FETE DE SOCIALLY-ENGAGED PRACTICES!

Creative Time’s Living as Form Summit happened yesterday, September 23, 2011, and the sprawling exhibition of hundreds of socially-engaged projects Living as Form opens today, September 24, 2011, at the Essex Street Market, all in New York City.  

Due to chronic travel fatigue and lacking resources, I decided to telestream the conference from my home in Cambridge (thanks for offering the option Creative Time) and will catch the exhibition en route from Philadelphia in early October. Both are centrally important to my dissertation work.

The conference offerings were deliciously mixed, from interpretive dance to tiresome self-narratives to probing theoretical discussions to awe-inspiring projects. Here, I will highlight four projects that caught my eye (and ear and heart). Clockwise from top left:

Tahrir Documents is “an ongoing effort to archive and translate activist papers from the 2011 Egypt uprising and its aftermath.” Numerous publishing, journalistic, and artistic projects have grown up from the fertile “Arab spring,” but this project distinguishes itself in numerous ways. It emphasizes ephemeral written materials—posters, tracts, pamphlets, stickers—as opposed to the backlog of twitter and social media messages (already archived in the book Tweets from Tahrir), and with this emphasis, it brings attention to older forms of activist expression and to the populations connected to such forms. Translation constitutes the central labor, and all translation happens on a volunteer basis. This project will be, if it isn’t already, funded by some organization, but I appreciate the volunteer group effort and open information, at an arm’s distance from privatization and capital. Finally, I support the group’s description of the revolution as ongoing and unfinished, and I think we would all be wise to check our verb tenses in describing conflicts, struggles, and wars affecting our world.

Haircuts by Kids is a project by the group Mammalian Diving Reflex that first happened in 2006 in Toronto and that consists of children giving strangers haircuts. The website describes the project as “a whimsical performance that playfully engages with the enfranchisement of children, trust in the younger generation, and the thrills and chills of vanity.” They also write of children as “creative and competent individuals whose aesthetic choices can be trusted.” I love the inversion of power, the disruption of norms, and the trusting exchange between a child and a stranger, all things that should happen more often in society. Through play, craft, and letting go, this project instigates new relations in the world, which is art’s ultimate goal. 

Women on Waves is an Amsterdam-based abortion advocacy group, and while I knew of their work, I didn’t know the extent to which they help women across the world gain access to safe abortions by shipping them the necessary medications mifepristone and misoprostol to take at home and providing counseling. Abortion is illegal (orange and red countries in map above) in about 25% of the world, particularly in the southern hemisphere, and I see this project as part of the continual work necessary to recalibrate the long-existing inequalities between the “north” and “south,” between those who colonized and those who were colonized. It’s a truly radical project, and it’s the new form of mail art.

Thousand Kites, a national dialogue project addressing the criminal justice system, is a multi-part structure to elicit and share stories. It has a fascinating evolution that began with prisoners contacting a radio DJ of one of the only hip-hop radio programs in the Appalachian area and then that DJ initiating a five-month long chess game with a prisoner, in which the moves were announced over the air and the paper board mailed back and forth. The presenter from Appalshop (the radio station) described how the prisoner’s radio was taken away and the other prisoners used to yell the moves through the prison vents. This contact spurred multiple initiatives…including a program called “Calls from Home,” where family could send messages to prisoners, and “Thousand Kites.” Kite is prison lingo for message. 

The conference also included a great history of squats—or “insurrectionary urban developments on a large scale”—by Alan Moore, a Deleuze-inspired discussion of Foucault’s ideas about philosophical activism by Gerald Raunig, a consideration of what “form” and “living” mean from different disciplinary views by Shannon Jackson, and the totally radical activist pranks by the Russian group VOINA. You can watch videos of these and many more talks at the Creative Time website. 

I am committed to supporting these kinds of projects through my scholarly and curatorial endeavors.