FORCES OF ART

PERSPECTIVES FROM A CHANGING WORLD

Editors
Carin Kuoni
Jordi Baltà Portolés
Nora N. Khan
Serubiri Moses

Contributors
Mariam Abou Ghazi
Kobina Ankomah-Graham
Jordi Baltà Portolés
Ilka Eickhof
Fernando Escobar Neira
Fatin Farhat
Maya Indira Ganesh
Rocca Holly-Nambi
Miranda Jeanne Marie Iossifidis
Nuraini Juliastuti
Nora N. Khan
Višnja Kisić
Diana T. Kudaibergenova
Carin Kuoni
Kabelo Malatsie
Jenny Mbaye
Zayd Minty
Nadia Moreno Moya
Serubiri Moses
Judith Naeff
Laura Nkula-Wenz
Joseph Oduro-Frimpong
Arnout van Ree
Naomi Roux
Vaughn Sadie
Anna Selmeczi
Nishant Shah
Lenneke Sipkes
Rike Sitas
Cristiana Strava
Goran Tomka
Kasper Tromp
Minna Valjakka
Paulina E. Varas
Mark R. Westmoreland
Kitty Zijlmans

Valiz, Amsterdam

www.valiz.nl

FORCES OF ART

Perspectives from a Changing World

Contents

Preface

PREFACE
................................................................................................
Kitty Zijlmans

Introduction

FORCES OF ART
Perspectives from a Changing World
................................................................................................
Carin Kuoni

Section One When Art Opens Spaces of Possibilities

WHEN ART OPENS SPACES OF POSSIBILITIES
Policies, Tensions, and Opportunities
................................................................................................
Jordi Baltà Portolés

MAKING ‘THE COMMON’
Arts Practices and Social Processes in Latin America
................................................................................................
Nadia Moreno Moya and Fernando Escobar Neira

TICKLING THE SENSIBLE
Art, Politics and Worlding at the Global Margin
................................................................................................
Višnja Kisic′ and Goran Tomka

‘THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS TO HAVE THAT SPACE!’
The Power of Art and Local Art Communities in Central Asia
................................................................................................
Diana T. Kudaibergenova

DISSONANT ENTANGLEMENTS AND CREATIVE REDISTRIBUTIONS
................................................................................................
Judith Naeff
Arnout van Ree
Lenneke Sipkes
Cristiana Strava
Mark R. Westmoreland

Section Two Content Sharing and Mistranslation

CONTENT SHARING AND MISTRANSLATION
On Global Aspirations and Local Infrastructures
................................................................................................
Serubiri Moses

ARTS AND ECOSYSTEMS
Building Toward ‘Cultural Resilience’ in Indonesia
................................................................................................
Minna Valjakka

THE SUSTAINABILITY OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS SPACES IN GHANA, TANZANIA AND UGANDA
................................................................................................
Kobina Ankomah-Graham and Joseph Oduro-Frimpong

CRITICISM IS A LUXURY
On the Effect of Evaluations
................................................................................................
Mariam Abou Ghazi and Ilka Eickhof

CURATING DAKAR AS AN ‘ART WORLD CITY’
................................................................................................
Jenny Mbaye and Miranda Jeanne Marie Iossifidis

Section Three Artistic Research and its Capacity to Cross Contexts

ARTISTIC RESEARCH AND ITS CAPACITY TO CROSS CONTEXTS
New Methodologies and Digital Technologies
................................................................................................
Nora N. Khan

CREATING SPACE FOR QUEERNESS
................................................................................................
Rocca Holly-Nambi

DOUAL’ART: ART, PUBLICS, AND THE CITY AS A ‘FIELD OF EXPERIENCE’
................................................................................................
Zayd Minty
Laura Nkula-Wenz
Naomi Roux
Vaughn Sadie
Anna Selmeczi and Rike Sitas

FREE SCHOOLS AS TOOLS FOR INCLUSION
Tiny Toones and Arte Moris
................................................................................................
Nuraini Juliastuti

BETWEEN MEMORY AND STORAGE
Digital Transitions for Art Organizations
................................................................................................
Maya Indira Ganesh and Nishant Shah

Section Four Histories of the Present

HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT
On the Political Agency of Art
................................................................................................
Carin Kuoni

SYRIAN ARTISTS OUTSIDE SYRIA
Conflicts, Challenges, and Possibilities for Artists Working in Displacement
................................................................................................
Fatin Farhat

NETWORK(ING) FROM LIMA TO JOHANNESBURG
................................................................................................
Kabelo Malatsie

COLLECTIVE CREATIONS
Art and Politics for the Present
................................................................................................
Paulina E. Varas

REFLECTIONS ON A CHANGING WORLD

MAPPING WITHOUT BORDERS
An Account of all Art Projects

Partners

Contributors

Index of Names

Index of Works, Exhibitions, Projects

Acknowledgements

Colophon

PREFACE

Kitty Zijlmans

Forces of Art was conceived as an initiative—which included the elaboration of this book—before the Covid-19 pandemic broke loose. But it was finalized right in the middle of the outbreak, or at least during its first wave. Newspapers, the media, experts, and countless others tumble over each other to share their analyses, and comment on taken (or discarded) strategies. Conspiracy theories thrive, international exchange is traded in for nationalist protectionism, but at the same time, people are craving for art, for sharing experiences and feelings, and for connecting with others. We are on the brink of a new world order. Yet, while writing this preface, George Floyd met his awful death literally under the oppression of a racist police force. This ‘incident,’ as it is euphemistically called, is a spark that has ignited a wave of protest demonstrations—not just in the US, but around the globe— against the never ending discrimination of and violence against black people, against people of colour. Even though, unfortunately, riots and looting sometimes take place, overall the demonstrations are as peaceful as they are persistent. Despite the Corona virus, people of all colours and ages, but especially young people, join in solidarity. Covid-19 plus George Floyd has kindled new waves of camaraderie and concern, a firm call for change.

Yes, we most probably are at the threshold of a new era, one we do not know yet, where the odds for change are towards an increased neoliberalism ruled by multinationals and a deep state; or a recognition of the need for collaboration and fairness, of bottomup initiatives. This is why this book is so timely. Its driving force is the shared concern and responsibility for societies worldwide, with regards to culture and the well-being of its communities.

It alludes to giving free reign to the forces of art and culture. Let us dream a bit. Imagine that for once the world isn’t trying to save banks and multinationals, but is turning to the creativity and potentialities of the arts. There it will find forms of lateral thinking able to view things in a different, unusual light. Not a one-size-fits-all solution, but models for a new political imagination stirred by affective movements; not aiming at profit, but prioritising care and driven by concern, not just with the human world but the whole ecology of the human and non-human—of all that matters. Central to this thinking is not what art ‘is,’ but what it ‘does.’ This question was the motor of the initiative and book Forces of Art.

How did the idea of this massive initiative (and massive it is, covering thirty-eight projects in as many countries by fifteen international research teams) originate? In 2018, motivated to build on their existing knowledge, Prince Claus Fund, Hivos and the European Cultural Foundation invited young and experienced researchers from various disciplines from all over the world to propose approaches for critically investigating the role of arts and culture in societies. The research teams selected chose their research objects from a pool of two hundred cases, based on projects supported through grants by the three foundations over a ten-year period. To arrive at these two hundred cases, a random selection was made from an archive of hundreds of projects supported between 2008 and 2018. The research project aimed at investigating the way in which artists, cultural organizations, and artworks affect people and their social environments, and to explore how, or to what extent, cases of creative practice have been operational in empowering people, communities, and societies in their given contexts. Instead of employing a quantifying methodology, one that is favoured by politics and donor agendas, the three organizations decided for an affective approach: not targeting measurable output, but exploring how art and cultural practices actually work as social praxis.

To encompass the aim of the initiative of researching how arts and culture affect people and their social environment from a global perspective, the working group opted for the working title ‘The Force of Art.’ This was inspired by Krzysztof Ziarek’s book The Force of Art (2004),¹ used as a course book in the MA Arts & Culture seminar at Leiden University (2015–2020). Considering the question of how art can be consequential, the book challenges the reader to think beyond art as representation, as merely aesthetical, or as simply an object or commodity. Instead, it stirs thinking of art in terms of a force that has the ability to transform relations and enable alternative configurations and relationalities. Art is thus understood as an event, an act, and as something that ‘works’ within society and steers away from the unrelenting manipulative drive characteristic of modernity. Many contributions in the book—finally entitled, in consultation with the publisher, Forces of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World— reflect how these processes of enabling and becoming function: artworks instantiate an interface between the ‘external’ social world and the ‘internal’ artistic space, and this allows art to be embedded in social praxis and yet to remain autonomous. It is this double character, Ziarek contends, that endows art with a critical and performative force.²

Art as a force affects people and this does not simply mean unlocking the beholder’s emotions, but enabling new relationalities with other people, their surrounding world, nature, the environment—fundamental connections that exceed the subject-object dichotomy. It is this critical potential of art that Chantal Mouffe envisions in her essay ‘Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,’³ exploring the different ways in which artistic practices can contribute to questioning dominant hegemonies. For Mouffe, critical art foments dissensus, making visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. Such artistic practices aim at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the frameworks of existing hegemonies. As numerous artistic and cultural practices discussed in this book demonstrate, one needs to go against the grain to be heard; this asks for strong commitment and collaboration of the parties involved to engender systemic change. The book testifies to the ceaseless energy people put into collectively setting up platforms, companies, centres, festivals, archives, projects, workshops, non profit organizations, all driven by the urge to reorganize social reality. It invites the reader on a journey detecting change in dozens of countries around the world, from Central Asia to Meso and Latin America, from Africa to Central Europe, from South and South-East Asia to the Middle East. What a rich panorama of innovative vitality unfolds here!

Woven into this fabric of interrelations, the three funding organizations play their part. In their plea for an affectdriven operation of funding instead of one aiming at ticking the administrative boxes, they mark the shift from ontology to performativity, and from prescribing to stimulating self-empowerment and self-regulation. This shift doesn’t come without strong contradictions, as some chapters point out, because funding organizations are embedded by their very nature in a system that is competitive, and within accountability structures that require forms of evaluation (be they less results-oriented). Nonetheless, in making this shift, the three funding organizations in question create the conditions that afford dynamic processes to occur: the emergence of networks of relations that otherwise might not have been possible, intersectional thinking, collaborative and multi-generational peer-learning—because, as Carin Kuoni indicates further on in the book, this is also a pedagogical initiative. Throughout the book, there are many references to the underlying energy and drive encapsulated by the notion of agency, understood as a force between bodies in the process of becoming. By setting up or expanding the dynamics of local cultural infrastructures, generators of creativity can grow. For this, space— literal and metaphysical—is needed. This is another current throughout the fifteen chapters: space to work, to feel safe and free to be who you are, to speak your mind, to work with others, to experiment and discover, to create collectively, to join forces to build and to counter dominant powers—art as a space of political imagination. All these local initiatives and projects connect to the global in their joint strive for bottom-up change driven by artistic, creative, cultural forces.

Lastly, some words of thanks. In terms of enabling, it is the Prince Claus Fund, Hivos, and the European Culture Fund who need to be thanked for this visionary initiative, and this includes all the parties involved: the researchers, artists, enablers. Furthermore, the editorial team, Valiz Publishers, the Advisory Committee with the critical attention of Patrick Flores, Yvette Mutumba and Yudhishthir Raj Isar, and last but not least, the tireless and most committed research coordinator Ilaria Manzini.

Kitty Zijlmans

Leiden University

Chair of the Advisory Committee

Leiden, June 2020

1 ..........Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).

2 ..........Ibid., p. 13.

3 ..........Chantal Mouffe, ‘Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces,’ Art & Research, A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 1, no. 2 (Summer 2007).

