The 2022 C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations Part II, was held on Zoom across four panels on May 25 and 26, 2022. Included here are abstracts and recordings of the panels. In order to continue the conversations, written responses from Sarah Lookofsky, current Dean of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and former Associate Director of the International Program at MoMA, and Irmgard Emmelhainz, independent translator, writer and researcher, will soon to be linked on this page. The seminar series was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow; Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow; Madeline Murphy Turner, Former Cisneros Institute Research Fellow for Latin America, and Wong Binghao, C-MAP Asia Fellow.

The Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) research groups periodically organize seminars, of which Transversal Orientations Part II forms part. These seminars connect the broad research interests of the four groups and enable members to think more deeply about how the Museum might best address a global view of modern and contemporary art.

Transversal Orientations Part II was conceived as a continuation of the conversations and possibilities raised in the 2021 seminar. Building on the ideas generated in this first iteration, which invoked transversalism’s potential for envisioning alliances and surpassing oppositions, this year’s seminar sought to explore and annotate the transversal as a methodology for working between geographical borders and beyond disciplinary and epistemological siloes, while also acknowledging the challenges of such an approach in our fractured, solipsistic present.

Some of the questions raised were: what can we learn by looking and speaking across geographies, histories, and epistemes? What patterns, knowledges, currents, and recognitions emerge when we interweave regional concepts and metaphors? What emancipatory worldviews arise or collapse at these unexpected intersections and gatherings? And, finally, how can we utilize a transversal perspective amid our present-day reality, in which right-wing nationalist leaders have come to power, borders have been fortified, and dialogical exchange often seems to be insufficient or even unattainable?

A term that originates in the field of mathematical geometry, the transversal has been taken up by thinkers to destabilize the ways in which relations are canonically accepted. Transversality “implies a desire in interdisciplinarity for knowledge and practices that are in some senses yet to be made proper.”¹ While aspiring towards the transformative potential of the transversal approach, this year’s seminar came to terms with the lived limitations and violences of categorically closed designations.

Comprised of four panels over two days, each panel featured a distinct pair of speakers  who engaged and acknowledged the limitations of transversalism in the historical present through issues of territory, colonial catastrophe, gender politics, and non-human ontologies.

Participants

Pamila Gupta, Daniel Lie, Sophio Medoidze, Nnenna Okore, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Isabel Sandoval, Diana Tamane, Daiara Tukano

Acknowledgements

The Fellows wish to thank the C-MAP Group Leaders (Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Roxana Marcoci, Inés Katzenstein, Stuart Comer, and Cara Manes) and Jay Levenson, Marta Dansie, Michelle Kuo, Josh Siegel, Howard Deitch, Christopher Brown, Mitchell Leitschuh, and Hayna Garcia for their invaluable input and assistance.

Day 1

Panel 1: In Thick Co-Presence

This panel explores the co-dependence and kinship between humans and other-than-humans. Looking specifically at the co-constitutive relationship between care and harm, this panel relatedly investigates the roles that gender and sexuality play in the creation of shared ecologies. The panel title comes from Donna Haraway’s book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, which discusses the importance of eschewing the future in favor of present realities and challenges.

Building on legacies of migration and queer studies, Daniel Lie’s work demonstrates how abjection can be a tool of subversion and expansion. Their practice celebrates natural cycles of transformation and the many interdependent exchanges that structure ecosystems. A fundamental aspect of Lie’s practice is their desire to develop works which decenter human agency and subjectivity. Working in collaboration with forces they term “other-than-human beings,” such as bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, minerals, spirits, and ancestors, Lie creates site- and time-specific works that can be experienced through multisensory channels. By giving visibility to materials that morph, decay, and evolve, Lie’s ecosystems highlight the intimate yet expansive coexistences among diverse beings, acknowledging our shared and continuous participation in the processes of living, dying, and decomposing.

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an assistant professor of science and technology studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University. She examines human-animal relations, environmental issues, and efforts to institutionalize justice. She is the author of Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (2018), which received the 2019 Michelle Rosaldo Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology and honorable mentions for the 2019 New Millennium Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize, both from the American Anthropological Association, and the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies.

Panel 2: Cycles and Reclamations

Cycles and Reclamations probes the relationship between art and social engagement pertaining to ecological crises and territory disputes. It asks, how do practitioners draw attention to these challenges by transversing professional and cultural silos? When working with the subjects of land and sea, how do creators engage with politics to call attention to the adversities we endure? Finally, what kinds of creative encounters can be proposed as solutions?

Nnenna Okore is an artist-researcher-teacher who uses artistic practice, pedagogy, and social engagements to address ecological issues. She has been involved in numerous participatory art projects and exhibitions designed to produce dialogue, art making, and an awareness of current environmental issues. Working largely with eco-based materials, Okore uses food-based bioplastic materials to create delicate works of art that engender dialogue about waste reduction and sustainable practices in art making. Okore has a BA from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a recipient of the 2012 Fulbright Scholar Award and Creative Victoria Award from Australia.

Daiara Hori Figueroa Sampaio – Duhigô, known as Daiara Tukano, of the Tukano Indigenous people – Yé’pá Mahsã, Eremiri Húusiro Parameri clan of the Upper Rio Negro in the Brazilian Amazon, was born in São Paulo. She is an artist, activist, educator, and communicator who graduated in visual arts and master in human rights from the University of Brasília. She researches the right to memory and truth of Indigenous peoples. From 2015 to 2021 she was the coordinator of Rádio Yandê, the first indigenous Internet-radio in Brazil. Recently, she won the 2021 PIPA Online Award, organized by the PIPA Institute, the most renowned Brazilian visual arts prize. She studies the culture, history, and traditional spirituality of its people together with their family. She lives in Brasília.

Day 2

Panel 3: (Im)possible Returns

Taking up the call for critical (art) geography to think about the complexity of communities, and an awareness of the issue of scales when we discuss and employ a transversal vision, this panel draws on the transversal as an intense interdisciplinary mode whereby different topologies, for instance, colonial or post-Soviet migration, come into communication, bringing newfound understanding and literacy to the consequences of imperialism.

Pamila Gupta is a professor at WiSER, University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. Her research and writing interests include Portuguese colonial and Jesuit missionary history in India; diasporas, islands, tourism, heritage, and design in the Indian Ocean; photography, tailoring, and visual cultures in East Africa; and architecture, infrastructure, and affect in South Africa. She is the author of two monographs: The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India (2014) and Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (2019).

Diana Tamane (b. 1986, Latvia/Estonia). In the artist’s works, family albums, documents, and private correspondence are transformed into catalysts, making it possible to reveal not only touching autobiographical stories but also apt portrayals of society and how a complex political history and presence intertwines with the needs and dreams of ordinary people. Tamane graduated from the Tartu Art College, the LUCA School of Arts, Brussels, and HISK post-academic program, Ghent. In 2020, with APE, she published Flower Smuggler, which has received the Authors Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards and been shortlisted in the Paris-Photo Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.

Panel 4: Rituals and Rapture

Joyous, occult, or banal, rituals are a part of our everyday lives and imaginations. This panel explores how rituals – religious, social, daily, or otherwise – are depicted in art and film. In particular, the significance of gender in rituals will be discussed to shore up how supposedly fixed borders (material, bodily, territorial, epistemological) can be crossed.

This panel featured screenings of film and moving image works by Sophio Medoidze and Isabel Sandoval that have not been reproduced here. Watch the pre-recorded conversation between Medoidze, Sandoval, and C-MAP Fellows Inga Lace and Wong Binghao in the video link below.

Sophio Medoidze is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in London. Her work has been exhibited and screened worldwide, including at the OUTPOST gallery, Ermes Ermes, LUX, CAC Bretigny, Serpentine Cinema (Peckhamplex), Kunstmuseum Luzern, Tate Modern (upcoming), and others. She was a recipient of Tyneside cinema’s Projections commissions and Feature Expanded development and Sub-ti awards for her latest film Let us flow! (ვიდინოთ!). A collection of Medoidze’s short stories, Bastard Sun, will be published in 2022.

Recognized by the Criterion Collection as “one of the most exciting and multitalented filmmakers on the indie scene,” Isabel Sandoval has made three dramatic features, including Señorita, Apparition and the Independent Spirit Award–nominated Lingua Franca. Her films have played at major international festivals like Venice, Locarno, London, and Busan. She is currently in development on her fourth feature, Tropical Gothic, which won a development prize at the 2021 Berlinale. She recently directed the FX limited series Under the Banner of Heaven, based on Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction book, starring Andrew Garfield.

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In fall 2021, while working as the Cisneros Institute Research Fellow, I had the privilege of speaking with Macuxi artist Jaider Esbell (1979–2021) over Zoom. Our conversation was brief, but with the assistance of his trusted collaborators Paula Berbert and Daniel Jabra, we organized a much anticipated virtual studio visit that was scheduled to take place on November 3.¹ The day before our planned meeting, Jaider Esbell passed away.

