Soft Power: Virginie Barré & Bruno Peinado

ADN Galería presents an exhibition by Virginie Barré and Bruno Peinado, that takes as starting point what the artists themselves call “soft power”. The Soft Power is a politics of implication in the facts and experiences that happen in daily life, through tools that are both agents of power and emancipation: intelligence, beauty or creativity, for instance. Those features resist the contemporary status quo, which maintains the old system of professionalization of power. As Franco Berardi (Bifo) asserts, the professionalization of power has contributed to the straining of affective contact. Thus, neither emotions, nor the imagination, or desire are integrated elements of the surplus production.

Experiencing with human desire, the implication and enjoyment of daily life is for Barré and Peinado a form of revolution. As philosopher Henri Lefebvre put it, daily life is the best way of freeing oneself from the impositions of capitalism, which affects both individual and collective forms of life. Daily life allows the shaking of the base of conventionalisms and everything that blocks creativity. Thus, the work by Barré and Peinado investigates those realms, where childhood, experimentation, games and the unexpected are fundamental pillars in understanding the act of creation in relation to the subject and its living times