifist organization Vredesactie. In recent years he has documented and litigated against the arms trade with Israel and Saudi Arabia. He has an academic background in philosophy and law.
Higo Mental: They try to develop, from artistic practice and research, a body of critical thought around images and imaginaries of the internet archive. They give performative conferences in the form of videological dialogue in which the alternation of materials creates a critical narrative that questions the hegemonic system of representation. Their internships have taken place at the MNAC, the MACBA, the CA2M, the Santa Mònica, FOC, Pols, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Las Cigarreras, the Fira de Tàrrega, Homesession or Can Farrera, among many others. https://higomental.com/
Monica Basbous: She is a multidisciplinary researcher and educator trained in architecture, art and communication. Monica’s practice, through maps, images, games, text and hypertext, addresses the way power is negotiated through the production of space, time, knowledge, bodies and their representations. She is a founding member of Qorras, where she co-develops research methodologies and creative documentation. She is currently a doctoral researcher at Pompeu Fabra University. Her most recent articles have been published in The Architectural Review, Middle-East Critique, Jeem and Weird Economies.
Miriyam Aouragh: She is a professor of Digital Anthropology. She studies the political role of new digital spaces and tools and the way colonial and imperial histories shape current IT infrastructures. She has written on these issues in publications such as Palestine Online (IB Tauris, 2011); with Hamza Hamouchene The Arab Spring a decade on (TNI, 2022); Mediating the Makhzan (r)evolutionary dynamics in Morocco (CUP, 2025), and with Paula Chakravartty Infrastructures of Empire (Sage, 2024). Organizes community projects with TITiPI (The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest). https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/directory/aouragh-miriyam
Marina Monsonís: Marina Monsonís is a visual artist who works with hybrid and heterogeneous ecotopic processes of social microtransformation rooted in territories, in collective, community and pedagogical projects that relate marine sciences, place-based design, gastronomy, graffiti, radical geography, ethnography and critical, oral and gestural memory. She works on projects that connect cuisine with political, critical, social and transgenerational aspects to create debates and transmit knowledge about the complexities and environmental conflicts that are intertwined in a situated way, “inhabiting the tensions” of km 0. She is interested in the coexistence of radical spaces where people are constellated in research, techniques, glocal, ancient and emerging knowledge, remaining in a generous and enriching ecosystem, where exchange dominates at the table. He has directed MACBA's La Cuina since its inception, in November 2018.
Anti Devillet: He resides in Marseille and participates in different collectives, such as Gammares (a collective that aims to introduce water issues into politics), which is also a member of L’Hydre (a network of collectives that fight for water justice), and Le Nuage était sous nos pieds (a collective that documents and fights against the deployment of digital infrastructures in Marseille and elsewhere), which is part of Guerre à la guerre (a coalition that aims to extend the anti-war movement in France).