Stitch & Split. Selves and Territories in Science Fiction

www.stitch-and-split.org/

Stitch and Split explores the joint, the interstices, between two registers which might be considered opposed, science and fiction, and their reciprocal contamination.

Science fiction as a zone of tension that amalgamates imaginary and real, utopia and dystopia, flesh and machine; the use of intrusion, incongruity and discrepancy as a system of resistance and a tool for questioning the present.

Science fiction is not an oracle that can predict the future more or less exactly, but a critical, inventive, cross-genre/gender and cross-disciplinary discourse on the body, identity and contemporary territories.

Stitch and Split mixes ingredients to try to encourage fruitful movements from one to the other, starting from the idea that the most productive encounters take place through the qualities of individuals or groups who converse with one another regardless of any a priori linked to their place on the ladder of the elites or cultural capital. They also take place where the categories of seriousness, credibility, entertainment and absurdity become more complex.

Through/between those processes, Stitch and Split will be exploring science fiction as an environment, a tool, a platform for thinking a situated present: the new forms of colonisation of territories and bodies, cyberspace as a ground of identity and not an abstraction without race or sex, encounters between the virtual, the organic and the mechanical, contemporary mythologies of procreation and otherness, cyborgs and androids as figures of the Other and of oneself, exploited work machine and reproductive machine, synonym of slave or freedom, the permeability and heterogeneity of identity, the body as the result of a scientific process of creation…