Esbell’s premature departure coincided with a moment of heightened visibility and well-deserved recognition of his practice. When I had the chance to travel to São Paulo just two weeks later, his significant impact on the programs within major art institutions throughout the city—the Bienal de São Paulo, the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, and the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM), among others—was immediately tangible, even to an outsider such as myself. In every artistic sphere I encountered, his presence, ideas, and legacy were deeply felt.

Born in Brazil on Indigenous territory known today as Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol, which borders Guyana and Venezuela, Esbell had already participated in a number of Indigenous social movements by the time he moved to the city of Boa Vista at the age of eighteen. In 2011, he began to immerse himself more profoundly in the visual realm when he held an exhibition titled Cabocagem—O homem na paisagem (Cabocagem—man in the landscape), in which he presented fifteen of his own artworks. Two years later, he organized the first edition of Encontro de Todos os Povos (Meeting of All People), establishing himself as an advocate for Indigenous artists and making clear the living presence of their culture and art. Moreover, these efforts promoted a specific Macuxi worldview, which importantly includes Makunaimî, who the Macuxi, Taurepang, and Wapichana peoples consider to be the creator of all natures.² “To be an Indigenous artist, from my perspective,” Esbell explained in a 2019 interview, “is to claim through these four letters—A R T E [art]—everything that it connects us to in terms of possibilities and bridging, indeed, worlds.” He continued, “It is a very special condition that we have been able to attain to be able to make small fissures between worlds so that this communication, which academia has been handling for a very long time, may have more fluidity.”³

Esbell maintained a diverse practice, one that spanned the roles of writer, poet, art educator, curator, and activist. Committed to art as a form of pedagogical activism—or artivism as he called it—he brought together painting, writing, drawing, installation, and performance to elaborate on transversal dialogues with Indigenous cosmologies, environmental concerns, land rights, and critiques of hegemonic culture.⁴ Through his work, he promoted Arte Indígena Contemporânea (Contemporary Indigenous Art),⁵ making explicit the importance of contemporary Indigenous artists—especially women—in order to actively contradict the oppressive and violent Western institutional structures that locate Indigenous art and culture in the past.

Esbell’s prominence in the 34th edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, Faz escuro mas eu canto (Though It’s Dark, Still I Sing), held in 2021, was evident. Among other works, he exhibited  Entidades (Entities, 2021) [Figs. 1–2], a seventeen-meter inflatable sculpture that greeted visitors as they approached the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, headquarters of the Bienal de São Paulo Foundation since 1957 and a key Bienal venue.⁶ Creating two colorfully marked serpents—creatures the Macuxi understand to be powerful agents of transformation—Esbell intended for the work to confront the nearby statue of Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral, credited in Western history with the “discovery” of Brazil in 1500, despite the fact the territory and its people were existing and thriving long before his arrival.⁷ Esbell’s critique of hegemonic discourse further extends through the sculpture’s dialogue with the Pavilion, which was designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer within the context of Brazil’s mid-twentieth-century bid for international recognition through the language of Modernist architecture.⁸ Entidades emerged from a significantly less recognized and yet crucial history of Brazilian art, one frequently erased in favor of Modernist or Western ideals. It and other works presented by Esbell at the Bienal directly engage mythologies and origins outside the narrative of European Christianity.⁹

Highlighting Macuxi worldviews and their ongoing relevance, Esbell painted A guerra dos Kanaimés (War of the Kanaimés, 2019/20) [Figs. 3–6], a series of vibrant yet caliginous paintings that were on view inside the Pavilion.¹⁰ Invoking the Kanaimés, deadly spirits usually associated with violence, the artist references the cosmovision of the Macuxi people in order to ground the fear associated with the Kanaimés in a concrete and contemporary context: Indigenous peoples’ right to life and land in defiance of attempts to exploit their territory. This critical series must be considered in relationship to the numerous resistance movements formed to fight for Indigenous land rights. In 2021, for example, more than 170 distinct peoples from across Brazil went to the nation’s capital to oppose proposed legislation that would both displace them and open their land to deforestation.¹¹ Esbell also brought this activism into the Bienal’s public sphere with the intervention Cortejo de enunciado da Bienal dos Índios (Indigenous Biennial Announcement Procession) [Figs. 7–9], which he performed in collaboration with his partner and fellow artist and activist Daiara Tukano, among other Indigenous activists and artists, including Gustavo Caboco, during the opening in September 2021. As they processed through the Pavilion, they paused at works by Sueli Maxakali, Uýra, and Caboco, as well as their own to stress that five Indigenous artists were represented in the exhibition—the most in the Bienal’s seventy-year history.

Of equal significance is the fact that two recent exhibitions in São Paulo have been dedicated exclusively to Indigenous art: Véxoa: Nós sabemos (Véxoa: We Know), curated by Naine Terena for the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in 2020, and Moquém_Surarî: Arte indígena contemporânea (Moquém_Surarî: Contemporary Indigenous Art), curated by Esbell for the MAM the following year. The former brought together more than twenty Indigenous artists and artist collectives, including Esbell, to confront the challenges Indigenous art faces today. Speaking to the attempted erasure of Indigenous art from Brazilian culture since the beginning of colonization, Terena writes: “The ‘whitening’ of art in Brazil is similar to the whitening of its population, where both alien and foreign references are overestimated to the detriment of indigenous and national ones. The aesthetic concept of art was brought to the country in the luggage of the colonizers. The strength of the internal production of a great diversity of indigenous peoples and their cultural manifestations were not recognized for their artistic qualities or when they were, they were mainly taken as an inspiration or reference for the art of the non-indigenous people.”¹²

Through his artistic, activist, and pedagogical work, Esbell criticized this erasure, or “whitening,” as Terena argues, of art. Carta ao velho mundo (Letter to the Old World, 2019) [Fig. 10], exemplifies Esbell’s concurrent commitment to visual practice and social engagement. Offering a counternarrative to hegemonic history, the large-scale installation features Esbell’s interventions onto pages torn from a four-hundred-page tome dedicated to Western art. By drawing over reproductions of paintings by Diego Velázquez and Caravaggio, among others, or images of the Virgin Mary, Venus, and other hallmarks of a “traditional” art education, Esbell inserted his own commentary, exposing the oppressiveness of this constructed historical narrative. For example, on a reproduction of the painting The Martyrdom of Saint Peter (c. 1620) by Italian Baroque painter Domenichino, Esbell intervened with his signature acrylic marker, drawing small birds into the trees and writing “Há genocídio nas florestas da Amazônia!!” (There is genocide in the Amazon forests!!) [Fig. 11]. On a page dedicated to a seventeenth-century landscape painting by Dutch Golden Age artist Hercules Seghers, Esbell sketched a portrait of Marielle Franco, the queer, Afro-Latina, feminist politician and human rights activist whom the Rio de Janeiro police assassinated in 2018 in a case of government corruption [Fig. 12]. Below her image, Esbell asks, “Marielle?,” evoking the question “Who killed Marielle?,” which was commonly inscribed on posters during the protests that followed her murder. Esbell’s intervention into Western art history with references to Marielle and the destruction of the Amazon aims to expose the ways in which individuals who are not of European descent, from the United States, white, or Christian, are targeted yet excluded from the master narratives of human society. Carta ao velho mundo sheds light on how Eurocentric history—now part of the “Old World” as the title claims—has succeeded at the expense of those deemed to be outside the demographics mentioned above, especially those who challenge such power.

Though Carta ao velho mundo engages with what might be understood as the past, Esbell’s practice was embedded within various temporalities. Along with professor and artist Charles Gabriel, he collaborated with Macuxi children to instill the importance of arts education in future generations and as a method to dismantle hegemonic art historical pedagogies. Amooko Panton—Histórias do vovô Makunaimî (Amooko Pantoni—Stories of Grandpa Makunaimî, 2018) [Fig. 13], which was exhibited on the third floor of the Bienial Pavilion, is composed of thirty-two paintings that Macuxi youth created in collaboration with Esbell through a series of workshops led by Esbell and Gabriel at the José Alamano Indigenous State School in the Maturuca community of the Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol. In these images, the children have depicted stories of the Macuxi people, demonstrating the living roots of their mythology. Esbell’s work as a cultural facilitator, furthermore, is intricately elaborated in Moquém_Surarî: Arte indígena contemporânea, which featured thirty-four Indigenous artists including Daiara Tukano, Rita Sales Huni Kuin, and Elisclésio Makuxi [Fig. 14]. On view at the MAM, adjacent to the Bienal Pavilion, this exhibition seemed to expand on the presentation of the five indigenous artists in Faz escuro mas eu canto, showing the present impact of Indigenous visual practice—as in Rita Sales Huni Kuin’s paintings, which unfold the relationship between ritual action and aesthetic experience through a rich iconography of symbols that intertwine animals, plants, and people.