FORCES OF ART

Perspectives from a Changing World

Carin Kuoni

Audacious, naïve, ambitious, utopian. These are all qualities that might be ascribed to the Forces of Art intiative, and this book in particular. The scope is unprecedented: fifteen international research teams spent the better part of a year investigating thirty-nine projects in majority world countries (artist Shahidul Alam’s term to replace ‘third world countries’) that attribute to art a significant role in advancing civil society. The projects analysed took place in a decade (2008–2018) marked by the global consolidation of neoliberalism and hypercapitalism, a turn towards populism (and in some Western democracies, authoritarianism), the Syrian, Kyrgyz, and Rojava Revolutions and the Arab Spring, the collapse of climate agreements, the global migration of people on a scale never before seen, and the onset of a global pandemic. And, yet, by sheer force of imagination, determination, and resourcefulness, these projects were launched, and the texts speak to their importance and impact. What you will find in the pages of this book is a dense, multilayered, polyvocal compendium of current thinking about the impact of art on civil society and social change. Utopian, naïve? No, these projects are thriving and animating their communities. Audacious, ambitious? Yes, and also inspiring and wayfinding. I invite you to join us.

The last two decades have seen extraordinary growth in the reach and range of art practices committed to social change, in organizations facilitating this work, and in philanthropic initiatives supporting the field. Forces of Art is set to open up the discourse on these art practices, directing sustained observation, providing adjustments and correctives, and shifting perspectives from prevalent approaches. For starters, taking a radical approach, the book only considers case studies from majority population countries. Secondly, in order to move beyond the familiar, the authors were selected from an international call to which they had been invited to apply. They were commissioned to investigate clusters of three to four projects each, based on their personal interests and expertise, regardless of geographical proximity. Accordingly, the projects are seen through highly specialized lenses, but always also in a context that extends beyond local parameters and connects projects beyond geographies. Positioning these projects in larger transnational political, cultural, and economic developments, Forces of Art also acknowledges and invites reflection on how the projects are funded, and how the funders—the original commissioners of the research and this book—are implicated in the narratives of projects.

Forces of Art makes a commitment to collaborative practices, seeking to nourish and sustain networks of affinities between groups of projects, groups of writers, and publics. It does so by its design, as an ethical imperative, and in response to trends unfolding in contemporary art practices. There is hardly a position represented here that does not derive from partnerships, be it multi-member research teams and their support staff or the projects in and of themselves—many of which are collaborative, entail organizational set-ups, and provide multitiered infrastructures and platforms. Even the editorial process has been a collaborative effort, a lively exchange between my colleagues and myself. In editing this book, we have experienced how these projects sit at the dynamic intersection of different regimes: economic, political, cultural, and financial systems. And we see how the collaborative creation of the projects functions as a form of resistance to hegemonic power constellations, offering opportunities for people to actively and knowingly engage with these forces according to their own inclinations. We invite you—readers—to experience this dynamic intersection for yourselves.

‘A PLACE OF ENUNCIATION’¹

The book is our place of enunciation in the present. The projects will live on and change, their affects and effects will multiply and dissipate, people will congregate and depart. At this moment of the book, in the time of coronavirus and social distancing, we can at least inhabit the pages of Forces of Art and follow the various narratives that shaped the art projects. These narratives flow in and out of the different sections of the book, at times interweaving with each other and at other times in conflict with each other, delineating different regimes. Here are some more general observations.

Economically and politically, despite looking at vast terrains with very distinct conditions, all projects considered in the book situate themselves within the force fields of hypercapitalism and neoliberalism. Global capitalism is the foil against which they have been conceived. Even the fact that many projects take the form of alternative infrastructures is, in the majority of contributions here, interpreted as a reflection of neoliberalism’s entrepreneurial impetus. Humanitarian development initiatives, of which the projects are often the financial beneficiaries, are seen as perpetuating racialized, geopolitical power structures, whether they stem from legacies of colonial nations or the accumulation of extraordinary wealth in private hands. With such transnational capacities come media and information economies that are often considered hegemonic and authoritarian. An ongoing concern is the question of how art escapes these regimes, how it avoids being instrumentalized, and how it provides viable forms of resistance in the face of their overwhelming presence.

In holding a space for distinct and very diverse research methodologies, Forces of Art itself serves as a forum for resistance, affords a multisensory experience, and points to a horizon beyond dominant narratives. The vibrant positions unfolding in these pages speak of a triumphant embrace of unique research approaches. While some contributions masterfully conjure theoretical canons—either as a stage from which to examine the projects or as a closing frame to reflect on them—others highlight primary sources, the voices of participants, artists, and/or stakeholders who were instrumental in organizing, participating or witnessing a project. The diversity of applied research methodologies is also informed by how the duration of a project is defined: some are considered terminated, and ‘exit interviews’ provide the basis of assessment; others are viewed as ongoing because of the stories they inspired, harbouring the possibilities to launch anew. Some of the researchers invite other artists to revisit the site of the original project and commission new artistic interventions. Yet others commission different artists to develop a project elsewhere, based on the original one, to be investigated. In one case, the invisible infrastructure connecting two continents—the deepocean internet cables between southern Africa and South America—provide the tenuous connection between the case study in Lima and the newly commissioned project in Johannesburg. The meaning of art as research practice could hardly be taken more literally.

With such vastly different approaches, language becomes a very material medium where frictions, misunderstandings, and divergent interpretations contribute to the reader’s appreciation of language’s agency. All authors have been invited to submit their texts in English. The fact that some are more comfortable in English as it is an official language in their contexts compared to others where this is not the case, reinforces English—and with it by default a Western approach— as a dominant perspective. On the other hand, this decision also provides evidence of the specificities and incongruities of any one language, and of the frailty, awkwardness, and precariousness of any attempt at translation. Indeed, the possibility of not being understood, of withholding participation, of ‘passing’ and using codes, is as much an experience as a strategy pursued by some projects. Critical self-reflection of the researchers’ own positionality is par for the course, arising within these distinct idioms and regularly alluded to—or explicitly stated—with references to ‘desk research.’

The theoretical edifice held up within these contributions still rests primarily on key pillars of the Western canon. This is a serious issue and speaks to the work still ahead of us. It is compounded by prevalent standards of academic validation that continue to favour Western methodologies and accreditation standards and therefore make scholarship of Western theorists globally accessible and available. Among the positions that weave through the majority of chapters are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s decisive work on notions of multitude and assemblages; Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural, social and symbolic forms of capital; Bruno Latour’s design of actor-network theory, up to his more recent Compositionist Manifesto; Jacques Rancière’s reformation of political subjectivity through the redistribution of the sensible, starting with The Ignorant Schoolmaster. These positions, however, are expanded on in the most welcome manner by less mainstream scholarship, among them Donna J. Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge; Suely Rolnik’s proposition of the collective body and micropolitics; Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s Undercommons; Jack Halberstam’s queering of heteronormativity; AbdouMaliq Simone’s urbanist research, in particular Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance; Doreen Massey’s ever-shifting constellation of trajectories as intersecting social relations; Elizabeth Povinelli’s radical love; Loïc Wacquant’s notion of body capital; and again and again Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. David Gutierrez’ redemptive narrative arises in certain contributions, as does Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s crucial research on ch’ixi mestizaje, ‘who knows (and recognizes) its internal Indian and is firmly located in the here and now of its land and its landscape.’

What if we listen to what the glacier says? Ways of knowing differ, and perhaps the greatest discrepancies among the contributions to Forces of Art arise in the area of epistemology. A small but distinct number of research teams looks at projects that are explicitly considering the agency of non-human beings. Accordingly, such projects propose cosmologies that include human and non-human actors and deliberately embrace a nonanthropocentric polity. For these researchers, such different sensitivities are mapped through transtemporal, heterogeneous, and polysemic logics, and are often pursued through feminist methodologies, notions of situated knowledge, and Indigeneity as centring the quality of relationships between subjects.

Historically, the current decade is bracketed by the Arab Spring at one end and the pandemic fragmentation at the other, with the events mentioned above occurring in between. But the deeper roots that become visible in certain projects entail the two decades at the turn of the century: the dissolution of the USSR in 1989 and the end of South African apartheid in 1994; the Oslo Accords in 1993/1995, and the Israeli reoccupation during the Second Intifada in 2002. In Indonesia, The New Order regime of President Suharto came to a gradual economic and political collapse in 1998, eventually leading to the formation of East Timor as its own country in 2002. This is also the period of various forms of highly publicized courts of international or transitional justice, from Cambodia to Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia among them. Uganda and Kenya’s infamous anti-homosexuality legislations took hold in the early twothousands. The terrorist attacks in New York on 11 September 2001 still loom large. More recently, Evo Morales was Bolivia’s first Indigenous leader, in power from 2006 to 2019; in the U.S., Occupy Wall Street and its enactment of prefigurative politics, along with the demands to de-colonize cultural institutions, predated the inauguration of the forty-fifth American president. These are just some of the key political events that underlie the chapters that follow.

‘I AM THE ARCHIVE AND THE INCUBATOR’²

Having provided a broad overview of the approaches taken by the researchers who have shaped this book, let’s look at the art itself and tease out some of the main qualities that distinguish these practices from other artistic interventions. Key among them is the challenge to notions of linear, chronological time, as suggested by the artist’s quote above. There are other core principles that emerge—which I present below as propositions—that impact, each in their own way, civil society and suggest different political formations and subjectivations by offering a look beyond familiar frameworks at alternative sites and forms of discourse, dialogue, and contestation. Like the research teams, the editors have grouped distinct practices according to their own expertise and they in turn also carve out specific and particularly meaningful attributes: Serubiri Moses focuses on temporality and the organizational capacities of art, coalescing around infrastructures and networks. Jordi Baltà Portolés considers how the suggestion of simultaneous realities that may be visible or not activates new forms of political formation. Nora N. Khan in turn expands on artistic research methodologies that embrace modes of abstraction and opacity as part of their place-making impetus, in physical as well as digital space; and I’ve selected projects that entail peer learning, collectivity, and simultaneity across contexts and time frames. Together, these trends emerge:

PROPOSITION ONE

History writing is a political act and the narrative holds power. History is present as a life force at every moment. A high degree of specificity must simultaneously afford considerations of larger temporal arcs. Not surprisingly, multi-generational projects abound and the moment of recall is also that of incubating new practices.

PROPOSITION TWO

There is no single author or subject; every incident is a unique constellation of different intersecting voices and forces. The intensity of these polyvocal gatherings delineates their impact. Polyphony challenges hegemonic structures and identitarian limitations that range from heteronormativity and neoliberalism, to ethnocentrism and ableism.

PROPOSITION THREE

The successful projects are hyperlocal, and simultaneously intersect with global development and trends. They insert and insinuate themselves into a matrix of political, economic, knowledge, and cultural regimes, but act on a level of micro-politics.

PROPOSITION FOUR

There is no polity without bodies. The totality of the body in space and as consciousness is the harbinger of everything, the gauge and ultimate sensor, a necessity brought into unexpectedly sharp focus now in times of social distancing.

PROPOSITION FIVE

Networks are rhizomatic; temporalities are expansive; technology can be modular and flexible.

Each project grows in significance through the exchange with the network. It becomes scalable, which makes it a political project, applicable to other situations.

The forces of art? They attend to contradictions and hold discrepancies and conflicts in place and in time. They are projections but never immaterial, and more intense when materially, historically, and ethically anchored. They afford spaces of intimacy, proximity, vulnerability, and trust. The forces of art have the capacity to speculate on and simultaneously enact possible futures, to open space for the imagination and perform alternative presents. They perform as models or gestures in relation to broader urgencies and society as a whole.

The book Forces of Art frames dynamic, collaborative art practices as political because they always also entail an ‘other.’ With art, we can step outside of ourselves—think of ourselves differently.

At this moment especially, where the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted economic systems on a planetary scale, an equally radical reorientation of political agency is called for and, perhaps, a new political becoming is possible. As we attempt to get ready for a changing world where conditions of sociality are altered, how do we begin to comprehend and plan the scale and scope of action available to us? How do we organize, navigate, guide, remain relevant, and truthful?

