Interconnections (Asynchronous)
Inward and Outward : Hawaiʻi Puerto Ricans Negotiate Global and Local through Dance Music Culture View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ted Solis
Puerto Rican music and dance in Hawaiʻi derives from sugar plantation labor importations circa 1900. Separated from their home island, during the twentieth century, by two oceans, this population was relatively isolated from musical and other cultural currents in Puerto Rico and among Nuyoricans. Hawaiʻi Puerto Ricans largely trace their ancestries to Jíbaros, who in 1900 were largely independent subsistence farmers of the hilly interior. During the Spanish colonial period in Puerto Rico their self-image, embracing music, dance, and poetry, inclined toward the “Hispanic” end of the Hispanic-African continuum. During the twentieth century, however, the polarity between highland “white” Jíbaros and lowland Afro-Puerto Ricans narrowed considerably in Puerto Rico—a cultural coalescence which bypassed Hawaiʻi Puerto Ricans, who clung to their perceived Jíbaro heritage, greatly defined by music and dance. I maintain that the relative lack of communication during much of the twentieth century obliged Hawaii Puerto Ricans to turn culturally both inward and outward. They looked inward in an attempt to sustain their “White,” Hispanic narrative in the face of an encroaching “Black” component in music and dance culture. However, with little conduit to contemporary Puerto Rican music and dance culture, they were obliged to look outward to the wider Latin world for repertoire and instruments. In doing so, however, they repeatedly subjected innovations to what I call a “Jíbaro Filter”: a cultural lens via which they rationalized their local identity and renegotiated and reinterpreted the aesthetic criteria of global Latin cultures.
Agricultural Aesthetics: Big Agricultural and the Ongoing Ruin of Natural Beauty View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Pauley
In this essay, I argue that big agriculture in the United States continuously destroys the aesthetic values of landscape. Row-cropping practices across a huge section of the Middle-West have also done (perhaps) irreversible damage to the natural ecology. The difficulty, however, is in how the ruin is very difficult to actually see and comprehend. In my arguments, I reveal the massive chemical and technological brutality of this agricultural system. I will then use visual and narrative art as examples and methods for bringing the ugliness and destructiveness of the system to the surface. The argument being that art "sees" past appearances and often reveals what structures appearances. Hence art is a vital and unique way to safeguard the natural world, which is currently our most pressing global issue.
Feminism as Praxis: Kabuli Women's Contributions to Feminist Epistemologies through Art View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bilquis Ghani
Feminism in Afghanistan is rooted in context, which complicates feminist discourses positioned as secular and individualistic movements. The ontologies of dominant conceptualisations should be reflexively approached, particularly those with roots in post-Enlightenment rationalism such as individuality, agency and freedom, or Western liberal feminism like gender and sexuality. I present the perspective of Afghan women artists’ experiences and critiques of liberal feminism as encountered through NGOs operating in Afghanistan. They have identified the paternalistic role that some women’s rights work have assumed in the country. In their challenge to feminism as label, participants challenge homogenisation of Afghan women and reconceptualise agency. Their experiences comprise a complex sociohistorical context which demands equally complex responses. I suggest that Kabuli art practice contributes to a feminism as praxis (Pabon 2013). In this paper, I suggest that we pivot our understanding of feminism and feminist in the Kabul context, and argue that feminism can be the verb without the label, a way to reconsider the lens through which Afghan women contribute to feminist epistemologies and which are equally valid in Western liberal feminist discourses. I discuss a progressive feminist politics which reconceptualises agency and which looks beyond feminism as identity construction to a feminism as praxis through the unprompted sentiments of the Kabuli artists with whom I spoke.
The Society of the Spectacular: The Social Practice of the Atlanta Arts Collective, 800 East, 1990-1998
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Kilburn
A prequel to the paper presented by this author at the 2020 Arts in Society Galway conference (“The democratic praxis of AiOP), this study is the first academic profile of the obscure but seminal Atlanta arts collective, 800East. Based on participant observation, interviews, and archival research, this ethnography presents a case study of negotiating the local in the global. Established on a sketchy dead-end street in Atlanta’s old fourth ward in 1990, 800East became the premier underground visual and performance arts space in the city for most of the 1990s and an open laboratory for a generation of artists to investigate the nexus of art and life. Working off the grid, with no official status or sponsorship, the collective -by necessity and then conviction- engineered a DIY aesthetic, leveraging goodwill, creative vision, and the hunger of Atlanta’s socially and artistically marginalized communities to create and sustain a safe space for creative expression. Despite its hardscrabble beginnings, the collective was prolific, producing monthly, large scale visual and performance art exhibitions from 1990-1998, as well as a variety of offsite initiatives. Over its eight-year tenure, hundreds of artists exhibited and performed in the space and tens of thousands passed through its gates. By renegotiating local space, responding to local needs, and leveraging local resources, 800East developed a praxis of artistic vision and community engagement with global implications. 800East was truly a “voice from the edge” and has lesson plans for negotiating the local in the global.