Although the emphasis on the work of Indigenous artists in biennials and temporary exhibitions has and will be analyzed by some as simply the result of fleeting, Eurocentric institutional interest in “otherness,” I would argue that the permanence of this shift is evidenced by the reimagination of the collection galleries of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. Reopened in October 2020 to coincide with the inauguration of Véxoa: Nos sabemos, the new installation and corresponding pedagogical information directly address the legacy of colonialism in Brazil as well as grapple with the omissions that characterize hegemonic narratives. Esbell’s Feitiço para salvar a Raposa Serra do Sol (Spell to Save the Raposa Serra do Sol, 2019), is located in one of the new galleries, Terra como matéria (Land as Subject), which questions the Western-imposed understanding of the human-nature relationship as one of anthropocentric domination, in favor of a worldview that prioritizes a reciprocal relationship between humans and nonhumans.¹³ With this presentation, Indigenous artists are making their way into the galleries of well-funded institutions. Still, it is clear that these very institutions are questioning their own histories and the violence their narratives have enacted on large populations of individuals.

At the time I traveled to São Paulo, the art world was still grieving, both privately and publicly, Esbell’s unexpected passing. Denilson Baniwa, Esbell’s close friend and colleague, asked that his own work, which was on view in several venues, be covered for an indefinite period. In response, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), the Pinacoteca, the MAM (in Moquém_Surarî: Arte indígena contemporânea), and other institutions shrouded Baniwa’s artwork in black cloth [Fig. 15]. A gesture to Esbell’s absence, Baniwa’s request also signals the impossible and perhaps even destructive weight that Indigenous artists today carry in fighting for not just representation, but also understanding and respect through increased visibility. In a public letter written on November 3, 2021, Baniwa stated that together, he and Esbell were committed to creating pathways for indigenous expression, but emphasized that with Esbell’s death, he would have to reconsider his own relationship with the West.¹⁴

Exhibitions and biennials come and go, but what is evident is that Jaider Esbell’s profound work will continue to weave its way through and beyond the Brazilian art world. His life and practice demonstrate, however, the immense challenges that still face Indigenous peoples and the art institutions that attempt to present their art. As Esbell’s life project clarifies, buying and collecting Indigenous art is insufficient. There needs to be a deep investment in education, activism, and future generations of Indigenous artists, and a serious institutional reckoning with the immense harm caused by exclusionary collecting and exhibiting practices. In this sense, the work must simultaneously consider multiple temporalities—past, present, and future—to begin creating the small fissures for which Esbell so eloquently advocated.

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The Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) research groups periodically organize a seminar among all four groups that connects their broad research interests and enables members to think more deeply about how the Museum might best address a global view of modern and contemporary art. Hinged on the transversal as a means to engage with and envision new networks and ways of thinking about modern and contemporary art, the 2021 edition offered an exploration and interrogation of the intertwining of multiple coeval life-worlds through concepts of “extending across.”

Over the course of two weeks, transversalism was offered and considered as a third, enabling term. To transverse is to surpass bipolar socio-historically constructed oppositions such as traditional and modern, male and female, man and nature, local and foreign, theory and practice, etc. Rather than adopting a center-periphery dyad or adhering to “mainstream” canonical standards, changing our perspective of looking at art opens up a way to account for different philosophies and nuances of comparison. This seminar series made reference to the methodology of “minor” transnationalism, to think and relate along other scales of knowability.

In addition, the seminar considered what it means to penetrate, exceed, and undermine geopolitical borders that have been set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe; accessible and inaccessible; to construct an “us” and a “them.” A border, as Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.”

By considering the transversal in its temporal, geographic and/or directional dimensions, as simultaneity, the seminar series elucidated the implications of the adoption of this operative term to art history, the museum, exhibitions, collections, philosophy and/or artistic practice. In doing this, new relational terms, stories, and people can be thought of together again.

Panel 1: Looking Sideways

This panel examined the processes of migration and contra-flows connecting regions while examining their artistic legacies. Looking at particular geographies, artists, and their stories across time, it aimed to challenge mainstream conceptions of the directionality of exchange within modern and contemporary art. How can minor positions weave a fabric of their own links directly, bypassing the centers of power and information? How can these transnational shared stories be acknowledged and told in a context that recognizes their complexity within history and display systems largely guided by national or global presentations?

Introduced by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA and moderated by Wong Binghao, C-MAP Asia Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Chairat Polmuk, Lecturer, Department of Thai, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. You can read it here.

Panel 2: Acts of Transfer and the Repertoire

This panel was organized around the idea of the transversal as transfer between disciplines, geographies, the performer, audience and participants, and/or the professional and nonprofessional. By looking at and considering the “repertoire” and acts of transfer through, for instance, translation and embodied dialogue, “hidden” processes of transnational contact and local histories, new cartographies, and unseen relations come into evidence.

Introduced by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA and moderated by Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Laine Kristberga, Assistant Professor and Researcher, Institute of Philisophy and Sociology of the University of Latvia, Riga. You can read it here.

Panel 3: Entangled Terrains

This panel is the outcome of an invitation to Sandra Benites, Black Athena Collective, and Chie Ikeya to reconsider or remap regions. Thinking about people who cross borders and borders that cross people, the session presented perspectives that acknowledge multidirectional histories of migration, colonialism, and the destabilization of current geographical perimeters. Panelists were tasked with reconsidering territorial logic and place vis-a-vis the mobility of individuals; how our relationship with the inhabited terrain might reformulate imposed delimitations. In this session, borderlands and the spaces in-between were examined, and the manifold ways in which art and visual culture entangle terrain.

Introduced by Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA and moderated by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Hlonipha Mokoena, Associate Professor, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. You can read it in English here and in Portuguese here.

Panel 4: The Politics of Position

This panel explored the particular conditions of locality and the productive tensions between local and global contexts. How do the languages, values, and histories of art and its attendant sociopolitical conditions differ from place to place? Can they be translated, communicated, and made legible, if at all, on a global scale, and what are the stakes of this transfer? Invited speakers discussed the specificities of their local or regional positions or punctuated a pristine map of universality. These discussions aimed to generate understandings of art and culture that are not uniformly appraised and consumed, as well as a sensitivity and humility when encountering art from unfamiliar contexts.

Introduced by Inés Katzenstein, Director, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, and Curator of Latin American Art, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA and moderated by Madeline Murphy Turner, C-MAP Latin America/Cisneros Institute Research Fellow, MoMA; Ph.D. Candidate, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Response by Riánsares Lozano de la Pola, Researcher and Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico City. You can read it in English here and in Spanish here.

View the past event page here. 

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Wong Binghao: Daniel, in one of our previous conversations, you mentioned that art can be a “queer line that connects many fields of knowledge.” This statement really resonated with me. What I enjoy about your practice is that you suture different communities, contexts, and actors—from what you call “other-than-humans” like fungi and bacteria to your family history in 1950s Indonesia. What have you gained or learned from this constellational practice?

Daniel Lie: When I spoke about this queer line (queer as a constantly transmuting way of being), I was thinking of art as a learning device that can be related to other fields of knowledge. All of my works are complex and require extensive outreach to people from diverse fields of action and research in order for me to fully understand the perspectives of a topic or concept I am exploring. In these (dis)encounters, open-ended partnerships can be forged on our journey of living and being. 

For instance, in my practice I am broadly interested in the philosophical, scientific, and spiritual aspects of death. This communication and collaboration with many humans and beyond-humans are manifestations of my desire to learn from diverse views. I seek a multilayer relationship with various forms of life, as I recognize their profound importance.

In this regard, I am interested in the correlation between micro- and macrostructures, and in moving between smallness and largeness. For instance, a closeup image of a rotting fruit can look similar to a wide aerial view of a forest. Cohabiting with microorganisms can tell us a lot about how other ecosystems function. By comparison, I find that there are many restraints and limitations in terms of human society as an ecosystem—for example, in the culturally political and ideological ways in which we consider and create kinships. 

As an artist who develops and is driven by research, I experience a wide range of encounters—from within the academy to non-hegemonic and nontraditional educational environments. Queerness allows for a diversion when there are boundaries to access or it deepens expertise in a particular field. For me, the queer line is very much about the possibility of existing in the in-between.

Although delving deeper into a particular topic can create greater resonances, this intensive process can also generate uncomfortable tensions and realizations. For instance, while undertaking site-specific research for my solo exhibition The Negative Years (2019) at Jupiter Artland in Scotland, I visited one of the largest farms cultivating the edible mushrooms commonly sold in European supermarkets. These mushrooms are grown indoors in large, climate-controlled hangars. At a particular point in the growth period, the environmental temperature is intentionally and significantly decreased. The fungi reacts to this menace to their existence by reproducing and generating at an increased speed. I was intrigued by this reaction to planned trauma in the cultivation of an organic species, and drew connections to the way that capitalism in human society induces and demands productivity to the point of exploitation. 

WBH: To build on my previous question, how has nonbinary/trans life and thought figured in your practice? I appreciate that it is never just a matter of literal, one-dimensional representation for you.