The artistic practices captured in Forces of Art point the way. And protocols may serve as a framing device and starting point.

Protocols have moved to the forefront of public life, as the Covid-19 pandemic is making abundantly clear. Disclosed— or not—they determine much of what we do. Like the syntax underlying language, they regulate how we relate to each other, to our cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create those environments. They are the building blocks of the relationships and power structures between us and the world around us. As such, they favour some and fail others. With recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, the controversies surrounding data mining and privacy, the embrace of Indigenous land practices long shunned by extractive industries, and a growing chorus of demands to decolonize our institutions, protocols have emerged as essential tools of empowerment. They are evidence of governmental, political, social, or corporate structures, they speak of power—and thus invite subversion, improvement, and action. Guided by experts, researchers, and artists assembled in this book, we will encounter protocols embedded in different fields. We are invited to consider the inclusive and equitable protocols necessary to conceive of new spaces and opportunities for political empowerment. Protocols emerge as empowering, liberating forces that we can harness to advance social justice in our communities.

Etymologically, a protocol (protocollare, before being glued) is the blank space at the beginning and end of a book, the so-called endpapers that set the conditions for the book’s performance, the tone before the content begins. Protocols are actionable, they are structural and offer clarity, transparency, and inclusivity when properly devised. For us, a key protocol was to invite into the pages of this book all who have contributed to its findings. For that reason, the annotated index in the back is key—an invitation for the organizations discussed in the following 380 pages to self-identify and self-represent.

Less space is afforded to other contributors to the book who were crucial to its success. Foremost I would like to thank Ilaria Manzini, research coordinator by title, but in reality the gently powerful force behind the book.

The members of our small editorial team, Nora N. Khan, Serubiri Moses, and Jordi Baltà Portolés have become indispensable companions. I am indebted to the members of the initiative’s Advisory Committee as well as copy editor Liana Simmons. My colleagues at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, Eriola Pira and Adrienne Umeh, have been extremely supportive. Artists and authors in the Vera List Center’s orbit inform much of my thinking; for Forces of Art, perhaps most significantly so Robert Sember, who first brought protocols to my awareness, a concept I returned to through Natalie Diaz’s writings. I thank John G.H. Oakes for his support and advice; he has been there from the very beginning.

Carin Kuoni

Editor-in-chief

1 ..........Borrowed from the chapter ‘Between Memory and Storage’ by Nishant Shah and Maya Indira Ganesh, p. 327ff.

2 ........... Ibid.

Section One

WHEN ART OPENS SPACES OF POSSIBILITIES

WHEN ART OPENS SPACES OF POSSIBILITIES

Policies, Tensions, and Opportunities

Jordi Baltà Portolés

In his collection of lectures Facing Gaia, philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour suggests that the sciences, the arts, and politics share an ability to ‘complicate’ approaches to the world, ‘involve’ those affected by them and thereafter ‘compose’ new relationships.¹ The ability of the arts to render contexts of complexity more legible, generate terrains of action open to seldomheard voices—and in doing so open new, more plural political spaces—is one of the ideas that runs through the chapters collected in this section. While, in Latour’s view, similar dynamics may be engendered in the sciences and politics, I would argue that the artistic and cultural practices presented here embody distinctive values and meanings which are intrinsic to them,² even if they can run in parallel to, and mutually reinforce, the ‘composing’ of new relationships and the political transformation brought about by processes in other spheres of life.

What gives strength to several of these experiences is their ability to help individuals and communities imagine alternative ways of relating to their environment, to history, to other social groups, or to political institutions and processes. By recognizing that, beyond that which is visible, the space of culture also comprises that which matters but cannot be seen, some of these initiatives open up spaces of possibility³ —they generate a space where, as Višnja Kisié and Goran Tomka argue in their chapter ‘Tickling the Sensible: Art, Politics and Worlding at the Global Margin,’ alternative processes of ‘living, relating, and creating’ may be imagined.

Indeed, the political potential of these projects lies also in their uncovering of the many ‘minor realities in which we are … enmeshed,’⁴ visualizing the coexistence of stories, meanings, and forms of existence which are often hidden behind the façade of a dominant reality. As anthropologist Ghassan Hage has argued, once we acknowledge that we live in a ‘multiplicity of realities’ it is also easier to assume that ‘we can be other than what we are.’⁵ In this respect, recognizing that plurality, and imagining alternatives, may become a step towards effective action.

Indeed, several of the examples analyzed in the following pages can also be identified with the notion of ‘civil action’ which, as sociologist Pascal Gielen and cultural worker Philipp Dietachmair argue, emerges when ‘civilians initiate that which a government or state has not yet thought of (or does not want to think of) and for which there are no interested markets.’⁶ Central to this understanding is the collective nature of activities and the conscious effort made to negotiating and designing a specific space for action. Although, as shall be seen, whether or not artistic projects have tangible consequences in the political realm is often not a relevant concern among project initiators, a reflective approach vis-à-vis broader societal and political matters is, on the other hand, an ever-present concern.

ART PROJECTS IN INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT CONTEXTS: SOME VISIBLE TENSIONS

The authors of the chapters presented in this section have examined in depth some of the tensions and contradictions that arise in the implementation of art projects in international development programmes and that result from, among others, the complexities of funding, goal-setting, political contexts, and conceptual framing. Drawing from their reflections, I focus on two particular areas of tension.

Firstly, a process of negotiation between local needs and priorities, on the one hand, and the frames of intervention proposed by external funders, on the other, becomes apparent. Both project beneficiaries and the authors of chapters have stressed that, when compared to other funding organizations, support provided by the Prince Claus Fund, Hivos, and European Cultural Foundation (ECF), is notable in its provision of a broad, flexible framework for action. However, a need to ‘navigate’ the expectations from the diverse set of stakeholders involved remains, as the chapter ‘Dissonant Entanglements and Creative Redistributions,’ by Judith Naeff, Arnout van Ree, Lenneke Sipkes, Cristiana Strava, Kasper Tromp, and Mark R. Westmoreland, makes obvious. This entails, among other things, combining the managerial skills necessary for securing external support (e.g. using the relevant language to convince funders, and conceptualizing activities in the form of a time-bound project that fits the requirements) and a connection to local communities who will often be diverse and dynamic, and potentially contradictory with the discourse deployed in fundraising strategies. Establishing suitable, ongoing consultation, and participatory mechanisms with grassroots communities, and understanding one’s own position and responsibility towards the ‘territory’ in a broad sense (i.e. the social, economic, environmental, political, cultural implications of a project), emerge as necessary steps in order to retain legitimacy and to be accountable in both directions.

More broadly, the need for organizations to balance skills related to project management in a narrow sense and those of ethical reflection, including the ability to interpret one’s own environment in a complex sense, also arises as an important aspect. This is also relevant from the perspective of organizations providing training in areas such as arts management, which should actively engage in these complexities.

Secondly, several authors reflect on the almost-inevitable framing of projects in an instrumental vein, where a narrative connecting causes and consequences, resources, effects and impacts, easily permeates all explanation. They highlight that, in spite of the discourses on autonomy and emancipation enabled by artistic processes, and the critical political reflection that often underpins them, action takes place within the confines of the neoliberal reason. What space exists, then, to open up spaces of possibility, for thinking differently, more exhaustively, about the meaning of one’s own actions? In several chapters, authors refer to the ability of arts-based processes to enable ‘affective’ encounters—that is, more personal, in-depth forms of mutual recognition, solidarity and feeling among participants, which may emerge as an alternative to the ‘effect-driven’ logic of instrumentalism. Related to this is the emergence of an ethics of caring for one another, and, as philosopher Marina Garcés has suggested, the potential development of an ability to share the fundamental experiences in life such as death, love, commitment, a sense of dignity and care, through the deployment of a receptive, listening attitude.⁷

Another significant response to the instrumental logic lies in challenging the unidimensional, unidirectional explanations based on effect, through more complex explorations of the assemblages of factors and processes that coexist in complex processes. Moving beyond the narrow alleyways of instrumentalism, this implies recognizing plural, multidirectional intersections of diverse intensity, and the potential of each actor to interpret different factors, and their confluences, in their own terms. It also involves moving beyond simple explanations on the power of art, while being open to exploring its many meanings. In their chapter ‘Making the Common: Artistic Practices and Social Processes in Latin America,’ Nadia Moreno Moya and Fernando Escobar Neira argue that the production of ‘the common,’ or ‘common spaces,’ is one of the several possible kinds of assemblage that may emerge in these circumstances. There is indeed a sense that, while the ever-present neoliberal logic may be impossible to escape, by exploring the margins, generating new, locallyrooted processes and expressions, and recognizing the existence of a ‘multiplicity of realities,’ some alternative forms of meaning may arise.

A CULTURAL POLICY PERSPECTIVE

From the perspective of cultural policy, where most of my research focuses, the chapters presented in this section raise several important points. An important connection can be established between the challenging of projects based on an instrumental logic and the reflections on the goals and values that should guide cultural policymaking. Whereas goals such as economic impact or social cohesion have played, and continue to play, an important role in the design of public cultural policies, alternative ways of explaining their raison-d’être can also be found. Among them is the placing of cultural rights, including the right of every person to take part in cultural life, at the core of cultural policy, with implications in terms of fostering freedom of expression and promoting access to creative opportunities for everyone, and combatting discrimination and obstacles to participation, among others. Cultural rights, which provide a universal frame but should be underpinned by participatory forms of interpretation and decision-making at the local level, can inspire policies based on values such as universal accessibility, rather than the search for pre-determined goals in the economic or social spheres.⁸

Another important aspect concerns the focus on the provision of an ‘enabling environment’ for cultural and artistic practices. In this respect, an important emphasis needs to be placed on the existence of legal, financial, political, and social conditions which allow artists, cultural organizations, and other groups to design and develop activities free from external pressure. This is closely linked to the existence of an enabling context for civil society organizations,⁹ an aspect which is central in ‘“The most important thing is to have that space!” The Power of Art and Local Art Communities in Central Asia,’ the chapter presented in this section by Diana T. Kudaibergenova. While a focus on the enabling environment involves focusing less on the specific content of activities, public authorities remain important carers of some areas in cultural policy, including, among others, the protection of cultural heritage, the recognition of minority expressions, and the support for innovative practices. There is therefore a need to modulate public authorities’ role and the allocation of resources, adapting it to different needs and circumstances—the design of participatory governance mechanisms which recognize and give voice to the multiple agents that contribute to cultural life is a suitable step in this direction.

Partly related to this is the ability of several of the beneficiary organizations presented in the chapters to develop relationships with partners in several fields of action—including education, social transformation, the environment, or political advocacy. In fact, although art remains a central, and generally the main, concern of the organizations analyzed, this is often strongly combined with other areas of activity. From the perspective of cultural policy, public institutions should also increasingly learn to develop ‘relational’ approaches, which facilitate dialogue and collaboration with other stakeholders, and cultural policies should be better equipped to explore the intersections with other areas of public interest.

Several of the chapters presented in this section address the frequent concern with the time-bound nature of project funding, and the related expectation that projects will lead to specific, tangible outputs. Whereas this remains an ever-present area of negotiation, there is also a sense that approaches promoted by the three funding organizations involved in The Force of Art have generally provided sufficient room to manoeuvre, providing flexible space for long-term development and focusing more on the nature of processes than the fulfilment of milestones or the generation of tangible results. This could potentially provide inspiration for funding models elsewhere, including in domestic public funding for culture in many cases. In order to achieve this, suitable institutional capacities to acknowledge and properly assess the complexities encountered by projects on the ground are needed, as is the existence of transparent, accountable frameworks to set priorities and guiding principles.

Finally, by emphasizing the ability of artistic processes to enable alternative ways of making meaning, fostering affect and care, challenging instrumentality, and opening up spaces of possibility, the initiatives presented in this section also serve to stress the important position that the arts and culture have in enabling the development of lives worth living.

