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Week 10

From her own personal experience as an aboriginal woman in Australia, Celeste Liddle argues the necessity of an Aboriginal feminism. A ‘radical’ approach that challenges the intersecting forms of oppressions produced by the white patriarchy (the issues of gender that every woman suffer), the black patriarchy (how the injustices operate within the aboriginal community) and the ‘mainstream’ feminism. In doing so she highlights that, whilst the struggles of aboriginal women are related to ongoing feminist causes, their fight it´s quite unique, by the fact they need to liberate from the multiple oppressions of gender/sexuality and race/nation working together.

I believe her argument illustrates a sharp dimension of the actual feminist movement and, following Nimili Fernando´s lecture, represent a situated example of the principles that nurture the idea of intersectionality. And, in this sense, how it also encourages the development of community art projects that seek to reveal sexism and racism perpetuation and stimulates individual and collective action upon it

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Week 9

In “The color of race”, six artists from the fields of performance, theatre, dance, filmmaking, and hip-hop speak about what it means to be an artist of color in Seattle and address issues of race within their respective crafts. Highlighting that “when a dominant culture controls resources, it also controls the narrative”, they deep in how important is in their work to struggle for a space in the art world were their communities can tell their own stories in the way they want to do it.

I found particularly interesting the way their diverse experiences and works connect with Baker and Sonn´s project, where personal storytelling appears as a methodology of decolonization. An art method that can reinforce and create personal and collective memories, reveal how subjectivities are constructed, and, in this sense, question the present racial constructions. But also how it reveals the tensions this works can produce within a cultural field dominated by European-based art institutions and white audiences.

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Week 7 

In this article, Balfron Social Club, a local campaign comprising of Balfron Tower tenants and leaseholders, artists and academics, united against the privatization of a social homes tower located in East London, denounce the use of social art as a way of ease the process of gentrification. They report that the organization in charge of this artistic approach to the community is sponsored by the very private housing association responsible of refurbishing the flats to sell them as luxury apartments in the private market. So they criticize that this ‘social arts practice’ only makes sense to the extent that helps the housing association interests by creating a ‘‘new and vibrant’ community that justifies the huge price tickets on developments nearby’.

This case highlights another scope of how the institutions can, not only interfere, but directly mold the art projects existence, meaning, and outcomes, and how even the ‘good-intentioned’ arts can participate in ethically compromising episodes. I found particularly telling the way it shows that even (or especially) ‘socially-engaged’ arts aren´t exempt from responsibility when it comes to its connections to sponsoring institutions.

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In this paper, the authors reflect on the characteristics of a media project called “The University of Local Knowledge”. A community arts initiative held by the residents of Knowle West, South Bristol (UK) since 2008, with the Knowle West Media Center and artist Suzanne Lacy, that aims to challenge and disrupt existing hierarchies about what constitutes knowledge and why values are placed on different spheres of expertise. More than 900 residents have shared their specific knowledge and experience through short films which serve as teaching units, are then assembled as ‘courses’ by the community, and integrated into a website to be spread.

I think this initiative it´s an interesting case that dialogues with Butt´s argument (2006) about how new-media projects can appeal to experience, local knowledge, and local understandings, instead of other system-centered ways of understanding. In this case, versus the academic or ‘expert’ knowledge of a place. But it also underlines the value of a community-led learning initiative and it´s potentials to confront perceptions.  

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Although there may not be a direct link between the appreciation of the art in setting and the intention to act pro-environmentally, it can lend support to the notion that placing artworks in nature can assist in the re-imagining and appreciation of the environment, enhancing individuals’ and communities’ sense of place and, consequently, encouraging the desire to act as environmental stewards… whether Floating Land had influenced how they felt about living in the village. One respondent commented “some art transformed the quite ordinary to something . . . amazing!

M. Marks, L. Chandler & C. Baldwin, “Re-imagining the environment: using an environmental art festival to encourage pro-environmental behaviour and a sense of place”, Local Environment, 21, 3 (2016): 325

Are environmental arts an effective way to connect people with environmental issues? Can arts projects contribute to environmental causes by changing people´s perceptions and behaviors? The authors in this article deepen these questions through a case study, arguing that environmental arts are indeed an important way of encouraging environmental engagement. They analyze the audience’s responses to a community art event called “Floating Island”: an environmental art festival in the Noosa Biosphere in Australia which brings 15000 participants into a natural setting to engage environmental arts through workshops, exhibitions, presentations, and performances. Among the most noticeable effects are signs of pro-environmental behavior change and enhancing the community´s sense of place.

Beyond the particular study case, I believe these results open a very interesting debate about the potential impacts of environmental arts in their audiences. The social and subjective effects of this experience reinforce the idea that, by working in the realm of imagination and creativity, community art projects can play a key role in transforming everyday practices.

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Education becomes an aesthetic event at the precise moment it becomes political…For Freire this aesthetic is the reconfiguration of the student-teacher relationship—a non-identification that results in a synaesthetic utterance. Through this aesthetic reconfiguration, the teacher as stultifier undergoes a fundamental short-circuiting, opening up a space wherein every teacher is a student and every student a teacher.

Lewis, T.E. (2009) p.294 “Education in the Realm of the Senses: Understanding Paulo Freire’s Aesthetic Unconscious through Jacques Ranciére”. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 43 (2), 285-299.

Lewis’ article examines the ideas of Paulo Freire´s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, emphasizing the fundamental role that aesthetic plays in any process of education. He argues that in Freire´s position the aesthetic nature of all pedagogy can be recognized in the teaching and learning dynamic, where student and teacher carry their own way of hearing, seeing and experiencing the world, from which a horizontal non-oppressive dialogic space can be constructed.

The strong connection between aesthetic and education which originally contained Freire´s theory helps me understand better the later emergence of the Aesthetic of the Oppressed principles and its idea that we are all potential artists. But also I believe that it points toward the possibility of applying its spirit and methods, not only through the theatre but through a long range of different artistic disciplines and community contexts. Could we adapt Boal´s methods to work through music, dance, films, literature, illustration, street art, etc. with different groups of persons?

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How can a community artistic project contribute to the process of social and political transformation, without nurturing the discourses and power dynamics which is trying to change? In which way can the arts become a “useful” tool for this purpose? For Basma El-Hussein one of the most powerful effects of arts resides in the sharp, collective and long-term impact of creativity. It´s capacity to enable a community with “the ability to feel and think beyond their immediate reality and outside their usual capacity”

I think this is a particularly interesting idea that broadens the discourses about the values and the inherent “goodness” of arts and aims to some of its current cultural and political potentials. Basma argues from the background of Arabic Spring, but I believe her idea of creativity power can be applied to any community that chooses arts as a way of transforming social values and power relations in a local context.