READING DIARY: FEBRUARY 2022- TT SESSION 14: CURATING AS A POLITICAL ACTION IN THREE PARTS WITH LUISA SANTOS, ANA FABIOLA, & CARLES GUERRA- Readings 1-6
FEB22-READING 1. 4Cs - From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture - This website, project and shear numbers of international organizations and people involved with 4 Cs is inspiring. It acts like a template for connected, collaborative creative projects.
Described as a...European Cooperation Project co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, the 4Cs seeks to understand how training and education in art and culture can constitute powerful resources to address the issue of conflict as well as to envision creative ways in which to deal with conflictual phenomena, while contributing to audience development through active participation and co-production. The project aims at advancing the conceptual framework of intercultural dialogue and enhancing the role of public arts and cultural institutions in fostering togetherness through cultural diversity and intercultural encounters.
The site lists an Arts Lab, Conferences, Film Programme, Mediation labs, EU exhibition sites, Residencies, Summer schools, Workshops, a Map, a blog, a Participation link, Digital Library, Press Materials and Publications. As my praxis develops, I would like to participate in one like it.
FEB22-READING 2. Imagine Going on Strike: Museum Workers and Historians- Ariella Aisha Azoulay first outlines in her IGoS writing Alex Gourevitch's radical view of the right to strike, which he poses is derived from the right to resist oppression. And he argues, oppression is partly a product of the legal protection of basic economic liberties, which he states is why the right to strike has priority over these liberties. Then Azoulay outlines a parallel re-framing of the act of creative workers' strikes, so they're understood... not in terms of the right to protest against oppression, but rather as an opportunity to care for the shared world, including through questioning one's privileges, withdrawing from them, and using them. For that purpose, one's professional work in each and every domain, even in domains as varied as art, architecture, or medicine, cannot be conceived for itself and unfolded as a progressive history, nor as a distinct productive activity to be assessed by its outcomes, but rather as a worldly activity, a mode of engaging with the world that seeks to impact it while being ready to be impacted in return.
Then she details workers strikes as an anti-imperialist, de-colonializing activities. Going on strike is to claim one's right not to engage with destructive practices, not to be an oppressor and perpetrator, not to act according to norms and protocols whose goals were defined to reproduce imperial and racial capitalist structures.
Does Azoulay's "racial" mean racialized, or racist, or ___?
Later, Azoulay makes a plea to historians... Going on strike means no more archival work for a while, at least until existing histories are repaired. No more time should be spent in archives to look for what descendants of people who were destitute were able, against the crimes of the discipline, to protect and transmit in place of imperial documents. Historians should withdraw from being the judges (or angels) of history and instead support and endorse community-sourced knowledge. They should go on strike whenever they are asked, by their discipline and peers, to affirm what the latter should know by now, that history is and always was a form of violence. When more than one million women were raped in Germany in the spring of 1945, no war was ended; when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland and were not allowed to return, nothing was established; when millions of African Americans were made sharecroppers, they continued to be exposed to regime-made violence; when millions from India, Africa, and China were made "indentured workers" to "solve" the "labor problem" of the plantation system, slavery was not abolished. Evermore, violence has been required to obscure the rape as lost memories to be discovered, events to be painstakingly reconstituted by scholars working in archives. To repair the violence, historians must go on strike to know that the violence still exists and that there is no such thing as the "postwar" world...
And she powerfully concludes with our re-imagining historians, refusing to use their expertise and knowledge until the precedents used to justify injustice are replaced with worldly and non-imperial rights, guarded and preserved by those who were destitute, beginning with the right to care for the shared world. Imagine historians striking until their work could help repair the world.
FEB22-READING 3. Errata exhibition guide potential history- Ariella Aisha Azoulay's errata exhibition guide is intended to correct errors and alleviate potential confusion about the UN sanctioned Jewish colonization of Palestine. Like other errata Azoulay has constructed, she uses photography and text to construct this "exibition guide". She re-interprets historical photographs to tell a less politicized, if not more realistic history of 1940s, on-the-ground Palestinian-Jewish peoples relationships and experiences. She describes her errata projects as her practice.
FEB22-READING 4. In Natural History of Rape, via found personal diary pages, photographs, and her publication of them, with added narrative, Ariella Aisha Azoulay cites numerous accounts of WWII/"post war" mass rapes in Germany, i.e., [Fig. 12] Over the course of several weeks, anywhere between a few hundred thousand and two million German women were raped, often in urban spaces where cameras were certainly present, as documented by the careful recording of the destruction of buildings in numerous trophy photographs. Destroyed cities were quickly crowded with photographers, some of whom acted as if nothing could stop them as they journeyed through the destruction, seeking out sights that constituted prime objects for the photographic gaze. The presence of rape, including both what preceded and followed the physical violence, did not require any special haste to detect. It was ubiquitous, but still, it did not appear as a prime object for the gaze of these photographers in the way the large-scale destruction of cities did.
Azoulay points out that the untold numbers of WWII/post war rapes of German women were so accepted that they were essentially un-note worthy. The implication is that patriarchal power is held in part or in large measure, through on-going mass sexual violence towards women.
She concludes with candid, sobering thoughts on our post WWII Germany/western world... New world order- Curfews, raids, body searches and arrests were pursued daily. I propose to see the imprint of patriarchal order on women’s bodies during the final stages of war, and the implementation of a ‘new world order’ after its end, as inseparable from the processes of naturalizing imperial bodies of governance as a neutral political language comprised of unqualified terms – sovereignty, citizenship, peace, war and the like. International law was codified and standardized to endorse these concepts and structures as incarnations of transcendental political categories, culminating with the creation of the U.N. as an apparatus that contains imperial violence within the realm of law and order. On this I’ll dwell on a different occasion.