While the terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ have been much maligned, it is worth stressing that the discussion on the place of culture in approaches to sustainable development (or, in a less institutional sense, the place of culture in the vision of a life worth living and balanced with the preservation of life on Earth, today and in the future) remains central to this day.¹⁰ Despite the many reflections provided on how cultural aspects inform visions of a desirable life,¹¹ mainstream approaches to sustainable development have generally failed to give art and culture a significant place. I believe that the reflections presented in the following pages could be seen as evidence of the need for cultural aspects to be given a more central place in strategies and policies concerned with building new relationships and more sustainable ways of living, today and in the future.

1 ..........Bruno Latour, Face à Gaïa: Huit conférences sur le nouveau régime climatique (Paris: La Découverte, 2015), p. 325.

2 ..........Eduard Delgado, ‘Planificación cultural contra espacio público,’ Karis 11 (2001).

3 ..........Marina Garcés, Un mundo común (Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2013), pp. 82–83.

4 ..........Ghassan Hage, ‘Dwelling in the Reality of Utopian Thought,’ Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 23, no. 1 (2011), p. 8.

5 ..........Hage, ‘Dwelling in the Reality of Utopian Thought,’ p. 11.

6 ..........Pascal Gielen and Philipp Dietachmair, ‘Introduction: Public, Civil and Civic Spaces,’ in The Art of Civil Action. Political Space and Cultural Dissent, ed. Philipp Dietachmair and Pascal Gielen (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017), p. 14.

7 ..........Marina Garcés, Nova il•lustració radical (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2017), pp. 68–69.

8 ..........See e.g. Delgado, ‘Planificación cultural contra espacio público’; Jordi Baltà Portolés and Milena Dragié evic Šešié, ‘Cultural Rights and Their Contribution to Sustainable Development: Implications for Cultural Policy,’ The International Journal of Cultural policy 23, no. 2 (2017).

9 ..........See e.g. Andrew Firmin, ‘Engaging Civil Society in Cultural Governance,’ in Re |Shaping Cultural Policies: Advancing Creativity for Development, ed. UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 2017).

10 ........Nancy Duxbury, Anita Kangas, and Christiaan De Beukelaer, ‘Cultural Policies for Sustainable Development: Four Strategic Paths,’ The International Journal of Cultural Policy 23, no. 2 (2017); Joost Dessein et al., Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development: Conclusions from the COST Action IS1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability, ed. Joost Dessein et al. (Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2015).

11 ......... See e.g. Jon Hawkes, The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential Role in Public Planning (Melbourne: Cultural Development Network (Vic)/Common Ground Publishing, 2001); John Clammer, Cultures of Transition and Sustainability: Culture after Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); UCLG, Culture 21: Actions. Commitments on the Role of Culture in Sustainable Cities (Barcelona: UCLG, 2015).

← REFERENCES

Baltà Portolés, Jordi, and Milena Dragié evic Šešié . ‘Cultural Rights and Their Contribution to Sustainable Development: Implications for Cultural Policy.’ The International Journal of Cultural Policy 23, no. 2 (2017), pp. 159–73.

Clammer, John. Cultures of Transition and Sustainability: Culture after Capitalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Delgado, Eduard. ‘Planificación Cultural Contra Espacio Público.’ Karis 11 (2001).

Dessein, Joost, et al. Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development: Conclusions from the Cost Action Is1007 Investigating Cultural Sustainability, ed. Joost Dessein et al. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2015.

Duxbury, Nancy, Anita Kangas, and Christiaan De Beukelaer. ‘Cultural Policies for Sustainable Development: Four Strategic Paths.’ The International Journal of Cultural Policy 23, no. 2 (2017), pp 214-30.

Firmin, Andrew. ‘Engaging Civil Society in Cultural Governance.’ In Re |Shaping Cultural Policies: Advancing Creativity for Development, ed. UNESCO, pp. 85–101. Paris: UNESCO, 2017.

Garcés, Marina. Un Mundo Común. Barcelona: Bellaterra, 2013. —. Nova Il•lustració Radical. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2017.

Gielen, Pascal, and Philipp Dietachmair. ‘Introduction: Public, Civil and Civic Spaces.’ In The Art of Civil Action: Political Space and Cultural Dissent, ed. Philipp Dietachmair and Pascal Gielen. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017.

Hage, Ghassan. ‘Dwelling in the Reality of Utopian Thought.’ Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 23, no. 1 (2011), pp. 7–13.

Hawkes, Jon. The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential Role in Public Planning. Melbourne: Cultural Development Network (Vic)/Common Ground Publishing, 2001.

Latour, Bruno. Face À Gaïa: Huit Conférences Sur Le Nouveau Régime Climatique. Paris: La Découverte, 2015.

UCLG. Culture 21: Actions. Commitments on the Role of Culture in Sustainable Cities. Barcelona: UCLG, 2015.

MAKING ‘THE COMMON’
Arts Practices and Social Processes in Latin America

Nadia Moreno Moya and Fernando Escobar Neira

This chapter presents thoughts and findings from a research inquiry exploring the intersections between arts practices and social processes in Latin America through the study of projects led by organizations active in the region: the Museo de Antioquia (Colombia); Proyecto mARTadero (Bolivia); and Fundación 4-18 (Colombia). The authors formulate their arguments from a transdisciplinary perspective that prioritizes spatial registers, the testimonies of those involved, and the paths followed by the organizations. They ask themselves what art can do in the territories where the projects took place, and through that question argue that the synergies between arts practices and social processes allow for the production, resignification, or actualization of ‘the common’ and common spaces in these territories.

Keywords

→ | Arts Practices
→ | Social Processes in Latin America
→ | the Common
→ | Common Spaces
→ | Contemporary Art
→ | Social Turn
→ | Cultural Turn
→ | Heritage
→ | Territory

INTRODUCTION

Our research focuses on the study of three projects that were initially chosen due to their resonance with our own research and professional interests—the connections between visual arts and power, issues of cultural policy, and shifts undergone by cities and citizenships in Colombia as well as Latin America in general. Furthermore, we wanted to take a closer look at projects involving arts practices engaged with social processes addressing the particularity of individual territories located in cities that were excluded from dominant narratives of ‘Latin American art.’ For these reasons, we thought it would be strategically appropriate to include case studies that encompassed large-scale and long-term projects alongside small organizations and short-term endeavours.

With these considerations in mind, we settled on three case studies: the project Museo + Comunidad [Museum + Community], led between 2010 and 2013 by the Museo de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia; Proyecto mARTadero [Project slaughtARThouse], a physical space and a ‘cloud’ of organizations and groups that started out in 2004 and that remain active today in Cochabamba, Bolivia; and Visualización de Honda [Visualizing Honda], a set of actions and interventions realized by the 4-18 Foundation in 2014 and 2015 in Honda, Colombia.

Before discussing the individual case studies, we outline our place of enunciation, the methodological path embraced by our research, and its purpose.

In our view, a research project on artistic and cultural practices is more akin to an artisanal process than to a process of instrumental reasoning. It is a mode of inquiry structured like a warp—that is, like a webwork where theories, materialities, and practices come into relation—rather than as a unidirectional process of inductive or deductive analysis based on empirical data. For this reason, we believe that it is off-point to set forth an a priori theoretical framework to display our analysis. Instead, we assemble a toolkit that allows us to approach our case studies through conceptual contributions derived from different disciplines or ‘traditions’ of thought: theories of art, new art histories, Latin American cultural studies, cultural geography, urban studies, critical theory, and what are known as forms of ‘social knowledge.’

We are aware of the degree to which our research is traversed by particular relations of knowledge/power: as researchers and lecturers working in a university, we are in a position of privilege with respect to forms of social knowledge; and the ‘book chapter,’ as a genre, prioritizes academic knowledge and specialized spaces, more so when it is intended for publication in English, a language that is outside the range of our thought structure (and the same can be said of many of the social agents involved in the projects that we will discuss).¹ For these and other reasons, we felt the need to establish methodological lines of inquiry wherein social agents would not be treated as ‘objects’ of study, but rather as subjects of thought and knowledge. Accordingly, we decided to recuperate the lived experiences of the people who led and who were participants in the projects by organizing joint journeys, or conversations, at the site where each project took place. Although we were not able to do this in all cases, we conducted a significant number of interviews and conversations; these turned out to be extremely important for us, for the information shared by our interlocutors, as much as for the intensity of their narratives.² The latter we embraced as texts and textures that can be brought into the space of memory and which performatively register the effects that these projects have had on their organizers and participants.

What can arts practices achieve within territories? What kind of potency can they deploy? As we advanced in our field work, we found that the concept of ‘the common’ could help us address these questions: We understand ‘the common’ as a

Dynamic form of association that is particular and concrete, that is, temporally, geographically, and historically situated, and which, for the most part, targets specific aims, most often having to do with securing or protecting conditions for collective reproduction amidst extreme threats of dispossession or injury.³

Since we seek to analyze how artistic practices coproduce and tend towards ‘the common,’ we should also clearly delineate our understanding of ‘common space,’ which we take to be a territorial apparatus, at the neighbourhood scale, where the public and the private enter into complex forms of coexistence, and which is subject to a variety of appropriations and identitary strategies.⁴

Considering the limitations in length for the present chapter, measured against the copious amount of information that people shared with us, we find ourselves compelled to focus on key moments where we have found a connection between the tactics of artistic practices and the assemblage (agencement, in French) of ‘the common’ within our three case studies. To this end, we will lay out the historical, political, and spatial circumstances that prefigured the creation of the organizations or projects; the role of the institutions that funded them; the temporality of their organizational processes; and the ways in which the organizations worked with the inhabitants and negotiated with state agencies, or other organizations, in the production of ‘the common.’

THE CASE STUDIES

Museo + Comunidad

•

Museo de Antioquia (hence MudeA) is a private, non profit institution, whose origins can be traced back to the founding of Museo y Biblioteca de Zea in 1881, initially in commemoration of Francisco Antonio Zea.⁵ The museum took on its current name in 1979, when its statutes were drafted anew, and its mission redirected towards the fields of fine arts and culture in the state of Antioquia. In 2000, after taking on a leading role in a plan for urban renewal called ‘Ciudad Botero,’⁶ the MudeA opened its doors at the former site of the Municipal Palace, in Medellín’s historical downtown. The relocation also brought changes to the museum’s management, funding structure, and museological project. All of these changes positioned MudeA as a ‘star-museum’ representative of Medellín’s transformation, along the lines of previous initiatives such as Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum.⁷

The project Museo + Comunidad played a prominent role in the ‘social turn’ of the museum in 2006: this was a stage during which the practices and discourses of the institution took on a distinct inflection, leading to an encounter between the museum and specific social issues that materialized in particular events as well as in its institutional architecture and profile. An event worth highlighting in this regard was the ‘Encuentro Internacional de Medellín 07/Prácticas Artísticas Contemporáneas, Espacios de Hospitalidad’ [Medellín International Meeting 07/Contemporary Art Practices, Spaces of Hospitality], a large scale project that reached beyond the exhibition format, encompassing interventions and collective or community projects in different city areas. Likewise, and for the first time in Colombia, for the 2008 project Destierro y Reparación [Exile and Reparation] the museum convened artists, academics, social organizations, and public officials, to debate and reflect on symbolic reparation for populations displaced by the internal armed conflict. As for its institutional architecture, we note that the museum established a section on Museums and Territories, which operated from 2006 to 2015.⁸ This section initially carried out a programme for the appropriation of heritage in different towns of the state of Antioquia through exhibitions and collective experiences conceptualized and organized through methodologies of community participation. These events and experiences influenced the Museo + Comunidad project.

