What is power? How is a power relationship exercised and manifested in human relationships? What are the different types of power and what is the form of power in our day-to-day life? How do the decisions and dynamics of various forms of power influence us and affect our interactions? 

 

In social sciences, power is the ability of an individual or an organization to direct or influence the behaviour of people, and is legitimate when it has an institutional or legal origin. We can consider that power does not always imply justice, nor what is right, but a force of the dominant over the dominated. 

 

The philosopher Michel Foucault (1995) speaks of the micropowers that circulate in the social order as "a complex strategic relationship" in a given society. So power is control, and this is exercised over a human group. Knowledge implies power, and the accumulation of information allows one to maintain power. A form of survival, as Elias Canetti (1984) explains, we could say that it is the right to decide on life and death, and is possibly the safest instrument for the preservation of power and life. 

 

With all of the above, what do we mean by power relations? Power relationships refer to relationships in which one person has power over the other and can get the other individual to do what they want, with more or less subtlety. In this sense, Foucault talks about the concept of "docile bodies” where he argues, in his book 'Discipline and Punishment’, that "a body that is docile can be subjected, used, transformed and improved". About this, we ask how power relations can shape and achieve their end through the control of these docile bodies. 

 

This year Lumínic aims to dialogue through photography with those projects that show the different power relations in our human condition. How can we make established power visible and how it affects human relationships? What power relations surround us in our everyday lives? How do we interact and act in the complexity of established power relations? How are oppositions to power represented in our societies? How the strategies of power, such as control, persuasion and influence, among others, can be represented through the photographic medium?