DL: I identify with nonbinary-ness because it denies any concrete value. I think it not only is connected to gender, but also goes beyond it. My personal experiences have shown me that the binaries and boundaries of identity—like the dualities of life and death, light and darkness, man and woman, good and evil, and so on—are limiting and restraining. Hegemonic society (Western, human-centric, cis-hetero-white-nationalist supremacy) needs to maintain these dualistic structures so that it can continue to classify, separate, and maintain its hierarchy. But this system does not contemplate the realities of the ecosystem. Even in talking about gender, there are so many identities and expressions of subjectivity. We live in a world that needs diversity for its sustenance.

Going back to my interest in death—it is not only witnessed in the absence of life, but in many moments of the living as well. It is an energy that moves in order for life to happen. For instance, in the phases of life, a child needs to symbolically die in order for the teenager, and subsequently the adult, to come into being. One is contained within the other. In this sense, the binary perspective of life and death has a restrictive notion of beginning and end that diminishes possibilities of existence. 

When organic matter rots, it is not dead, as people commonly believe, but rather filled with the presence of many living beings and decomposers—with fungi, bacteria, and insects. It is full of life. Abjectification is a key process of renewal. So why do we think that rotting matter is dead when the reality is actually quite the opposite? In the process of cohabitating with decay, I came to understand it as a powerful and disruptive element. I find rottenness to be nonbinary: it shows us that there is, in fact, no end or beginning in life or death.

As with my other projects, I arrived at this perception after an extended period of slow research. The passage of time has been an important actor and conceptual pillar in my works since 2014, and I have deepened my knowledge and insights on the subject with each artwork and installation that I have presented. 

Since the start of 2021, I have been developing works under the framework of The Rotten Research. This project includes a series of site- and language-specific creations: essays; other publications; a forthcoming solo exhibition, primarily of drawings, that should open in mid-2021 at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien; and public installations at Berlinische Galerie and around the city of Berlin. The main component of The Rotten Research is a digital project titled Rotten TV: an online broadcasting and research platform that brings together creatives, thinkers, and cultural institutions from Indonesia (Cemeti—Institute for Arts and Society), Brazil (Casa do Povo) and the UK (Jupiter Artland) to progressively investigate the topic of rottenness from April to November 2021, culminating in and coinciding with the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), which will be held in November in Glasgow. 

WBH: Let’s speak more about the binary of life and death. In a text titled “Walk Along ONG,”which you wrote for an incredibly detailed web-based, multiform project Toko Buku Liong (Liong Bookstore), co-created with Adelina Luft (2020), you imagine revisiting Indonesia with your deceased grandmother, Ong King Nio, sixty years after your family migrated to Brazil. In relation to these real and speculative migrations, you describe feeling like a “forever stranger.” Could you elaborate on the negotiation of place(lessness) and how it might present itself in your practice?

DL: What is life? What is death? Where do we come from? What am I doing right here, right now? These questions are ontological and can sometimes be considered cliché if they are looked at from a shallow perspective. For me they are a starting point from which to dive into complexity.

In an attempt to nurture this complexity, I went to Indonesia and lived there for about fourteen months in 2019–20. I learned the language and took traditional dance classes at the Indonesian Art Institute of Yogyakarta as a way of familiarizing myself with a nonverbal expression based on secular movements. I could not have fed this root of my life and history in Brazil. Once I was in Indonesia, I started to understand many other layers of my story. While searching for a “source,” I realized that there was never a place to “arrive.” Origin does not exist. 

The more I learned about myself and my ancestors, the wider the narrative became. There was not a single point of curiosity. It was the opposite—many more branches sprouted from my initial point of inquiry. As a queer child born in São Paulo to a migrant mother from Pernambuco (Northeast Brazil) and an immigrant father from Java (Central Indonesia), I felt displaced from an early age, like I was already born in a foreign context. The creation of national mythologies in order to belong to a political situation can be reductive. I felt like such norms did not apply to me; they rejected me, as I rejected them. 

I see all of us as organisms that are part of a larger ecosystem called Earth. What are the possibilities for me to relate to this planetary, ecological community? What types of negotiations are needed? Our existence is contingent upon a diversity of other existences. I am thinking here of the “other-than-humans”—of micro- and macroorganisms, quingdoms,¹ spirits, etc. These groups make the conditions for a here and now that we experience as a version of reality. The process of question-making that I have engaged in within my practice is powered by ways of relating with these “other-than-humans” that teach and give me agency.

Madeline Murphy Turner: Daniel, could you speak more to your compelling point about the importance of living with microorganisms and what this can reveal to us about ecosystems? Given the increasing urgency and apathy toward the climate crisis in Brazil, how do you see your practice converging with dialogues regarding ecological issues in the country or region?

DL: The first layer of the ecological system that we deal with is our own body. The many ways that this body will perish and disintegrate into smaller pieces represent, for me, the transition from human whole to environmental part. When we decompose, we become soil, and when we are cremated, we become part of the atmosphere. In each case, there is a significant degree of transformation and expansion. In my practice, I consider how these separations between body and environment can be abolished. Perhaps the first step is acknowledging that humans are not and cannot engage in a hierarchical relationship with other beings. This acceptance requires a process of unlearning.

I have been cohabiting with microorganisms through a simple and daily practice that relates to my research on rottenness. Where I currently live,  I have left a plate of fruits and vegetables to rot, decompose, and putrefy, thus revealing several activities: maggots and flies appear, mold grows and takes over the surface, and food liquefies and/or dries out. In this process, I witness small yet intense changes that debunk the symbolic connection between rottenness and death.

Through my works, I try to create affection toward this neglected but ubiquitous process of life. For example, in my site-specific installation Quing (2019) at Jupiter Artland, I highlighted how the rotting and decomposition of plant-based compost can in fact generate energy. This energy was then used to power an outdoor bioheater that, in turn, created the ideal conditions for fungi and other microorganisms to exist inside the gallery. I think that rottenness is shunned and marginalized by society because it is connected to the collective experience and passage of time, which contrasts with consumerism. One of the most apparent consequences of capitalism is that it constantly devours and discards. As consumers, we are also prime discarders. For example, in the bathroom or when we are taking out the trash, we push a button or close a lid and “undesired” products are gone, out of our sight. This ease of disposal extends to our interpersonal relationships. On social media, with the click of a button, we can unfollow or block someone, we can limit our interactions with and access to a person or information, etc. In my practice, I think critically about these forms of human-centrism and individualism that exist on many different scales.

I think this is the opposite of how things work when environments are not abused. Things don’t simply vanish or end. Just like the law of physics dictates: nothing is lost; nothing is created; everything is transformed. That is one of the main problems with the consumerist society in which we live. There is a lack of sustainability and responsibility for cycles of production, which has led to our current ecological crises. How can I deal with the fact that my body is transforming and aging when popular and visual culture informs me that this natural state of my organic matter is wrong? We are constantly bombarded with images from the makeup industry, from the cult of perfectly fit bodies, and dealing with the intense neurosis of appearance motivated by the fashion industry, plastic surgery, and anti-agism. Our collective desire to constantly consume “new” products and lifestyles has contaminated the possibility of existing as organic beings bound by time-based transformations. As I understand it, ecological apathy is rooted in the contradiction that we can care for the environment while simultaneously being careless consumers. Taking rottenness out of the margins is one solution to breaking out of this apathetic state that signals an uncaring denial of ecological issues. I offer a counterproposal that we create an acquaintanceship, friendship, and kinship with rottenness. If I live long enough with rotten matter, I wonder if I can make peace with myself and understand that my body is also undergoing organic changes. This cohabitation has made a significant impact on my life and made me more aware of the existence of other beings. It has motivated me to keep in contact with them, to learn more about them, and to continue to learn from them about how to be on this planet.

MMT: You have previously articulated the isolation from Brazilian culture you experienced growing up and, alternatively, the strong, embodied pull you feel toward your Indonesian roots. Have you found points of contact between your experience and those of other groups in Brazil that share similar feelings of isolation or disidentification? How have these connections left an impact on your practice?

DL: Acknowledging my own pain and trauma was how I initially found commonalities between my personal experiences and those of other groups in Brazil and beyond. My experience has been specific, due to the cultural isolation from my Indonesian diaspora while growing up in Brazil. I deal with the lingering feeling of isolation by extending my attention and practice to diverse communities, and trying to identify and find comfort with each group. I do this while understanding that there will always be fundamental differences between narratives. Maybe the common feelings of isolation or disidentification stem from an experience of brokenness, which can be repaired by the creation of new bonds.

As a person of Asian descent, or a Pessoa Amarela in Brazilian Portuguese (literally, “Yellow Person”), I have looked for guidance from and am grateful to the communities that have developed necessary strategies for survival under what has long been normalized oppression (for example, those communities subjected to Brazil’s 338-year history of slavery and the genocide of its indigenous people). Their knowledge has been an important source of learning, and I honor them through my practice.