This social turn taken by the museum in 2006 should not be regarded exclusively as an intra-institutional project, but rather as a shift rooted in a broader and complex political and territorial fabric, which also foreshadowed the Museo + Comunidad project. Medellín was the city most impacted by the incursion of Colombia’s armed conflict into urban spaces since 1995.⁹ Starting in 2003, paramilitary groups that had established control over certain areas of the city engaged in a process of collective demobilization, which was legally sanctioned through the 2005 law 975, known as the ‘Justice and Peace Law.’ Simultaneously, victims’ organizations intensified their capacity to organize and have a say in public policy, to a great extent due to the fact that the law granted considerable benefits to the perpetrators of human rights violations and other forms of abuse, while allowing for ineffective measures for unmasking the truth about violent deeds and for the awarding of complete reparations.

For these reasons, Medellín was the first city in Colombia to formally establish a victims’ assistance programme (hence PAV, for its initials in Spanish), one of whose sections was devoted to the issue of ‘historical memory.’¹⁰ Starting in 2004, the PAV programme, led by the office of the city’s Secretary of Government, promoted several projects dealing with the issue of symbolic reparation; the PAV was also a crucial participant, alongside the MudeA, in the creation of the Museo Casa de la Memoria de Medellín [Medellín House of Memory Museum], which opened in 2011.

Amidst this context of reflections and actions, and starting in 2008, the MudeA introduced the idea of creating ‘community museums for peace,’ with a particular emphasis on Communes One and Thirteen. This project was in line with the local government’s policies on memory, as explained above; according to several sources its original intent was to encourage the construction of community-based museums in territories that had been impacted by violence and whose populations had been victims in the conflict. Over time, this initial idea was adjusted in response to particular circumstances, as we will explain below. In August 2010, after the project had struggled to procure local funding, the Prince Claus Fund took notice of it and began to formally provide it three years of support.¹¹

Broadly speaking, the project may be said to have developed through three stages, which more or less coincide with its operational years. During the first phase—beginning in late 2010 and throughout 2011—the museum, the PAV, and the Con-Vivamos Corporation¹² formed an alliance to join forces and share knowledge. The aim of the alliance was to promote a process of ‘community participation around the symbolic representation of local heritage, culture and identities, memory, and territories.’¹³ This process was expected to lead to the drafting of a community methodology for the creation of museums. The plan was to move forward with this project in the neighbourhoods of Commune One (Santo Domingo Savio, Popular, and Villa de Guadalupe) and in the Ciudadela Nuevo Occidente (hence CNO), a multifamily development complex located in the village of San Cristobal, to the west of the city.

In its second year (2012), project activities mostly focused in the neighbourhoods of Commune One mentioned above. A survey was conducted with more than four hundred inhabitants of the commune; the questions and methodology of which were arranged and co-constructed by the MudeA and groups of inhabitants from the territories who had been involved in the first stage of the project. The survey was meant to garner wider participation in the process of identifying and conceptualizing locations or features of the neighbourhood to which inhabitants attributed a patrimonial value. Through this stage, and onwards, the museum carried on with the project on its own.

In the third year of the project, the museum invited three collectives who worked in the fields of art and alternative communications to develop collaborative projects with the inhabitants as a way of developing some aspects of the work that had been carried out during the two previous years. The collectives that took part in this third stage of the project were Antena Mutante and Lengüita Producciones, both active in Colombia at the time, and Tranvía Cero from Ecuador.△Figs. 1 & 2.

∆ 1
Lengüita Producciones in collaboration with Ratón de Biblioteca, Love letters, 2013, artistic action, photographic documentation, courtesy: Museo de Antioquia

∆ 2
Tranvía Cero and Vigías del Patrimonio meetings in Santo Domingo Savio neighbourhood, 2013, photographic documentation, courtesy: Museo de Antioquia

As we have pointed out, adjustments were made to the project on different occasions, most significantly during the first year of the project. Several situations led the MudeA to reflect critically on the idea of creating and constructing ‘community museums’ in the territories. This led them to no longer focus on achieving a particular final product, such as a museological script drafted in collaboration with the communities. The emphasis throughout the three years was to activate encounters, journeys, aesthetic and artistic experiences that could facilitate exercises of collective memory, the self-management of community projects, the acknowledgement of the territory through appropriation, and the resignification of its spaces through the lens of ‘heritage.’

To this effect, the museum took on the role of a mediator or companion, which accounts for the name eventually given to the project (Museo + Comunidad), by which the museum meant to underscore a sense of articulation or addition of efforts between the institution and the neighbourhood communities. It should be noted that the Prince Claus Fund continued to support the project in spite of this shift and, according to different sources, proved overall to be remarkably flexible and open to experimentation; this benefited the nature of the project as a processbased endeavour and the adjustments were made in response to territorial situations and dynamics.¹⁴

Out of the activities and processes carried out within the framework of the project, we highlight the work that was carried out by a group of seniors, mostly women, from the neighbourhood of Santo Domingo Savio who took on the name Vigías del Patrimonio [Guardians of the Heritage]; and that of a group of students from the Fe y Alegría high schools in the neighbourhood ‘Popular,’ who later came to be known as Caminantes del Popular [Foot Travellers from the Popular neighbourhood]. Both groups were involved in the project throughout its three years of duration, and in collaboration with the MudeA’s team they created a set of heritage routes between 2012 and 2013, drawing from legacies of oral memory, subjective experiences, and the information collected through the surveys. These routes singled out meeting places, local characters, or everyday aspects of neighbourhood life, producing narratives where lived spaces and spaces constructed by their own inhabitants take precedence over those built by the state. During our fieldwork, we asked the groups to walk through the routes again with us.

The route traced by Caminantes del Popular went through a bakery, a house where cappuccinos are still sold, and a place where cars and buses were washed, among others. Only two of the sites had been built by state intervention: the Santo Domingo metrocable station, and the UVA (a community cultural centre). According to one of the participants, Mónica Giraldo, these places are meaningful because the neighbourhood ‘has very few spaces where people can meet and enjoy leisure time. ... [ T ]here are very few sports courts, parks, and spaces for young people.’¹⁵ △Figs. 3

∆ 3
Caminantes del Popular, sketch of the route on a map, 2013, graphic design: Yurilena Velásquez, 2019

∆ 4
Vigías del Patrimonio, sketch of the route on a map, 2013, graphic design: Yurilena Velásquez, 2019

The route traced by Vigías del Patrimonio is similar, although its spatial narrative privileges places of collective memory associated with the neighbourhood’s history of self-construction, or with the armed conflict. △Figs. 4 The latter is due, to a great degree, to the fact that group members directly experienced these events or processes. Their narrative also embodies the long history of social organizing and civil resistance in the neighbourhood.¹⁶ The collective Tranvía Cero proposed the creation of commemorative plaques, in collaboration with Vigías, to be placed in the symbolic locations of their patrimonial route.△Figs. 5–7

At the CNO, on the other hand, the project was only able to move forward during the first year.¹⁷ Unlike the neighbourhoods in Commune One, the CNO was a neighbourhood made up of several recently constructed multifamily building complexes, where the State had relocated a group of people from the Moravia neighbourhood.¹⁸ According to David Henao, a member of the MudeA’s team, the people who came to live at the CNO were strongly rooted in rural ways of life, and consequently suffered from cultural shock after moving into the apartment buildings, leading to difficulties in coexistence and an abrupt break from their previous livelihoods. Henao states that ‘There was no sense of community there, [as] there were many people who had no social bond.’¹⁹

At the time, the CNO was also dealing with the presence of groups involved in drug trafficking that fought over control of the territory. This kind of struggle for territory, still present in different areas of Medellín, led to ‘non-aggression pacts’ between the groups who traffic through ‘invisible frontiers’ that delimit their areas of economic and social control. Said frontiers also function as limits that prevent inhabitants of different areas of the same neighbourhood to enter other areas, and it may even isolate buildings within the same multi-family complex. In the words of Andrés Arredondo, who at the time led the PAV’s Historical Memory section, the CNO was an ‘urban archipelago of restrictions, prohibitions, with no passageways.’²⁰

Among the project’s activities at the CNO, we highlight a process that was put together in collaboration with a group of female residents of the Las Flores housing development, which led to the creation of community gardens. After noting that the women had a deep knowledge of cultivation and gardening, from their rural background, and that they were already engaged in the practice of growing flowers and other plants in the complex, the museum led several workshops, meetings, and exhibitions that focused on these practices and also allowed the women to share their life stories. They jointly programmed days of gardening to produce common spaces in the spaces between the buildings, in the form of convites [collective neighbourhood-based action] known as Menguantes para Sembrar [Waning Moons for Planting].²¹ At these events, the women shared plant cuttings and exchanged knowledge with the museum’s gardener, who also took part in the project.△Figs. 8 & 9

∆ 5
Tranvía Cero and Vigías del Patrimonio, commemorative plaques, documentation of the process, 2013, 10 courtesy: Museo de Antioquia

∆ 6 & 7
Tranvía Cero and Vigías del Patrimonio, commemorative plaques, 2013....cumentation, courtesy: Museo de Antioquia

∆ 8 & 9
Museo de Antioquia and residents of the Las Flores housing, wanings for planting, 2011, documentation of the process, courtesy: Museo de Antioquia

∆ 10 & 11
Museo de Antioquia and residents of the Las Flores housing, community gardens, 2011, documentation of the workshops, courtesy: Museo de Antioquia

The name ‘community gardens’ came out of these experiences. It emphasizes the production of common spaces, non-existent until then, but also the strengthening of a common narrative of rootedness and collective memory in that territory.△Figs. 10 & 11

Lastly, the project reached beyond its initial intention, since over time it created a tactical space for overcoming the invisible barriers established by illegal groups. Consuelo Giraldo, an inhabitant who took part in this experience, states that ‘The Museum managed to ignite the “spark” of participation. ... Some processes got underway, because we used to shudder at the very idea of going to La Aurora.’²² The community gardens at the Las Flores complex became exemplary for women from other neighbouring buildings who saw the need to come into contact with them, thus creating possibilities for transit and dialogue among their inhabitants.²³ △Figs.12–14

∆ 12
View of the vegetable plot at Las Flores housing, photo: Fernando Escobar Neira, 2019

∆ 13
Partial view of the community gardens at Las Flores housing, photo: Nadia Moreno Moya, 2019

∆ 14
View of the bridge that leads to La Aurora housing, photo: Yurilena Velázquez, 2019

Proyecto mARTadero

• •

The building where Proyecto mARTadero operates was formerly the city slaughterhouse of Cochabamba, Bolivia, built between 1925 and 1926 by the Catalonian architect Miguel Tapias and located in the Organización Territorial de Base (Territorial Base Organization, OTB for its initials in Spanish) of Villa Coronilla.²⁴ This was originally the heart of the ancient city (Ranchería de Kanata), on the eastern side of the Rocha River that cuts through the city along the southwest-northeast axis. Nowadays, the location marks the frontier between the historical downtown and the city’s southern area, which in the urban imaginary is Cochabamba’s poorest district.

In 1992, after rising pressure from local inhabitants concerned with unsanitary public conditions at the Villa Coronilla neighbourhood, the city was forced to shut down the slaughterhouse. From that moment on, the building was put to different uses, among them a sports academy, a warehouse space for the public lightning company, and a deposit for goods confiscated under the Law 1008.²⁵ Later on, the building fell into complete abandon, which accelerated its deterioration, incidentally causing the decay of the surrounding urban space.

In the early twenty-first century, Bolivia went through a deep social, political, and economic crisis, which provoked what are known as the ‘Water’ and ‘Gas Wars’ (2000 and 2003, respectively), two massive social mobilizations that foreshadowed Evo Morales’s ascent to power in 2005.²⁶ Amidst that climate of excitement, the former slaughterhouse building reopened its doors in 2004 to host twenty-nine works by the twenty-five artists who contributed to the second version of the ‘Concurso Nacional Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo’ [National Biennial Prize for Contemporary Art, or CONART]. With this event, Cochabamba became the first city in Bolivia to launch an open call event for contemporary arts, which incidentally earned it a place within the country’s artistic landscape.