Azoulay's Natural History of Rape is a brilliant, brutal, and vital to the actual history of the west's "democratic freedoms". Reading it reminds me of reading Two Venuses, and of so many other pieces that give voice to the previously voiceless women of our past. It is a vivid reminder that the misogynistic patriarchal western practices persist, and are so deeply ingrained, a millennium later, that we are blind to it. See The Burning Times www.nfb.ca/film/burning_times/
FEB22-READING 5. Unshowable Photographs is like all of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's work, compelling, infuriating, painful, patient, political, powerful, revealing, smart, thoughtful, and very well-studied. In it she states that her research is of "...photography and human rights." Her drawings remind of Jean Dominique Ingres' and Warholian styled "traced drawings" styles/techniques. Azoulay's are traces from photographs through I think, an unspecified tracing device. Whereas Ingres were traced from camera lucida projection, and Warhols, via the use of an electrically powered light projector.
Unlike Ingres' and Warhol's, Azoulay's are of un-available to the public images. It's a cleaver, rebellious and remarkable visual documentation of the essentially hidden photographs. HA.
In her drawings, titled Many Ways not to Say Deportation, she traced images of photographs taken between 1947-1950 that detail Evacuation of their ‘own free will’ (Tantura–Fureidis–Transjordan), Evacuation from a ‘Jewish zone’ to an ‘Arab zone’ (Ramle–Ramallah), and Evacuation of the ‘wounded and ailing’ (Tel Aviv–Jaffa) Her accompanying text narratives discusses the real life human rights tragedies of the 1948 Israeli Giza Strip occupation that ultimately gave way and the 1967 West Bank occupation.
Note...collectively Azoulay's work, here, Readings 2-5, calls to mind the brilliant, radical, sometimes funny in an ironic-tragic kind of way, sevearl US-based feminist artists, including some featured in Rutgers Feminist Art Project exhibition, Some Day is Now: Women, Art & Social Change: nbmaa.org/exhibitions/some-day-is-now
FEB22-READING 6. Para-sites like us: What is this para-sitic tendency? by Janna Graham, Six Degrees Resident, tagged with Janna Graham, Fieldwork, Museum as Hub, Para-sites like us, Pedagogy, R&D Season, Six Degrees Resident, if I read it correctly, is initially premised on the idea that due to the fact as living, creative beings, inhabiting the same living planet within various more-and-less successful, socioeconomic structures, cultures/ethnicities are better off working together vs. separately and apart from our private and public artistic and educational institutions. That is, creatives working collaboratively with, beside or parasitically, artistic and educational institutions, curators, etc., towards common solutions to various social problems that we've historically and collectively created, i.e., injustices of all kinds... classism, ethnocentrism, racism, sexism, etc., is likely, and probably logically a more productive route than creating within isolated artistic silos or bubbles. (Graham cites, among other successful examples Michael Rakowitz’s “paraSITE” dwellings, which are conceptually, creatively and practically really cool.)
Then midstream Graham seemingly argues against potential productivity of parasitic relationships between artists, curators, directors, educators, stating that The host, while seeming outwardly amenable to progressive social elements, minority communities, etc., is so only when these initiatives and groups coexist with this banking concept and the invisible elements it solidifies....and later she still poses, The question at the forefront of their minds is: when are we the para-site and when are we the host?, citing the pedagogy of the para-site through Freire, which states an... intricate relationship is suggested between the oppressor and the oppressed. What results is a cast of political figures other than those whom we have come to expect in both political and cultural/artistic terms. They are neither strict heroes nor anti-heroes. They are neither at the front of the line nor on the outside charging in. Their positions can be gross and murkily embedded. Neither leaders nor followers, they are radically connected to what they take from and what they host. Like the many unspoken heroines of feminist activism, they are often known more for their organizational contributions than they are for loud speeches and grand gestures, but over time they have developed strategies for breaking the power relations in which they are embedded and for inducing change.
Graham concludes with an open-ended or deconstructed future of potentially constructive parasitic relationships... As late neoliberalism exposes what lies beneath the modes of inclusion of its earlier iterations in violent acts of policing and recrimination, the distance between the para-site and the host is lessened. In this, the very existence of the para-site is threatened, and silent and clandestine para-sitism may no longer be an option. It might rather be necessary to move from this quieter phase to one of amplifying contradictions in order to become more conflictual. If facilitated, such strategies might be opportunities for para-sites to gain, by way of exit or rebellion, new consistency and new ground.
Oocyst Parasites / Occupying Para-sites
In biological terms, Oocyst parasites move quickly from host to host. They simply use their host to catalyze their own development, leaving little impact on it.
Ectoparasites / Dialogic Para-sites
Are parasites that live on the host’s surface using its attributes to encourage the development and multiplication of para-sitic activity? An ectoparasite does not necessarily leave an imprint on the host’s cellular structure.
Endoparasiting / Critical or Transformative Para-sites
Endoparasites occupy spaces inside the host’s body, changing it as well as enabling the conditions for the community of parasites.
The Invited Para-site
The final category—in which the invited para-site is actively commissioned by the host to use and interfere with its body—has no counterpart in the microbial world. The difference between those relationships listed above and the one between the commissioned parasite and host is that, while hosts solicit the input of outside activist agents, these projects are not created through a real negotiation of the para-site’s demands. Rather, these projects are initiated through the interests and desires of those working within the institution, who then solicit outside agents from there.
www.newmuseum.org/blog/view/para-sites-…