Narrative reparation is one key frame of action in my practice. How can I socially and ecologically contribute to this action in my work? I try to do this by devoting time to create images and propositions that make “marginal” issues or groups that I identify with (like rottenness) more approachable.

WBH: You received degrees in fine art and teaching fine art. How does this pedagogical foundation influence your artwork/practice?

DL: Three key concepts in my artistic practice have been shaped by my teaching studies at São Paulo State University (UNESP): the pedagogy of autonomy (a concept from Paulo Freire²), analyzing the world through visual culture and not only through fine arts, and unlearning as a tool of living. This education gave me an understanding of art as a useful expression of deep social critique and contribution. I like to challenge myself by asking how my artwork can contribute to my life and to the communities that I surround myself with. 

I often make works that are homages to the people and other-than-humans with whom I have developed strong kinship. This artistic process has allowed me to learn and connect more deeply with the world around me. For instance, the installation and performance work  Lindinalva and the Balm (2016) was a testament to the ninety-five years of my late grandmother’s life. The site-specific installation Death Center for the Living Presents: East to East (2018), co-conceived with Anerina da Costa (my aunt), and artists Carmen Garcia and JUP do Bairro, was a multilingual installation that included archival images, poems, and performative elements that functioned as a lab of collective practice and authorship.  Fortunately, through my work, I was also able to honour my father, who recently died of Covid-19 at age sixty-four. I titled my debut gallery exhibition Lie Liong Khing (2015) after him. These acts have given me peace, as they bear witness to the passage of time and become a testimony to life.

The post A Version of Reality: Conversation with Daniel Lie appeared first on post.

Madeline Murphy Turner: Dearest Laura, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I’m hoping that we can start our conversation from the point when we first met. In 2014, we were introduced by our wonderful mutual friend Edward J. Sullivan, renowned professor of Latin American art at New York University. Soon after, we went to Monterrey, Mexico, where you organized a large-scale public performance to coincide with your exhibition Transcommunality: Laura Anderson Barbata, Collaborations Beyond Borders at the Centro de las Artes de Nuevo León. This performance, and the many others that are part of your ongoing project titled Transcommunality, bring together performance groups from Trinidad, Brooklyn, and Oaxaca. Can you please talk about Transcommunality, and the experience of working with people whose practices emerge from distinct and yet interconnected histories?

Laura Anderson Barbata: Transcommunality has evolved and grown through the years. As you know, it is more than a series of art projects. It also involves many long-term relationships. I began working with Moko Jumbie stilt dancers in 2002 at the Keylemanjahro School of Arts & Culture in Cocorite, which is a suburb of Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. In Western Africa, Moko Jumbie is a protective spirit that, due to its towering height, is able to foresee danger and evil. The Moko Jumbie is traditionally called in to cleanse and ward off evil spirits that have brought disease and misfortune to a village. In Trinidad and Tobago, hundreds of Moko Jumbies perform during Carnival, and they also play an important role in annual Emancipation Day parades. I designed and created thematic development and costuming for Keylemanjahro’s Junior Carnival Parade presentations in collaboration with many Carnival artists from Trinidad until 2006. After that, I wanted to take the experience of all I had learned in Trinidad farther—to expand it and share it with others—and to build bridges of dialogue, collaboration, and exchange in New York City, where I have my studio.

When I was still in Trinidad, I heard about the Brooklyn Jumbies, who like those at Keylemanjahro, hail from the Moko Jumbie tradition of stilt dancing that originated in West Africa. I set out to find them. Coincidentally, in 2007, I was offered a solo exhibition in New York. I proposed a project titled Jumbie Camp, which transformed the gallery into a community work space open to anyone wishing to collaborate. During the day, for the duration of the exhibition, the space was devoted to the preparation of costuming for a street performance, and in the evening, the Brooklyn Jumbies used the gallery and street as rehearsal and stilt-dancing training spaces for youth from Bedford-Stuyvesant and Flatbush. The exhibition culminated in a large-scale street performance outside the gallery, which is on West 24th Street in the Chelsea gallery district. I saw this event as a bridge that connected stilt-dancing groups from the West Indies, West Africa, and Brooklyn. These connections are highlighted by the two main founders of the Brooklyn Jumbies: Ali Sylvester and Najja Codrington. Ali, who is from Cocorite, was trained by Glen “Dragon” de Souza, the leader and founder of the Keylemanjahro School of Arts & Culture Moko Jumbies, while Najja was trained in the Chakaba stilt-dancing traditions of Senegal. Together, Najja and Ali passed on their stilt-dancing knowledge and traditions to youth from Bed-Stuy and Flatbush. But Jumbie Camp also built bridges between the residents of Chelsea and Brooklyn, as well as put tradition in dialogue with contemporary art.

This was the beginning of what has become a long and collaborative relationship with the Brooklyn Jumbies. As you know, I am from Mexico, and I knew of Mexican stilt-dancing traditions dating back to the pre-Columbian era and wanted to learn more about them. Coincidentally (again), in 2009, I was invited to Oaxaca, Mexico, to participate in the international experimental dance festival Prisma Forum. I was interested in meeting the Zancudos de Zaachila from Oaxaca. The Zancudos—stilt dancers in the town of Zaachila—perform annually to call upon the power of their saints to give them protection, bless them, and perform miracles. I wanted to learn more about their practice, history, and traditions.

This became the beginning of an extraordinary exchange of knowledge and sharing between the Zancudos de Zaachila and the Brooklyn Jumbies. Neither group had previously known about the other: the Zancudos did not know about the practice in Trinidad and Tobago, West Africa, and Brooklyn, and the Brooklyn Jumbies were unaware of the practice in Oaxaca, Mexico. Their shared and culturally unique practice created bonds of respect and friendship that led to collaborations between the groups, and we were invited by the town council of Zaachila to return for several consecutive years to join in their annual processions—and at the end of the cultural festivities, to present the results of our collaboration. 

During this time in Oaxaca, I also wanted to further expand the project by inviting local artisans to contribute to and be part of what would be presentations of their traditions: textile weaving, carving, alebrijes, novohispano altar techniques, painting, gourd carving, etc. And so I began exploring with each of the people interested in participating the different ways their work could be integrated into the whole. The results of those collaborations are the exhibition and performance that you mention—the ones that the Zancudos de Zaachila and the Brooklyn Jumbies traveled to Monterrey for—and we also held workshops and roundtables with Monterrey stilt dancers. To date, the Brooklyn Jumbies and I have performed and held workshops in the US, Mexico, Jamaica, and Singapore. Transcommunality has been exhibited in several venues in Mexico and the US, and will be exhibited at the Newcomb Art Museum in New Orleans this year.

MMT: Incredible. Thank you for highlighting that your practice is composed of so many integral participants. One of the many thematic threads I find so impactful across your artistic practice is that processes of exchange are always central. You continuously prioritize reciprocity, whether it’s between you and your collaborators, the audiences who witness the performance unfold, or even historical figures. I’d love it if you would talk about how you first came to understand the significance of this aspect of your work, as well as some of the challenges that you have faced over the years in committing to such a perspective.

LAB: As you say, these projects go beyond the performance of public experiences; they are primarily relationships that are built over extended periods of time, and reciprocity is at their core. This requires that I make a commitment to acompañamiento: to listen and learn and approach the participants and collaborators with open and continuous communication, self-evaluation and collective evaluations, because it is normal for things to change and we often need to recalibrate and refocus. In the process of exchange, in sharing and learning from each other, we agree on what we will give and what we would like to receive, and in this way, all participants become stakeholders in the project.

But for me, this way of working began in the nineties, when I was asked a simple but powerful question: “If we teach you how to build a canoe, what can you teach us in return?” I was asked this question by the Ortiz family, who are members of the Ye´Kuana community in the Venezuelan Amazon and were teaching the Yanomami community in Mahekototeri how to build a canoe. I wanted to learn, too, and to become an apprentice. Their response to my interest was to ask this question, and it influenced me profoundly, because it recognizes the role that responsibility, reciprocity, and balance have in our lives—and the importance of equally valuing one another’s knowledge and contributions. This question ultimately established the methodology for the Yanomami Owë Mamotima paper- and bookmaking project in the Venezuelan Amazon (which became my first community-driven arts project), and to this day, it continues to be the motivating factor in my work. In other words, reciprocity has become my methodology.  

MMT: I’d like to delve a little deeper into the work that you have done with the Brooklyn Jumbies, particularly your ongoing project Intervention: Indigo and its connection to the Black Lives Matter movement. You and the Jumbies started this project in 2015 with an intervention in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick that began in front of the local police precinct, reminding viewers of the crisis that faces communities of color in the United States and abroad, and the dire need to change the police system. I’m hoping you can tell us more about how you conceived of this project, and how you have been thinking about it recently, in the context of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Daniel Prude—to name just a few recent victims of police violence—and the subsequent global protests.