That same year, the group of artists in charge of CONART, led by Angélika Heckl and Fernando García, obtained from Cochabamba’s City Council a bailment over the slaughterhouse building for thirty years. Immediately after receiving the bailment, they began to work on restoring and reforming the building.△Figs. 15 & 16

∆ 15
Partial view of Proyecto mARTadero building, photo: Fernando Escobar Neira, 2019

∆ 16
Partial view of Proyecto mARTadero building, photo: Nadia Moreno Moya, 2019

This group of artists had been working under the name Nodo Cultural Asociativo [Cultural Associative Node, or NADA], whose organizational structure was represented as a star with a central point of convergence known as the ‘synergetic zone.’ This image reinforced the collectivist principle of the mARTadero project as it was taking form. The fact that a handful of collectives coming from different art disciplines decided to share a physical space and orient their practice towards a range of social concerns in line with the movements that emerged before 2005, leads us to think that this ‘synergetic zone’ amounted to a commitment to ‘the common.’ According to Heckl, this moment signals the rise of the ‘contemporary’ in local art, as well as its emancipatory and innovative character, being a form of art that encourages and enables connectivity.²⁷ Along the same lines, ‘connecting with others’ was perceived, at the time, as linked to the possibility of using the strategic capacity of contemporary art to ‘take over’ an abandoned building, and to create conditions for synergy among artists, and between art and other dimensions of social and political life.²⁸

In our view, Heckl’s remarks on the transformative power of contemporary art as the idea underlying the creation of the mARTadero point towards the early emergence of a wager for ‘the common’ in this project. Although at the time they claimed to be working in defence of the patrimonial value of the building under a traditional framework, we find in their agenda a strategy of political resignification, which perceives the building as a common space for culture and art and as a collective cause, itself encouraged by the exercise of cultural rights on the part of citizens which exerted pressure on diverse political and state authorities.

Since 2010, mARTadero has made more room for the city’s cultural diversity, decentring the leading role assigned to contemporary visual arts during its first years. The project began to negotiate, in complex terms, the possibilities of contemporary art practices—such as dance, theatre, music, and the audiovisual arts—within the predominantly urban cultural diversity of Cochabamba, and through the participation of its citizens. We interpret this inflection as a cultural turn, because it exceeds the conventional categories of high culture, using culture as a ‘resource’ to achieve the defence of minority rights.²⁹

Thus, as Fernando García remarks, the mARTadero has stood for a broad and complex view of art and culture, which entails the coexistence of several artistic forms and practices such as those proper to high culture and popular cultural practices.³⁰ △Figs. 17 Nonetheless, this position has also led to some tensions within Bolivia’s cultural field. For instance, mARTadero shares many of the values of Cultura Viva Comunitaria [Living Community Culture, CVC for its initials in Spanish], but they have felt rejection on the part of some members who have questioned the sincerity of their ‘social engagement.’³¹ As we see it, this is due to divergent political positions regarding the role of art and culture in Latin American societies, with CVC leaning towards supporting traditional forms, and mARTadero having a more open view that does not see a conflict between these values and those promoted, for example, by Cultura en Red [Networked Culture].³² The same can be said about contemporary art practices.

∆ 17
A meeting about the Ollantay Park project in the University of San Simón, Cochabamba, 2019, courtesy: Proyecto mARTadero

However, according to several current members of the team, the cultural turn was made possible by the fact that the mARTadero gained a certain degree of strength as an institution a few years after its foundation. This brought on qualitative changes, such as a conspicuous specialization in its procedures of cultural management, and quantitative changes that entailed a greater reach and forward thrust in mARTadero’s actions. Neyda Campos, who is in charge of Project Management, explains these changes as follows: mARTadero 1.0 (2007–2012) initiated a platform for contemporary artists from different disciplines in Cochabamba; mARTadero 2.0 (2012–2014) encouraged a participatory process aimed at the surrounding neighbourhood; and mARTadero 3.0 (2014 onwards) showed that the project had achieved a great capacity for management and gained national and international recognition.³³

All of this can be said to be grounded in mARTadero’s ability to garner sources of support. It is important not to overlook accounts by project members, all of which suggest that international cooperation has for the most part created the financial conditions that have allowed contemporary art to expand during the past few decades in Bolivia.³⁴

Currently, several members of Proyecto mARTadero describe it as a ‘cloud of organizations,’ that is, as an organization of organizations gathering a plurality of artistic and cultural projects within a large physical container. These include, among others, permanent residencies by two theatre companies, a performance duo, several dance groups, the hip hop ensemble Essential Roots, the Workshop for Urban Acupuncture, the breakdance collective Matarifes Villa Coronilla, and the skateboarding group Team Llajta Skate, the Laboratory for Creative Communities (hence CCLAB), Asociación Kuska (focusing on mosaic crafts), the NAM School of Parkour and the Young Artivists project. This cloud-form may well have stemmed from the project’s initial organizational structure, which endeavoured to represent a form of collectivist organization within the building as well as within NADA.

According to Susana Obando³⁵ who coordinates the mARTadero’s Social Interaction area, the mARTadero currently fulfils functions for which the city government should be responsible, such as promoting education, experimentation/creation, and the circulation of contemporary art practices in Cochabamba.³⁶ Given the absence of public cultural policies in Bolivia, among other circumstances, the mARTadero has taken on the lead role in promoting these practices. In this current stage, the mARTadero is part of the Telartes Network, whose aim is to promulgate a Law of Culture for Bolivia.

∆ 18
CCLab – Proyecto mARTadero, Ollantay Park, 2019, partial view of the construction, photo: Nadia Moreno Moya

∆ 19
CCLab – Proyecto mARTadero, Ollantay Park, 2019, partial view of the final design and murals, courtesy: CCLAB – Proyecto mARTadero

∆ 20
Young practitioners of parkour in the opening of Ollantay Park, 2019, courtesy: CCLAB – Proyecto mARTadero, photo: Fabricio Villarroel

∆ 21
Detail of the mural painting process in Ollantay Park, 2019, courtesy: Proyecto mARTadero

∆ 22
Urban Art Biennal (BAU) poster and view of La Esperanza neighbourhood, 2019, photo: Fernando Escobar Neira

∆ 23
Die77 (Diego Vilar), Untitled, 2019, mural, mixed media, ‘BAU19-Ekos’, photo: Fernando Escobar Neira

When we visited Cochabamba, the group was involved in the last stages of the construction of Ollantay park, a location devoted especially to young practitioners of urban arts like graffiti, hip hop, and parkour. The park, built on a former residual space on the mARTadero’s block, is the result of an exercise in participatory design.△Figs. 18 & 19 In our view, this project, resulting from the synergy between the groups and projects that constitute mARTadero, synthesizes a struggle for common spaces. In 2008, mARTadero had envisioned the construction of an ‘Arts Square,’ and began working on the design and guidelines for the park. This initiative changed over the following years, and critically after 2014, when the collectives of mARTadero’s CCLAB. In 2016, the project information was shared and disseminated among different communities living within its area of influence. In 2017, after a long process, the Annual Operational Plan of the city’s Office for Tourism approved the project. In 2018, they initiated contracting procedures, and construction finally started in 2019. To put it briefly, the Ollantay urban park is the materialization of a long process, throughout which the mARTadero encouraged these practices and promoted citizenship participation through the lens of cultural rights.△Figs. 20 & 21

We add that the urban rehabilitation plan, in the terms outlined by its proponents, destabilized the traditional understanding of heritage, which focuses on the conservation of buildings invested with patrimonial value by virtue of their connection to colonial or state-formation narratives. Instead, by spatially integrating the slaughterhouse building with a formerly underutilized part of the lot, the project promoted an active integration of the site with the territory from the point of view of the arts. Thus, we see the Ollantay urban park as an expression of the production of ‘the common:’ a residual space that, like the slaughterhouse, has been resignified as ‘everyone’s’ through the direct impact of emergent artistic and cultural practices in the city.

In a similar vein, the process of the Bienal de Arte Urbano [Urban Art Biennial, BAU for its initials in Spanish], which has completed five editions, one every two years between 2011 and 2019, is another instance of what we have just described. The Biennial has grown, perhaps not in terms of the number of square metres of paintings on the city’s walls, or in the presumed artistic ‘quality’ of its interventions, but in the complexity of the relations that it has been able to foster as a city event, reaching new urban identities and affectivities and connecting with the youth environment of information and communication technologies, and the advance of the market, all of which traverse current life conditions and accordingly transform the notion of ‘the common.’△Fig. 22

To sum up, Proyecto mARTadero went from being understood as a setting for the circulation of contemporary art, in harmony with the global art system, to becoming an epicentre for art and cultural actions and interventions of a greater scale and complexity—that is, at the territorial scale— which have included expanded practices of different arts such as theatre, music, and dance; a think tank on cultural policies; a lab for urban design analysis; and a common space for the city. Ultimately, all these actions can be understood as necessary to the production of ‘the common.’△Fig. 23

Visualización de Honda

• • •

The city of Honda, Colombia, was established in the seventeenth century, between the rivers Magdalena and Gualí on the northern edge of the state of Tolima; it is known for its historical downtown district and a few civilian constructions that belong to Colombia’s cultural heritage.³⁷ For the past two decades, the city has been hit by an economic slump, caused by the shutting down of a beer brewery that for a long time employed a large segment of the population, and the departure of other manufacturing companies. As a consequence, tourism has become the city’s major source of income (or at least the most visible).³⁸ The current effort to extract value out of its built heritage through cultural tourism has opened the way to processes of gentrification, leading to the appearance of boutique hotels, gourmet restaurants, summer houses for the Bogotá elite, and other services characteristic of a kind of cultural consumption in which the city’s inhabitants participate only as workforce. The economic slowdown also froze all funding for culture and cultural education by the city government, since the administration declared bankruptcy in 2010. According to Luz Dary Ariza,³⁹ who was Honda’s Director of Culture and Tourism when Visualización de Honda was in progress, the city had no way of garnering funding for artistic and cultural processes, with the sole exception of traditional events like the ‘Festival de la Subienda.’⁴⁰ △Figs. 24

Visualización de Honda was a project developed between 2014 and 2015 by Fundación 4-18 (hence 4-18), a foundation created by a collective of professional artists trained and based in Bogotá.⁴¹ During its first years of activity, this collective worked on projects in different abandoned buildings in Bogotá, where they intervened through strategies characteristic of site-specific art. Although these projects were conceived with reference to local imaginaries, they never engaged in co-creative processes inspired by the tenets of community-based or relational art. Beginning with a project titled 69/71, carried out in Bogotá in 2011, 4-18 factored relationships with other people into their processes, with the particular aim of finding an organic articulation between their projects and the social or cultural uses at play in the spaces where they planned to intervene.⁴²

∆ 24
Santiago Castro and young locals, bench covered with graffiti, 2014. View of Honda city, courtesy: Fundación 4-18, photo: Santiago Rodríguez, 2014

Their first visit to Honda took place in 2014, when Felipe Rodríguez was asked to participate in a six-week residency programme at Flora Ars + Natura’s location in this city. Once in Honda, and fearing that he might not be able to complete the residency project as he had intended, Rodríguez invited another member of 4-18 to lend his support for the production of some of his ideas, and to carry out a set of artistic interventions, which they framed under the category of ‘expanded art.’⁴³ They identified the ‘absence of the state’ as a crucial feature of the city, which became even more prominent at the time since the mayor was in the process of being removed from office. 4-18 then thought that, after Rodriguez’s residency, they should try to develop a way of responding to these circumstances in Honda, inspired by an understanding of art as a way of working through social issues.⁴⁴

With this purpose in mind, they applied for support from Arts Collaboratory, which funded a year of work between 2014 and 2015. According to the collective,

We identified a set of issues upon which we meant to intervene, through a process that we define as urban acupuncture. This process follows three steps: a dialogue with the community, a diagnostic of everyday matters, and the creation of symbols that function as needles, with the intent of having an effect on the everyday life of a location.⁴⁵

Following this methodology, they singled out the following issues: the decay of the Cacao en Pelota hill; pollution in the Magdalena river; a crisis in artisanal fishing practices and contingent economy; and the gentrification of the historic downtown.

