Just Art

January 22

We examine learning as a form of re-occupation, both cognitive and spatial, in precarious political and physical contexts. The condition of physical displacement (including disappearance) is central to this day, that takes off from Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti’s School Under a Tree (“shared living in a state of displacement”), informed by their work in a refugee camp in Palestine.

SITAC XII opens with the metaphorical moment of silence, a calibration of the given context, politically, culturally and institutionally. With their video piece Moments of Silence, Swedish artists Lars Bergström and Mats Bigerts speak of the world in such a condition of pause as “a frozen arrow pointing at the thought of something important, so important that it should never be forgotten.” A tall order that the conference cannot aspire to, but certainly this moment in early 2015 does in the aftermath of the profound repercussions of the abduction and disappearance of young students in Iguala, Guerrero, the murder of young black men in the United States, and the criminalization of marginalized peoples in too many places in between.

Under various loaded terms – slow food, seed banks, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and others – the discussion on what we eat and who is empowered by it, has gained international urgency due to population explosion, monopoly by multinational food corporations, and environmental crises. Knowledge of local communities, and access and control over local agricultural products and procedures, so far sit squarely against corporate and government interests in large-scale food production. In Mexico, key words are indigenous food autonomy versus transgenic corn; in parts of India, positions are occupied along similar fault lines focusing a wide range of food crops. This day examined and compared strategies for a more just distribution of, and access to, food sources foregrounding art projects that open new thinking on these issues along legal investigations.

The morning was informed by Amar Kanwar’s project The Sovereign Forest, the artist’s long-term engagement with activists and local farming communities in Odisha on India’s East Coast, and the rousing debates over transgenic corn and the defense of native seeds in Mexico that mirror the Indian situation. Reports on the October 2014 Estudio SITAC that brought together Amar Kanwar and activists, artists, and educators in Oaxaca complement the morning session. In the afternoon, the discussion expanded philosophically and legally to reflect on such recent developments as the right to just treatment that has been expanded from human to non-human animals, from natural to corporate persons. Introduced in Bolivia in 2010, the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, for instance, affords human rights to indigenous plants. In the U.S. in 2012, on the other hand, corporations’ right to free speech was reaffirmed.

We looked into constructions of gender, their deep entanglement with constructions of race, and the potential to destabilize these categories through performance-based strategies.

MuAC’s Campus Expandido hosted the international sound art collective Ultra-red for an extended workshop in November 2014, in collaboration with Museo Experimental El Eco and the Seminario: Estética, Arte y Política taught by Helena Chávez Mac Gregor. The experience of “listening” based on a structured protocol was shared by twelve workshop participants from Mexico City, was the topic of the first presentation. Founded in 1994 in California and with members internationally, Ultra- red is dedicated to “militant sound investigations” that explore acoustic space as generative of social space and apply it to political organizing. Formative for the workshop in Mexico was Ultra-red’s recent project Vogue’ology, developed within the New York City’s House/Ballroom scene, an intentional community of transgender, bisexual, lesbian and gay, primarily Latino/a and African American men and women organized as “houses” that function as social networks and artistic collectives.

Later on, the discussion broadened to analyze operations of exclusion and counter-strategies through the enactment of gender, class and racial identities in gendered spaces, including architectural, urban, and virtual settings.