LAB: I started to spend time in New York in the late eighties, and in the mid-nineties, set up a studio there while dividing my time between Mexico, New York, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago—and wherever else my projects took me. As a Mexican and foreigner in New York, it was impossible not to have strong emotional and intellectual responses to the historically blatant systemic racism and violence toward people of color in the United States. I felt it was necessary and my duty as an artist to address this in my work; the Brooklyn Jumbies and I had discussed it in depth over the years and felt the need to find a way to respond to it through our collaborations. It took several years to finally be able to articulate it in a cohesive work: Intervention: Indigo. In 2015, the Brooklyn Jumbies, Chris Walker, Jarana Beat, and I presented Intervention: Indigo, a project that combines procession, performance, dance, music, textile arts, costuming, ritual, improvised interactions with the audience, and protest. It began at the Bushwick police precinct. The work is a call to action to serve and protect—and a protest in response to the violence and murder at the hands of the police of Black people living in this country and all over the world. The point of departure is the color indigo, a dye that is used around the globe and associated with protection, wisdom, and royalty. For example, in Burkina Faso, newborn babies are wrapped in indigo-dyed cloth to protect them. And I do not think it is a coincidence that indigo is the color of police uniforms here in the US, and almost all around the globe. It is a color imbedded with great meaning.

Six weeks before the global outbreak and lock-down because of Covid-19, in February 2020, we performed Intervention: Indigo again in Mexico City. This time, we were joined by Los Diablos de la Costa Chica, Los Rebeldes de El Capricho, who had traveled from Ometepec, a city in the state of Guerrero on the Afro-Mexican coast, to take part in the project. We started at the center plaza of the Glorieta de los Insurgentes, facing two significant buildings: the Secretaría de Seguridad Ciudadana CDMX [Ministry of Public Security of Mexico City] and the Fiscalía General de la República [Attorney General of Mexico]. The figures of Rolling Calf, performed by Chris Walker, and Little Jaguar, who I portrayed, initiated the intervention at the center of the roundabout, and were joined by Los Diablos in a choreographed symbolic call for justice and protection, which we directed toward the institutions we were facing and to all citizens. It is important to note that the Mexican Constitution did not officially recognize our Afro-Mexican population until 2018. An estimated two million Afro-Mexicans inhabit the coastal states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Veracruz. In 2020, for the first time, the Mexican census allowed for self-identification as Afro-Mexican, Afro-descendant, or Black.

In Brooklyn and in Mexico City, as we made our way around informal street vendors, through traffic, residential areas, and artist neighborhoods, we were joined by the rest of the performing artists and by onlookers, who not only followed us but also became an integral part of the unfolding narrative. As we moved through the streets, we transformed them and our relationship with public space—and we offered a new narrative, one that demands visibility, recognition, and justice for all Afro-descendant and BIPOC communities. Through the act of intervention, we exercise our right to occupy public space, and in doing so, express our defiance as we symbolically appropriate what is ours and demand protection. We do this while wearing the color that symbolizes care and service but also the repression of QTBIPOC communities.

MMT: Thank you so much for those very powerful and crucial words. I’m especially interested in what you say about the only recent recognition of Afro-Mexican populations. In thinking about the work you are doing for Intervention: Indigo with these communities, and many other projects of yours that we don’t have time to get into today, it seems that there is an aspect of your practice that is deeply committed to people and histories that have been expunged from “official” narratives.

LAB: During the recent global health crisis and lock-down, it has become evident that governments and institutions meant to serve their populations were incapable of attending to the most basic needs and rights of the people. And it was during this time that we witnessed—once again—the brutal murder of African-American people, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Daniel Prude, among many others who have tragically lost their lives at the hands of the police. These horrific acts of violence, injustice, and hate mobilized massive protests around the world to demand change; to demand the dismantling of the racist, sexist, and white supremacist systems that continue to deny the rights of QTBIPOC communities; to demand that the ongoing discrimination be reckoned with and to affirm the responsibility that white and privileged communities and institutions have in dismantling this violence; and to demand change. The BLM movement continues to press forward to bring about awareness and equality for QTBIPOC communities. There is no going back to the time before Covid-19—global economies are crumbling. It is a time to unite in a commitment to real change on both social and personal levels, to build a future in which justice and equal rights are honored. It is a time to support our most vulnerable communities. It is OUR responsibility as citizens of the world to serve and protect each other and to stand up for our Black Brothers and Sisters.

MMT: Through your social practice, you have also confronted the global climate crisis. I had the joy of witnessing the performance of Ocean Calling, which you created on the occasion of World Oceans Day at the United Nations Plaza during the first United Nations Ocean Conference in New York City in 2017. Since 2016, you have pursued several projects dealing with climate change and that compel audiences to acknowledge the need to protect our oceans. I’m hoping you can tell us more about these projects, and how you think about the environment or the natural world in relation to your community-based practice.

LAB: The environment has been an interest and concern of mine throughout my career. I began my practice making works in the studio—drawings on paper, sculpture, and outdoor installations—that address nature and the environment. I also initiated community projects in the Venezuelan Amazon that combined environmental protection and the preservation of oral history in the communities through paper- and bookmaking using local materials. This background and experience are the reasons that I was invited in 2015 by curator Ute Meta Bauer to be a fellow of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary’s TBA21-Academy, which is an ambitious, innovative program to bring awareness and find solutions to environmental crises such as global warming and the need to protect the oceans. The program brings together scientists, researchers, curators, and artists to embark on exploratory trips by sea to different parts of the South Pacific. I participated in an expeditionary trip to Papua New Guinea. As part of the program, all of the participating fellows were brought together after their trips to exchange ideas, to share our experiences and findings with different communities, and to listen to these community members’ experiences and responses to our work. This is the genesis of the performance at the UN in 2017, which was commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary–TBA21 Academy.

Ocean Calling, is a cross-disciplinary work created in collaboration with artists from the Caribbean diaspora and Mexico, and it is inspired by all forms of life that make the ocean their home—as well as by the people and the histories and cosmography of the communities that for millennia have lived in close relationship with the ocean. The resulting work combines spoken word, dance, improvisation, stilt dancing, ritual, procession, costuming, sculpture, and music to create a form of storied performance that unfolded at the United Nations Plaza after the first United Nations Ocean Conference in 2017. It was presented in a highly political space at a crucial moment, and in New York City, a metropolitan environment that is extremely dependent on the health of the oceans—even though this may not be overtly obvious to urban communities.

During the performance, I read aloud the declaration signed by the Pacific Island Countries and territories to significantly improve ocean governance. This statement was drafted during the Pacific Regional Platform for Partnerships and Action on Sustainable Development Goal 14 meeting, which took place in Suva, Fiji, just months before the UN Ocean Conference. It led the way to action on SDG 14: Sustainable Development Goal 14, and the work highlights the global impact of the collaboration among the Pacific Island Countries and territories on significant policy changes.

MMT: I’m really interested, Laura, in what you say about the unrecognized impact of oceans on the urban environment, especially given how as humans, we often, incorrectly, think of the urban and the “natural” environments as such distinctly different spheres. Your perspective is so important, because, as you have beautifully elaborated, you have worked with communities ranging from those in the middle of the Amazon to those in the center of New York City. How do you see your interest in the environment arising or unfolding across these different sites?

LAB: Perhaps my interest in the ocean is rooted in the fact that I grew up in Mazatlán, a coastal town (now a city) in the state of Sinaloa. Every day we woke up to the ocean, and the beach was where my sisters and I would play and explore for hours after school. We had no interest in toys; the beach and the ocean had everything: it is a place of marvel, a place that is different every day; it is teeming with life on the surface, in the sand, and in the water; sunsets are spectacular and different every day, with millions of colors painting the sky. It is a place of delight as well as of mystery. And as children, it was not unusual for us to be woken up in the middle of the night by a loudspeaker telling us to evacuate the area because of the possible dangers of an approaching ola marina [tidal wave or hurricane]. We were continually reminded of the powerful presence of nature, and of the importance of listening to it, respecting it, and getting out of its way when necessary. Nature was just part of life. 

I think that I was also impacted and informed by having spent so much time in the Amazon rainforest of Venezuela, a place where you experience your relationship with nature and the environment in a very direct way. Nature dictates everything, all activities: health, productivity, mobility, life, and death. One must learn to commune with this reality wholeheartedly, and to do so with humility, with respect, and with gratitude—and if you can do that, you will be able “listen” to it and to learn.  

As I mentioned earlier, the environment has been an ongoing concern of mine. In 1992, I was living in Mexico City and the subject of my work was the environment: seeds, nature, cycles of life in the natural world. One of my drawings from this time received an award at the exhibition Eco Art 92 at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM), which was held in conjunction with the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit. It was a hopeful moment, as that conference yielded Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, which was adopted by 178 governments, and laid the groundwork for environmental protection safeguards for the twenty-first century.