They conceived a diverse range of interventions responding to specific locations and involving participants through predominantly artistic premises: a sound booth; a phonograph performance at the cathedral; a workshop on stenopeic photography; three music videos for traditional tunes that refer to the decline of the Magdalena river; a viewing spot for the city; an animated short film on the river’s state of pollution, produced with children from the Pacho Mario neighbourhood; a radio programme on a local station; and an artist’s book based on cyanotypes portraying the craft of fishing.

Here, we take a closer look at one of these interventions: the sound booth, specifically conceived as a spatial intervention for the Cacao en Pelota hill. To make it possible, 4-18 had to make the site accessible again, in order to make it adequate for a contemplative experience of the landscape. This meant, among other things, constructing a flight of steps leading up to the booth; building and installing trash bins along the path; and working in tandem with young people and other cultural agents involved with the hill. The booth was a way of marking the landscape. It was a cubicle designed for an individual experience through the playback of local natural sounds. It was painted yellow, as the Navarro Bridge, but unlike the bridge it alluded to nature, rather than a building, as the repository of heritage value. To access the booth, one had to climb up two thirds of the hill along a path whose steps were made out of dirt, wood, rebar, and old tires. The sound system was powered by solar energy. Next to the booth, 4-18 built a bench, which was later covered with graffiti by young locals who had participated in a workshop with a guest graffiti artist from Bogotá.△Figs. 25

∆ 25
Felipe Rodríguez, Sound Booth, 2014, intervention, c. 200 × 70 × 60 cm, courtesy: Fundación 4-18, photo: Santiago Rodríguez, 2014

∆ 26
Partial view of Cacao en Pelota hill (flight of steps and trash bin), courtesy: Fundación 4-18, photo: Santiago Rodríguez, 2014

Although it is located on a privately owned plot of land, the hill is a landmark for many inhabitants, and it is transformed into a common space as people pass through it while engaging in activities of sport or leisure—in fact, many locals think that it is a public space. These ways of using the hill had not entirely disappeared when 4-18 made their intervention, but they had dwindled. In that sense, the sound booth sought to resignify and update these practices: to reiterate the hill’s significance within the local imaginary, and to reframe natural resources as a factor in the production and defence of ‘the common.’△Figs. 26

Several members of 4-18 now believe that it was only by the time that the project ended that they were in a position to start, because only then had they established close ties to some of Honda’s inhabitants and institutions. For this reason, we believe that 4-18’s interventions were not based on a conversation with concrete social or community processes, but on artistic operations designed to alter perceptions of existing natural and cultural resources.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Throughout our research we observed that the people involved with the case studies’ organizations often took a critical and thoughtful stance with respect to ‘redemptive narratives’⁴⁶ about the capacity of art and culture to intervene in specific social contexts, assistentialist discourses about vulnerable populations, and similar tactics for mobilizing resources of different kinds. The latter was an important point for many of them, for it had to do with their ways of dealing with the need to rely on financial resources obtained through cooperation, private enterprise, or local and national government agencies; as well as political and economic interests— both legal and illegal—established in the territories where their projects were to be carried out.

Given the limitations in length for the present text, we have not delved into these issues in detail. Each project and organization is, of its own accord, a space for debate around the ethical, political, or aesthetic significance of the intersection between artistic practices and social processes; and around the processes, epistemologies, methodologies, or ways of making that these intersections call for and reproduce. Provisionally, we consider it plausible to argue that the discrepant and apparently contradictory positions embraced by participants in all three projects are, precisely, an expression of a productive struggle around the meanings of art and culture. Such struggles are even more acute and relevant when artistic practices intersect with social processes aimed at strengthening citizen participation, social cohesion, cultural diversity, the sense of belonging, and strategies for the care or defence of natural resources and heritage, among other topics that surface in their narratives.

We should also point out that we were not interested in measuring the degree to which these projects were successful, if that entails fixing a criterion for assessing social impact that one could systematically apply and cross-check. When we spoke in terms of ‘intersections’ between art and social processes, we took it for granted, from the start, that it would not be possible to establish a category that could delimit a specific type of artistic or social event of which our cases would all be examples. In our three case studies, there is no such thing as ‘social art,’ or the use of art as an instrument for social change. Instead, there are intersections, some of which have a greater or lesser capacity to produce social, cultural, and artistic assemblages.

We have focused on one among many possible kinds of assemblage: the production of ‘the common,’ or of common spaces, which does not mean that we did not get a glimpse of other possibilities during our inquiries. ‘The common,’ and common spaces, are simply the categories that, in our view, most accurately captured the way in which certain spaces can be produced or resignified. Some of these arrangements have remained active, as the community gardens in the Las Flores development at the CNO, and the Ollantay urban park. Others were temporary, and only the traces of their spatial markings remain, as with the ‘heritage routes’ in Medellín’s Commune 1, or the sound booth and viewing spot at the Cacao en Pelota hill.

These categories do not figure as such in the narratives of the people we interview, or in their project documents. We have relied on them as a way of representing something concrete, but also as something that comes into view within a narrative, for just as there are common spaces that were produced in the territories, there are others that take place in narratives that have a potential to territorialize. We have used these categories as a way of calling attention to the potentialities of ‘artistic practices within a territory,’ considering that what they can do lies, above all, in the potency of making. We find their greatest power in the capacity to make and to narrate what can be done. We do not believe that the mere intersection of artistic practices and social processes can transform territorial conflicts, which are spatially configured through a complex web of instances and agents. Such an expectation would amount to an acritical replaying of a ‘redemptive narrative’ about artistic practices in the territories.

Our analysis should also not be taken as a representation of all of the events constituting each of our cases. Not all of the practices and actions that we encountered through our research struck us as having the same intensity and potency. In spite of the intentions and purposes of their organizers and participants, and even when their planning was adequate, the intersections of artistic practices and social processes are eventful in nature and their unfolding can never be entirely predicted. Moreover, most of the projects in our case studies were themselves moments in a learning process, experiments through trial and error where decisions and adjustments were made along the way. This situation was intensified by the fact that the three organizations in our study were not communitybased, or social organizations rooted in the territories where they carried out their key projects.

This is not necessarily a weakness from our point of view. Instead, we find that the possibility of international funding—from Prince Claus Fund, Hivos, and Arts Collaboratory—came at a time when these organizations were in the process of transcending disciplinary, epistemological, and organizational boundaries, engaged in an effort to disrupt their ways of doing and their understanding of the cultural, artistic, or social fields within which they located their practice. In the case of the MudeA and Proyecto mARTadero, we have interpreted these moments as a social and cultural turn, respectively, and we would argue that, for these organizations, these turns led to an unambiguous reorientation towards extraartistic contexts. In contrast, we do not find such an inflexion in 4-18, and in our view the reason is that such turns can only occur through lasting and sustained interactions with other cultural agents.

To conclude, we note that in all three cases there was an organizational ability to establish alliances with other groups or institutions, or to appeal to or negotiate with government agencies. These we regard as creative and disruptive capacities to promote artistic practices and spaces for dialogue with different communities and inhabitants, for the sake of arranging ‘the common.’ Undoubtedly, in all cases it could be said that ‘a lot of things’ had been done, but we sense that, to a great extent, this measure of hyperactivity prevented the projects from settling into a constant regime of writing or archiving that would have allowed for their social reproduction beyond personal testimony. Project members and participants have called attention to the need for systematizing the knowledge that has been collected through these projects, and for a greater degree of critical reflection about them. In a way, during our inquiries we found ourselves playing the part of ‘organizational psychologists,’ or better yet, as scribes for the projects’ memoirs. In that sense, we hope that by writing this text we may be playing a part, as participants, in the unfolding of yet another assemblage.

1 .............Spanish was the main language used for research (both for participants and researchers).

2 .............A list of interviewed participants can be found in the references section at the end of the chapter.

3 .............Raquel Gutiérrez, Horizontes comunitariopopulares: Producción de lo común más allá de las políticas estado-céntricas (Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2017), p. 73.

4 .............Natalia Da Representaçao, ‘Los espacios comunes como problema: Sociabilidad, gestión y territorio,’ in El retorno de lo político a la cuestión urbana: Territorialidad y acción pública en el Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires, ed. Andrea Catenazzi et al. (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento-Prometeo Libros, 2009).

5 .............Zea was a botanist and politician born in Medellín who participated in the process by which the territory that is currently Colombia gained independence in the early nineteenth century.

6 .............So called in honor of artist Fernando Botero, who offered to donate several works from his collection to the museum, including some of his own (by his authorship) public sculptures.

7 .............Ascensión Hernández Martínez, ‘El efecto Guggenheim-Bilbao en Latinoamérica: Medellín, Ciudad Botero, un proyecto cultural para la paz,’ Artigrama no. 17 (2002), pp. 149–76.

8 .............Alejandro Cardona, ‘Un museo andariego. La experiencia dialógica de construcción colectiva del patrimonio entre el museo y la comunidad,’ Jangwa Pana no. 12 (August 2013), p. 152.

9 .............Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, Medellín: memorias de una guerra urbana (Bogotá: CNMH, Corporación Región, Ministerio del Interior, Alcaldía de Medellín, Universidad EAFIT, Universidad de Antioquia, 2017), pp. 84–97.

10 ...........Although it is true that, since then, memory has become a public policy, it is timely to remember that commemorative acts and narratives of the past were already part of the toolkits of resistance of different communities and social organizations in Colombia. Likewise, they played a part in several efforts to bring art into contact with peace initiatives or the restitution of the social fabric. As an example, it is worth recalling the community-based project La piel de la memoria [Skin of Memory] carried out in 1998, directed by the artist Suzanne Lacy and the anthropologist Pilar Riaño; and different initiatives of organizations that were formed in Medellín since the late eighties such as Corporación Región, Con-vivamos, Nuestra Gente, Casa Mía, among others.

11 ...........Carlos Mario Jiménez, interview by the authors.

12 ...........A community organization long devoted to popular education on the northeastern area of Medellín.

13 ...........Corporación Con-Vivamos and Museo de Antioquia, ‘Propuesta de Museos Comunitarios en la Comuna 1 y la Ciudadela Nuevo Occidente en Medellín,’ Final report (Medellín, 2011).

14 ...........Lida Restrepo, interview by Nadia Moreno and Yurilena Velásquez.

15 ...........Mónica Giraldo, interview by the authors.

16 ...........Santo Domingo Savio is one of Medellin’s ‘historical’ neighbourhoods in terms of self-construction and popular organizing.

17 ...........Although the MudeA projected a plan and a budget to further this process in 2012, it interrupted collaboration with the CNO. After cross-checking documentary information with some interviewees, we think that this sector was a priority for the PAV, which at the time pulled out as an institutional ally.

18 ...........There were also inhabitants coming from other neighbourhoods of the city as a result of forced intra-urban migration.

19 ...........David Henao, interview by Nadia Moreno and Yurilena Velázquez.

20 ...........Andrés Arredondo, interview by Fernando Escobar.

21 ...........The convite is a traditional practice of community collective action rooted in self-constructed popular neighbourhoods of Medellín. For example, people collaborate in the construction of a neighbour’s house while sharing food and drink. In this way, they sow collective feelings of identity and of belonging to the territory.

22 ...........Consuelo Giraldo, interview by the authors.

23 ...........La Aurora is the name of another development at the CNO.

24 ...........A Territorial Base Organization is ‘the basic unit of a community or neighbourhood type, occupying a specific territorial space, whose population has no distinctions in educational level, occupation, age, sex, or religion, and whose relation to the state is mainly maintained through the city government in the jurisdiction of its location’ (Decree 23858 of 9 September 1994).