The Origin of Places: A Nelson Mandela University-National Research Foundation Project in Co-authorship with the First Indigenous People of South Africa and the Role of Museums View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Magda Minguzzi
We are experiencing a moment of great fragility and global crisis that is mainly the result of the economic system which most of the world is based on, namely capitalism. Western capitalism that led to settler colonialism drastically changed the course of the history of many countries, including South Africa. In this crisis, institutions such as museums and universities which are a product of Western capitalism are being overwhelmed by current developments and realities. Does it make sense to use these institutions as they were founded and exported by colonists? Isn't it time to rethink a different role for them, especially in places like South Africa which has suffered strong colonization and where the Indigenous people continue to suffer strong repression? This paper explores a project started in 2017 in Port Elizabeth, by a group of leaders of the First Indigenous Peoples (KhoiSan), staff and students of the Nelson Mandela University, with the support of the National Research Foundation. A project with the scope of documenting heritage, Indigenous places and practising ancient rituals, with the goal to achieve cultural re-appropriation by the KhoiSan. With the imposition of the colonialist narrative, the KhoiSan don’t have the right to their heritage spaces, and their places of memory have been covered under a veil of total forgetfulness. The project facilitated the opportunity to collaborate with two museums that became open spaces, a platform where the KhoiSan could express their identity and values with school children and community members in general.
The Snag: The Materiality of Wavering Grief View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Samantha Jones
This paper examines wavering grief as a way of reaching toward unknowing; a type of grief that feels the dark spots that we cannot otherwise readily access. Wavering grief is an ambiguous state of mourning what is both gone and not gone yet. I therefore explore here the materiality of wavering grief as is manifested in the particular experience of the snag, or standing deadwood. This experience embodies the physical proximity swayed by at least three interconnected phenomena: a) the ubiquitous force of gravity, b) the perpetually open wound, and c) the blind propagation of new worlds. The paper also examines how the situation of wavering grief creates the interminable condition that Jean Luc Nancy calls “the open wound” -- i.e. a phantom limb which is still present. The final goal of the paper is to demonstrate the phenomenon of wavering grief as a somatically inscribed and perpetually ambivalent state, one that creates the necessary conditions for encountering new ontologies.
The Colors of Humanity Reflected in the Skin Tone of Mannequins in a Museum’s Fashion Collection View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marcy L. Koontz, Shirley Foster, Craig Graves
Since the turn of the twentieth century, when museums began to collect objects of dress in earnest, mannequins used in exhibitions of fashion have been predominantly white. Some may argue that white is colorless and provides a neutral base on which to display the objects. In the past several years, there has been much discussion regarding the collections of fashion in terms of the overwhelming lack of objects created by nonwhite designers. Left out of the dialog has been how the objects are displayed. Humanity’s true colors are varied, the color of mannequins should reflect this attribute that is as important as the diverse objects which they adorn. This paper examines skin tone, the mannequin project, designed to change the way in which fashion is studied, showcased, and exhibited through the transformation of four white mannequins. Using a mobile spectrophotometer, the skin tone of four individuals was objectively sampled to determine their true skin tone. The color measurements were then matched with paint swatches, the mannequins were painted, and the participants were photographed with their mannequin at the end of the process. The purpose of this project was twofold. First, to spark conversation, expand the narrative, and take action that leads to change in how fashion is exhibited. Second, for others to examine ways in which representational changes can be made that better include rather than exclude.
Transformative Cultural Learning: Towards An Integrative Global Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bronwen Wade-Leeuwen, Kathryn McLachlan
Arts-based inquiry and experiential learning approaches support the development of critical, creative, and reflective thinking to envisage new art forms, digital spaces, and international forums. Drawing on Palmer, (2017), our research supports his approach to integrative education, urging an ontological and epistemological shift to understanding the relational, interdependent nature of our being and becoming, in the world. This includes developing 21st century skills of critical and creative thinking, deep reflective practice, and problem-solving/finding. This paper showcases the creativity and reflective practice workshops as environments for engaging learners in creativity and reflective practice to encourage transformative cultural learning to develop lifelong learners. Using multi-modal documentation from in-practice sessions, we demonstrate a process of re-enchantment, bringing student voices engaging in deep reflective practice. Students will be making new ‘edgy’ artforms through traditional Frescoes (fresh plaster) 3D artefacts, which will be photographed and transposed to digital media. The artworks and artefacts created from local Indigenous and international voices are shared on a global digital gallery in nine countries, as a large-scale community project. This new media artform will be curated to collectively form the longest digital Earth Day Mural in the world, to highlight the importance of the SDG’s.