At this current stage of my life, when I do the math, I have mostly lived in cities, primarily in Mexico City and New York, both megacities. What has always surprised me about urban life is how easy it is to disconnect from the environment. I don’t want to say the obvious, but I have to: our urban lifestyle is designed to make life more convenient and comfortable in order to meet the demands of capitalist ideals. Discomfort must be avoided, and that means not accepting, looking at, or even acknowledging what is uncomfortable or unpleasant: greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, rising ocean levels, climate refugees, poverty, slave labor, climate, jobs, and justice. These crises are interconnected and we have been taught to turn a blind eye to them.

Now, at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, I look back on the progress spurred in 1992, which marked an important shift in global policy and social consciousness in terms of the protection of our environment and the communities that live in close relationship with it. However, these gains stand at risk of being systematically erased and replaced with shortsighted agendas that serve the privileged few. To feel discouraged by this reality only paralyzes us. We have the opportunity to make an impact, beginning by recognizing that our personal choices have tremendous power. We can inspire others to take a stance and to change the values and practices of private industry and policy. We are at a crossroads. I created Intervention: Ocean Calling and Ocean Blues in response to these issues, and although these works in themselves will not solve the problems we are facing, they can inspire necessary conversations, and ultimately, ideally, make some waves.

MMT: As we can see in the wearable artworks that you create for Transcommunality, Intervention: Indigo, Intervention: Ocean Blues, among others, textiles are integral to your work, not just in their visual effects, but in the meaning and stories that they communicate. Can you take a moment to talk about this element of your practice? How did your interest in textiles develop, and how do you conceive of the links between the very detailed, contemplative, and minuscule process of creating these materials and the large-scale nature of your performances?

LAB: My work in Trinidad and Tobago introduced me to the role that textiles play in public processions and performance. It was through assisting the Keylemanjahro School of Arts & Culture Moko Jumbies that I saw the potential that textiles have to convey an impactful message. Not only are they the foundation of the costuming for the youth participating in Junior Carnival, but the larger-than-life scale of the characters on stilts enable exploration in terms of movement, scale, and narrative. The physical characteristics of each of the textiles, along with their embedded symbolism, allowed me to utilize them as an integral part of thematic development and character design.

Because creating Moko Jumbie costumes requires a significant amount of fabric, I often recycle textiles from past projects and combine them with newer materials sourced locally in markets in my native country. I am also very interested in repurposing discarded materials that I have collected from numerous sources, such as Mas camps in Port of Spain; in New York, I collected discarded CDs as well as fabric scraps from the North American company Victor Textiles. Each piece of cloth holds a story within it, and by putting them together, I create dialogues between them that can be communicated through the dancer and expand their meaning.

The Transcommunality project was developed further in Oaxaca and scheduled to be exhibited at the Museo Textil de Oaxaca. The museum’s director, Hector Meneses, introduced me to extraordinary textiles from their collection and educated me about their uses and traditions within the different weaving communities of Oaxaca. During my research in Oaxaca, I was also eager to meet master artisans specializing in alebrijes, church restoration, wax flower candles, gourd carving, weaving, and embroidery who I invited to produce elements for new costumes to be worn by the Zancudos de Zaachila and the Brooklyn Jumbies. I met with each of the master artisans to discuss and plan their contribution; some chose to have complete freedom, while others were interested in responding to specific interests that I expressed. And in the case of Intervention: Indigo, the characters are made with indigo textiles that were handwoven and dyed in Burkina Faso, Guatemala, Japan, and the United States as a point of departure in addressing the use and misuse of the color blue by those whose duty it is to serve and protect. Indigo is one of the oldest plant-based dyes, and it is used all over the world and ritually embedded with symbolism and spirituality, power, and nobility. The color historically represents absolute truth, wisdom, justice, and responsibility. The textiles are embedded with this information and are central to the work itself.

MMT: Recently, we were talking about your position as an artist who works between Mexico City and New York City. How do you think this element of nomadism or transversality, if I may call it that, has impacted your perspective and work?

LAB: As a Mexican-born, New York–based artist, it is my belief that a shared artistic and social practice can serve as a platform on which to connect, learn, exchange, create, and transcend borders in order to activate one’s sense of belonging—locally and globally—and our shared responsibility toward the welfare of one another.

It is undeniable that I have learned from and been impacted by the opportunity of having worked in Mexico, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, the United States, and Norway. I mentioned before how a question I was asked in the Venezuelan Amazon clarified for me the way in which we can create platforms of reciprocal exchange that are rooted in respect. And this has become the fundamental philosophy of my work. But also, working in different parts of the world with many people has impacted my intervention work. For example, Intervention: Indigo is informed by my homeland of Mexico, which has a rich legacy of ritual public processions and celebrations—as well as protest—the importance of the occupation of public space through processional performance from my work in Trinidad and Tobago, and my research on textile traditions and material culture from around the globe.  As artists, we can unite to name the forces that are oppressing our societies and identify a common purpose by using all the forms of creativity we have available—dance, music, stilt dancing, spoken word, the creation of ritual space through interventions, and the creation of wearable art from textiles. These expressions have the capacity to cross boundaries, and they invite us to honor traditions. Through the process, we recognize ourselves in the work and build art-based social-practice projects that result in long-term exercises of reciprocity and collaboration.

MMT: I’d like to conclude by asking you about your activities during the pandemic. I’m thinking especially about your incredible initiative to make face masks, which you then donate to neighbors, hospitals, and homeless shelters. While it is an emergency response in an unprecedented moment, I think your effort to make and distribute masks also, almost surreally, aligns with your broader artistic practice in its very concrete commitment to the communities in which you live and work. 

LAB: In a way, I feel that my work has come full circle, and I’m still trying to understand my role as an artist in the future. For now, what to do has been absolutely clear to me. As I mentioned earlier, shortly before the COVID-19 outbreak, I had presented Intervention: Indigo in Mexico City. This experience was still very much present in me and I was still processing it, which is normal after a solo exhibition—and especially after one of my interventions, which as you know, are few and far between. And so I returned to Brooklyn and shortly thereafter, I was facing the onset of COVID-19, and it was absolutely clear that it would disproportionately impact our Latinx, Native American, and Black communities.  My first impulse was an urgent need to respond with whatever skills and materials I had available, and the answer as to how to do it was right in front of me. I immediately gravitated to the Indigo project textiles I had in the studio, and I started making masks to donate. I was sewing nonstop until I had completed a big batch, and then I set out to find people and places that needed them. At the beginning of the lock-down, essential workers in the local deli markets were not being given masks—yet they had long and crowded subway commutes from Queens and the Bronx to my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The homeless shelter around the corner from where I live was also not receiving PPE for its staff or residents, and the director of the shelter was desperately trying to find face masks to distribute. I contacted a community group based in the Bronx that was also in need of masks, and I posted a sign on my building for neighbors to contact me if they needed them. The need was, and still is immense. So I went from making masks for stilted characters, which can be up to almost twenty feet high, to—in the spirit of Intervention: Indigo—making face masks to protect and to serve our BIPOC communities. The project Intervention: Indigo gained new meaning for me, and I have continued to make and distribute masks.

I also knew early on that Mexico would be impacted in unimaginable ways due to social, economic, and political inequities, and so I made several tutorials in Spanish on how to make masks by hand. These were circulated through social media by cultural institutions and museums in Mexico, and projected around the clock on a large screen on the street. The tutorials were also circulated in the US in Spanish by community centers that serve Latinx communities. World leaders—including those in Mexico and the US—were behaving as if they could minimize the effects of the pandemic by merely ignoring the crisis. Believing that they had to choose between economies and health, they ignored medical experts and created a narrative that contradicts scientific facts and statistics; all around the globe, we are seeing that the systems that serve the needs of citizens are inadequate and failing. This only fueled in me the urgency to continue making and distributing masks, and we all had to act quickly. But it also made clear why it is more important than ever to create networks of support for one another.

To date, I have made and donated approximately two thousand masks—to hospitals, shelters, clinics, neighbors, and friends, and to people in Queens, the Bronx, and Texas, and on Native American Reservations in Montana. As I began donating masks, the people receiving them responded in beautiful ways. They have sent me tortillas, beans, maseca, jalapeños, flowers, cheese, and fabric, among other items, in exchange for the masks. People I do not know have been reminding me of and reintroducing into these efforts the driving force behind my own work, which is the importance of recognizing each other’s labor, each other’s value, each other’s work, and each other’s knowledge, and of responding through balanced exchange, through gestures of reciprocity. This is the essence of mutual aid.