25 ...........A bill that deals with the confiscation of goods, properties, and other items linked with the coca trade.

26 ...........As of writing, Bolivia was experiencing a new political crisis, produced, above all, by a coup d’etat and the forced resignation of Morales as president of Bolivia in November 2019.

27 ...........Heckl was one of the main forces behind CONART, as well as Proyecto mARTadero’s first director.

28 ...........Angélika Heckl, interview by the authors.

29 ...........George Yúdice, El recurso de la cultura: Usos de la cultura en la era global (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2002).

30 ...........Fernando García, interview by the authors.

31 ...........CVC is a Latin American movement that emerged out of the joint-base of several cultural communities. Grounded on diversity as a founding principle, it promotes the exchange of practices and forms of knowledge. They also seek to influence public policies in their respective countries, in order to respond collectively to the specific needs of their territories.

32 ...........Cultura en Red is an Iberoamerican initiative based on network processes that mix Web 2.0 with collectivist logics in pre-capitalist societies. It is based on principles of cooperation, collaboration, and non-hierarchy, directed at promoting social action, collective creativity, and civil coexistence.

33 ...........Neyda Campos, interview by the authors.

34 ...........Including the support granted by Hivos for four years starting in 2010. This support also took on the form of a dialogue among peers, going beyond the parameters of conventional sponsorship.

35 ...........Susana Obando, interview by the authors.

36 ...........When Obando says ‘contemporary arts,’ she does not mean visual arts within the global art system, but the broad range of practices mentioned above.

37 ...........The historical downtown and the Navarro bridge, which crosses the Magdalena River, were declared national monuments in 1994.

38 ...........The fact that Honda is perceived as having heritage value, as a tourist destination, has prevented it from being written into established narratives of the armed conflict. It is part of the Middle Magdalena region, controlled by paramilitary groups and drug trafficking organizations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. See: ‘El DAS y los paras,’ Semana, 2 December, 2006, https://verdadabierta.com/guerra-entre-paramilitares-por-el-tolima/ 2006; ‘Guerra entre paramilitares por el Tolima,’ Verdad abierta. 3 February 2014, https://verdadabierta.com/guerra-entre-paramilitares-por-el-tolima/

39 ...........Luz Dary Ariza, interview by Fernando Escobar.

40 ...........The festival takes place in the early months of the year, when fishing is at a maximum. Paradoxically, the city is home to three museums: the Alfonso López Pumarejo museum, the Magdalena River Museum, and the Honda Cultural Center (run by the Bank of the Republic).

41 ...........The artists from the collective who participated in this project were Nicolás Rodríguez, Felipe Rodríguez, Tomás Silva, Pablo Gómez, and Santiago Rodríguez.

42 ........... Felipe Rodríguez, interview by Nadia Moreno.

43 ...........In their website, 4-18 state the point in further detail: ‘We are driven by the juxtaposition of artistic, environmental, social, political, scientific, and sportive dynamics. Such intersections are the basis and the philosophy behind 4-18’s projects, and this is what we call expanded art.’

44 ...........Nicolás Rodríguez, interview by Fernando Escobar.

45 ...........‘Proyecto Visualización de Honda,’ Fundación 4-18, www.4-18.org/honda (accessed 13 November 2019).

46 ...........We borrow this category from the work of David Gutiérrez Castañeda (2016), who expands on Elizabeth Povinelli (2006).

← REFERENCES

Cardona, Alejandro. ‘Un museo andariego: La experiencia dialógica de construcción colectiva del patrimonio entre el museo y la comunidad.’ Jangwa Pana 12 (2013), pp. 150–58, 179.

Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. Medellín: Memorias de una guerra urbana. Bogotá: CNMH – Corporación Región – Ministerio del Interior – Alcaldía de Medellín – Universidad EAFIT – Universidad de Antioquia, 2017.

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Da Representaçao, Natalia. ‘Los espacios comunes como problema. Sociabilidad, gestión y territorio.’ In El retorno de lo político a la cuestión urbana: Territorialidad y acción pública en el Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires, ed. Andrea Catenazzi et al. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento-Prometeo Libros, 2009.

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← INTERVIEWS

MUSEO + COMUNIDAD

Carlos Mario Jiménez, interview by Fernando Escobar and Yurilena Velásquez, 8 April 2019.

Carolina Chacón, interview by Fernando Escobar and Yurilena Velázquez, 10 April 2019.

Elizabeth Echavarría, interview by Fernando Escobar and Yurilena Velázquez, 11 April 2019.

Lida Restrepo, interview by Nadia Moreno and Yurilena Velásquez, 12 April 2019.

Giovanni Correa and Juan Diego Cano, collective interview by Nadia Moreno and Yurilena Velásquez, 15 April 2019.

Carlos Mario Jiménez, interview by Nadia Moreno and Yurilena Velásquez, 30 April 2019.

David Henao, interview by Nadia Moreno, 3 May 2019.

Zinayda Quiñonez, interview by Nadia Moreno, 6 June 2019.

María Cristina Álvarez, interview by Fernando Escobar, 10 June 2019.

Andrés Arredondo, interview by Fernando Escobar, 10 June 2019.

César Cano, interview by Nadia Moreno, 17 June 2019.

Consuelo Giraldo, interview by Nadia Moreno, Fernando Escobar, and Yurilena Velásquez, 20 June 2019.

Edward Niño, interview by Nadia Moreno, Fernando Escobar, and Yurilena Velázquez, 22 June 2019.

Carlos Edwin Rendón, interview by Nadia Moreno, 22 June 2019.

Jader Sánchez, Mónica Giraldo, and Sonia Martínez, collective interview by Nadia Moreno, Fernando Escobar, and Yurilena Velásquez, 22 June 2019.

Lilia Colorado and Silvia Colorado, collective interview by Nadia Moreno, Fernando Escobar, and Yurilena Velásquez, 15 August 2019.

Pablo Ayala, interview by Fernando Escobar, 12 September 2019.

Cristina Vasco, interview by Fernando Escobar, 20 September 2019.

PROYECTO MARTADERO

Fernando García, interview by Nadia Moreno and Fernando Escobar, 18 November 2018 and 1 August 2019.

Claudia Michel, interview by Nadia Moreno and Fernando Escobar, 8 July 2019.

Marco Marín, interview by Nadia Moreno and Fernando Escobar, 10 July 2019.

Magda Rossi, interview by Nadia Moreno and Fernando Escobar, 10 July 2019.

Angélika Heckel, interview by Nadia Moreno and Fernando Escobar, 11 July 2019.

Fabiola Quiroga, interview by Nadia Moreno and Fernando Escobar, 11 July 2019.

Claudia Silva, interview by Nadia Moreno and Fernando Escobar, 11 July 2019.

Neyda Campos, interview by Nadia Moreno and Fernando Escobar, 12 July 2019.

Susana Obando, interview by Nadia Moreno and Fernando Escobar, 12 July 2019.

Malena Rodríguez, interview by Nadia Moreno and Fernando Escobar, 15 July 2019.

VISUALIZACIÓN DE HONDA

Marcela Prieto, interview by Nadia Moreno and Fernando Escobar, 21 December 2018.

Felipe Rodríguez, interview by Nadia Moreno, 27 February 2019.

Nicolás Rodríguez, interview by Fernando Escobar, 20 March 2019.

Pablo Gómez, interview by Fernando Escobar, 30 April 2019.

Gonzalo Gamboa, interview by Fernando Escobar, 2 May 2019.

Roberio García, interview by Fernando Escobar, 2 May 2019.

Luz Dary Ariza, interview by Fernando Escobar, 3 May 2019.

TICKLING THE SENSIBLE Art, Politics, and Worlding at the Global Margin

Višnja Kisić and Goran Tomka

In this chapter, we explore the questions of entanglements between arts and politics by looking at the work of the foundation Más Arte Más Acción (MAMA) in the department of Chocó, Colombia, at a global political margin. MAMA’s practice is an example of dissenting the global capitalist hegemony and creating spaces where imagination of alternative processes of living, relating, and creating can take place. Our aim has been to conceive politics beyond anthropocentrism, acknowledging ontological interrelatedness of the web of life and agency of a more-than-human world in politics, as well as away from epistemic injustices and modes of coloniality that shape the very conceptions of micro and macro-politics. While questioning the dominant understandings of the relation between art and politics, we claim that it is in the relationship with specific territories, ecosystems, places, beings, and ways of worlding that artistic practice engages in dissenting the policed worlding and in reconfiguring the political. We propose the notion of ‘rampant practice’ for understanding (artistic) practices that re-engage with the web of life and its interdependencies, uncertainties, and vulnerabilities, thus undisciplining, disturbing, challenging, and ‘tickling’ the dominant subjectivation of actors, places of existence, processes of becoming, modes of practice, and ways of relating within arts practice.

Keywords

→ | Art and Politics
→ | Worlding
→ | Anthropocentrism
→ | Rampant Practice
→ | Colombia

INTRODUCTION

To the carers of the Dignified, Simple and Solidary life. We have gone through all this because of the love that we have known in our territories... Our land is the place where we dream our future with dignity.¹

The futures we can dream about, desire, and imagine have been saturated by neoliberal capitalism’s hegemonic landscape, contaminating spaces and times for questioning the status quo and discussing possible life alternatives. As alternative ‘cosmo/visions’² pierce through the surface, the growing military, epistemic, and ontological violence is ever harder to hide. In this particular moment, the temptation of quick policy solutions is high. However, radical reimaginings of the political ask for much wider considerations. They require rethinking the very ontological understandings, epistemic injustices, cognitive assumptions, and affective relationships that govern the ways in which life is perceived, politics and its subjects are legitimized, and societies are organized. What do these radical reimaginings of the political mean for arts? How may artistic practices create spaces, encounters, and subjectivities that are shaking the neoliberal capitalist hegemonic order, triggering new imaginations and alternative ways of shaping the world? How can we think about them beyond anthropocentric conceptions of politics and impacts? How can we understand their rampant modes of existence within webs of life?

In this chapter, we explore the questions of entanglements between arts and politics by looking at the work of Más Arte Más Acción (MAMA) in Chocó, Colombia, which takes place in what could be understood as a ‘global political margin.’ MAMA’s practice can be considered a manifestation of dissenting from the neoliberal hegemony and of creating spaces to imagine alternative processes of living, relating, and creating. This is what we call ‘tickling the sensible’—referring to practices that play with, poke, divert, and question the ways in which senses, sense and sensibilities are distributed and negotiated. As it will become clearer within this chapter, to tickle the sensible is to challenge the hegemonic order and its attempts to cement life and relations, without desiring to institute a new hegemony. It concerns both micropolitical (intimate) and macropolitical ways of creating wiggle room in which life can take unexpected directions beyond the colonizing grids.

In studying the case of MAMA within the Force of Art initiative, we spent seven weeks in Colombia following the organization across the country. This included: participating in their co-organized events visiting and conversing with their collaborators as well as other actors in the independent Colombian art scene; staying in MAMA’s Chocó Base residency; and sharing time, conversations, and space with the members of MAMA, other artists and researchers, as well as various communities they relate to in Nuquí, Quibdó, Bogotá, Cali, and Medellín. Our research methodology is based on observation, participation, and group conversations, supplemented by in-depth interviews, and a personal diary in which we have documented our experiences. Before travelling to Colombia, we had explored and analyzed traces of MAMA’s work—its website with publications, videos and reflections of people who have been part of residency projects, as well as art interventions, events and writings created throughout their work. Upon our return from Colombia, we conducted additional in-depth interviews via Skype with former residents of the Chocó Base and longterm collaborators proposed by MAMA. Throughout the process, our approach had many traits of participatory research,³ in that we strived to co-produce data and findings in collaboration with participants as well as exchange and discuss findings and several versions of the final text with them.