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In April 2002, Guatemalan artist Alejandro Paz Navas (born 1975) realized the conceptual project titled The Bodyguard (El Guardaespaldas). This rudimentary video documents almost fifteen minutes of the daylong action that Paz Navas created on the streets of Guatemala City with two borrowed cameras and the help of fellow artist Jorge de León (born 1976). To execute the project, Paz Navas first contracted a professional bodyguard for the day, informing him that he would be asked to perform his usual labor but withholding details about whom he would be guarding. Next, the artist found a beggar willing to participate without pay. Highlighting the conceptual nature of the venture, Paz Navas explains that he did not want to use actors but rather to engage real people who would play the roles they hold in daily life. For this reason, their compensation—or lack thereof—mirrored that of their professions. Throughout the video, the bodyguard escorts the beggar through the Centro Cívico—the Guatemalan government’s center of power—to the peripheries of the city.¹ Carried out entirely in the streets, The Bodyguard provides a point of entry into the dynamics of public space at the turn of the twenty-first century in Guatemala. Building on an analysis of The Bodyguard, this text elucidates how a generation of artists in Guatemala utilized the city to create work that visualizes the traces of the Civil War (1960–96) and its aftermath.

Following thirty-six years of armed conflict, the Guatemalan Civil War came to an end in 1996 with a signed peace agreement. The effects of more than three decades of brutal violence, however, remained present in the lives of individuals and the social fabric of the country. The entry of transnational corporations following the peace accords allowed for the invasion by neoliberal policies and free market economies, which disproportionately benefited the upper class and left the rural and urban poor with lower wages and increasingly fewer employment opportunities. Discussing how this widening economic disparity provoked greater demand for personal protection, Avery Dickins de Girón explains that the 1996 peace accords resulted in a decrease in the police force, while wage inequality led to a rise in urban violence and police corruption. For those with disposable income, private bodyguards became both a safety measure and a sign of status. Dickins de Girón writes: “Walking through any commercial zone in Guatemala City, one is struck by the number of armed guards posted outside supermarkets, delivery trucks, and restaurants. Whether they instill a sense of comfort or fear, the individuals behind the guns—most of them rural peasants—symbolize the unequal social and economic conditions in contemporary Guatemalan society.”² It is important to note that most people seeking employment as bodyguards come from low-income communities and, therefore, despite the difference in how they earn their living, the country’s homeless population and those hired as bodyguards in Guatemala City often have a shared history. 

Paz Navas is part of a generation of artists that includes Regina José Galindo (born 1974), Aníbal López (A-1 53167; 1964–2014),³ Jorge de León, Yasmin Hage (born 1976), and María Adela Díaz (born 1973), who formed their practices in the postwar period. Centering their work on conceptual actions and public performance, they were impacted by the Grupo Imaginaria—especially its members Pablo Swezey (1959–2014) and Luis González Palma (born 1957)—a collective that, founded in 1987 in Antigua, was the first artistic initiative to confront the traumas of the Civil War.⁴ Without official institutional art circuits, the postwar artists developed their work parallel to the emergence of the experimental art festival Octubre Azul;⁵ alternative spaces Proyecto de Artistas Independientes (PAI), Colloquia, and Casa Bizarra; and Espacio Contexto, which, for the first time, brought exhibitions of international contemporary artists such as Santiago Sierra (born 1966) and Teresa Margolles (born 1963) to Guatemala City.⁶ Due to the lack of established art institutions and financial resources, these young artists often worked in the streets, developing ideas for projects while on the bus, sharing meals, or traversing the city. Describing the environment following the peace accords, Regina José Galindo remembers: “Around 1997, ’98, and ’99, there was a feeling that things were about to change. There was a degree of peace, and at that time, a group of youths took to the streets. We went out onto the streets. And we started to produce art in the public space.”⁷ 

Speaking to neoliberalism’s precarious attitude toward life, Judith Butler suggests: “When bodies assemble in the street, in the square, or in other forms of public space[,] . . . they are exercising a plural and performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field, and which, in its expressive and signifying function, delivers a bodily demand for a more livable set of economic, social, and political conditions no longer afflicted by induced forms of precarity.”⁸ This strategic implementation of the “right to appear” permeates the work of Paz Navas and his generation vis-à-vis their counteraction of the erasure of history and bodies from the realm of the public. For Octubre Azul in 2000, Paz Navas realized the action Genocide (Genocidio), in which he threw approximately one hundred broken dolls into the plaza in front of the Supreme Court and the Tribunal building. On their way to their government jobs, civilians occasionally paused to look, but more commonly walked over the broken toys without paying notice. This work invokes both the violence inflicted on hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans during the Civil War and the willful ignorance that citizens adopted in order to disregard such reality. Staged in front of the city’s court buildings, Genocide also highlights the problem of bringing the perpetrators to justice. Referencing this artwork, Rodolfo Arévalo writes, “Justice, despite its huge building and the investment of different governments and foreign aid, does not operate as expected,” pointing out that in the early 2000s, only about 2 percent of all homicide cases in Guatemala resulted in the incarceration of those guilty.⁹

Beyond the financial and institutional realities that propelled these artists into the street, it is also important to note the significance that public access to information held for them. Following the end of the Civil War, a Truth Commission was established to investigate the crimes committed by the military. Horrific details, especially about the genocide of Mayan communities in the countryside, began to emerge. Referring to the impact of these atrocities on his generation, Paz Navas explains: “The war in Guatemala was experienced in a very opaque way. We lived in the city, but it was very difficult to know what was taking place beyond the limits of the city, methods of information and communication were completely controlled by the government’s—the military’s—agenda, and it was not understood what was happening.”¹⁰ Creating actions in the streets, artists emphasized the need for transparency by making their work completely accessible to the public. The city became a platform on which to visualize previously concealed facts about the armed conflict and its lasting effects on the country and its citizens.

The practice of exposing the indelible traces of violence can be found in the work of many artists of this generation. The same year that Paz Navas executed Genocide, Aníbal López organized an art action titled June 30, 2000, the photographic documentation of which was presented at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. In anticipation of a military parade that took place along the Sexta Avenida, López covered the entire route with ashes. An act that subversively and discretely recalled the burned villages and bodies of people massacred during the war, the scattered ashes were mostly removed by the start of the parade. Nevertheless, the remains were smeared along the avenue as the soldiers, some of whom committed genocide during the Civil War, marched in celebration. Also in 2000, María Adela Díaz staged a public intervention titled Allegory of Reality (Alegoría de la Realidad), in which the artist dyed twelve white doves red and released them in Guatemala City’s Parque Central to symbolize the blood of Guatemalans who died every day. In 2003, upon hearing that Efraín Ríos Montt—the dictator from 1982 to 1983 who oversaw a scorched-earth campaign—was running for office again, Regina José Galindo performed Who Can Erase the Traces? (¿Quién puede borrar las huellas?). Walking barefoot from the Constitutional Court toward the National Palace in the Parque Central, she periodically dipped her feet in a basin of blood, which she carried with her, leaving a path of crimson footprints behind her.

Realized on the street, in parks, and plazas, these projects also gesture toward the changing economics of postwar Guatemala. With the increasing violence and poverty brought on by neoliberalism, the privatization of public space as urban renewal projects attempted to turn “undesirable” zones into “dignified” areas filled with shopping, restaurants, and other leisure spaces for the upper class and tourists to enjoy. Theorizing a neoliberal vision of space through these development projects, Rodrigo J. Véliz and Kevin O’Neill argue: “The reality, however, is that not all Guatemalans are free to visit these spaces. Paradoxically, these efforts at urban renewal yield places that are not all that public—places that look inviting but that nevertheless restrict the flow of certain people and certain goods.”¹¹ In fact, these privatized undertakings forcibly displaced street vendors just like the ones seen toward the end of The Bodyguard. In this sense, it could be that rather than providing the beggar with protection, the bodyguard in Paz Navas’s project enacts a privatized policing of the “undesirable” and “public” Guatemalan subject, defending financial prosperity rather than people. This possibility is highlighted by the fact that we see the bodyguard escorting the beggar who, in search of income, asks unheeding pedestrians for spare change. With this project and others such as Genocide, June 30, 2000, Allegory of Reality, and Who Can Erase the Traces?, these artists of the postwar generation made subtle yet compelling interventions to visualize the impact when the body politic is sacrificed by the state for capital and power, a dehumanizing tactic that traversed life in Guatemala before and after the peace accords.

Working in the streets of Guatemala City, Paz Navas and his generation grappled with the repercussions of the Civil War and the changing dynamics that came with the importation of neoliberal policies. They occupied the spaces being usurped by a narrowing elite to attempt to make unavoidable the socioeconomic realities that many citizens had tried to ignore. At the same time, there was an awareness on their part of the persistence of invisibility even in the public sphere, as demonstrated by the two subjects featured in The Bodyguard. Paz Navas notes that despite their seemingly conflicting professions, the cruel irony is that both are unable to enter the private spaces of the upper classes and both are treated as anonymous citizens by the public. When considered with the previously mentioned knowledge that the bodyguards and the homeless frequently come from similar backgrounds, their shared anonymity further binds them.¹² In this sense, in The Bodyguard, Paz Navas creates a correspondence between two seemingly distinct beings, both of whom navigate the complex and contradictory postwar landscape that characterized Guatemala City at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The post The Right to Appear: Alejandro Paz Navas’s <em>The Bodyguard</em> (2002) and the Guatemalan Postwar Art Scene appeared first on post.