The Messy, Dirty, Silly Interplay of Art and Activism: Artivistic 2007

The best part of Artivistic 2007 was being together with so many people who are serious (and seriously silly) about the interPlay of art and activism. The discussions that arose reflected a wide variety of practices and experiences and the interdisciplinary, cross-cultural nature of the event was always in the forefront. It could have been improved by having more rigorous discussions as well as more local community involvement, but still, I learned a great deal at this conference and made some long lasting connections with people excited about blending art and activism.

a place that is dear to someone

Overall I feel like there were good questions asked to frame the conference, but some more nuanced questions might have been more fruitful. The three questions took the form “what is…”. I think that this setup a situation for dialog centered around definition instead of analysis, which is often a tool of domination and control. Many contemporary approaches favor play and process to definition. Personally, I find Deleuze’s process ontology useful and might find questions dealing with an analysis of process and assemblage to yield more detailed responses. Questions like “how is indigenousness produced and maintained?” or “What is our relationship to natural space?” or “What are the parts or types of occupation?” might be more fruitful. Still, I recognize that the simplicity of the questions may produce a broader interdisciplinary space by avoiding academic jargon, like the kind I am using right now. Some people doing political organizing might stop listening after the word Deleuze, because they feel that the jargon is not relevant to their everyday work.

Which leads to my main critique. A large part of why I came to Artivistic was because I thought that No One Is Illegal (NOII) Montreal was going be a large part of the three day Imaginary Border Academy, and I wanted to work with local organizers, bridge our common struggles, discuss differences and share stories. Unfortunately, NOII formally pulled out of the conference at the last minute. They felt that they were not included enough in the planning process. I know that negotiating the demands of social movements and “the art world” is difficult. Still, I feel that the organizers of Artivistic needed to make it more of a priority to respond to the concerns of NOII and work more closely with them so that they would be involved, especially after advertising a three day workshop that included NOII. For a conference on art/activism with hopes of participants engaging in local action, I feel like it is critical to engage the local activist community to help provide context, direction and ongoing commitment instead of weekend actions. Also, the critique NOII gave of being included late in the process is a common mistake that political organizers make again and again, trying to be inclusive after the fact, inviting people into a project already well formed gives them less say over the form as well as less ownership of the process.

The first day of Artivistic was obviously missing NOII. As one of the presenters in the Imaginary Border Academy workshop who was also invited in at the last minute, it was clear to me that NOII would’ve provided a local context and direction that wasn’t present otherwise. In addition, throughout the first day there were a number of presentations by indigenous people, starting with morning circle and a beautiful drum and song ritual. What I feel was potentially problematic was that this ritual had no context or discussion before or after. Did the decision to not discuss the ritual presented lessen or worsen the possibility of tokenization? I’m not sure. Then later, for the nightly round table, two indigenous presenters presented on the topic of “What is Indigenous?”, Kary-Ann Deer a poet and artist and Kevin Lee Burton, a Cree filmmaker. They were followed by Schleuser.net, who presented their concerns with the language of territory, nationalism and blood based identity, concerns arising out of their history and context in Germany.

imaginary border academy installation

I think that if members of NOII had been present, this would’ve been a much better dialog. There was some dialog about privilege, white supremacy and racism, but it did not go very far. I think that an organization like NOII, based on solidarity, would have added a much needed knowledge to this discussion. As it was, I think that a lot of the comments and dialog were overly academic and that the presenters might have felt like they were being reframed, marginalized and talked over. Private Pipi raised this concern about the dialog, but most people insisted that the dialog was fine and didn’t want to engage in discussion about how to improve the dialog itself. As I understand, one of the indigenous presenters said at a later event that people think about things too much and need to learn to listen and feel with their hearts.

Day 2 began with a project that does just that. “In the fall we plant bulbs” is a beautiful, contagious piece by Montreal based artist Gina Badger. I see the piece as a call for a more intimate relationship with the city, created through a collaborative urban gardening tactic. Gina refers to this as “dirt-under-the-fingernails intimacy”, and distributed in her presentation small packets with garlic cloves and instructions for planting them in “a place that is dear to you”. She presented a short video of her doing so in a field in Montreal, which included the poem, also in the packet, which begins “the city spun around to kiss me on the forehead and said I with my infinite folds am inside you.” The video is intended to share a mood, it is an invitation to share “a desire to care for something”. She says the piece is about care and time and mutual creation. She envisions a map of garlic shoots throughout the world marking loved spaces.

The second day of the Imaginary Border Academy continued the discussion and analysis of borders, with all the participants sharing some of their thoughts about borders by posting sheets of paper on a wall and discussing them. This was followed by us splitting into 3 groups to write a “Border Manifesto”, which is still in progress at http://borderacademy.org. Some of the initial work is already interesting, being anti-manifesto, rhizomatic and challenging borders of monogamy, marriage, gender, language and ideology, as well as national borders.

At lunch I participated in Christopher Lee Kennedy & Caroline Woolard’s workshop, A Message from Below. The group walked through the city, giving away and planting small planters with dirt and seeds, wrapped in paper. While I was there, the interaction with city residents was hard to get started, which also illustrated the need for more collaboration with local activists and organizers. There is a potentially problematic situation that arises from traveling artists and activists trying to intervene in a city they don’t have much knowledge of. For example, the simple knowledge that local residents have that the neighborhood near the conference venue is largely composed of Hassidic Jewish people seemed to be not taken into account by Lee and Caroline, who were trying to interact with people on the second floor of their apartments and give them a gift, while the residents did not want to have their privacy intruded on.

The night panel included a lot of interesting work, including irational.org’s Food for Free, mapping out edible plants in the city of Bristol, and Susan Coolen’s Astral Projections, presenting photos of constructed alien embryos and sperm to challenge conceptions of natural based on assumptions of locality vs. “out there”. Peter Cusack’s Sounds from Dangerous Places dealt with people living near the Chernobyl exclusion zone who used to live inside it and led to a fruitful discussion of the naturalness of catastrophe. Again I was a bit frustrated that there was not enough time to deal with the question guiding the panel, “What is Natural Space”, but after three days of travel and walking through the cold wind, I was too tired to contribute much myself.

dinner with foraged food from the area picture above by Nicole Fournier

Day 3 began slowly after the previous night’s performances, dance and dj sets and general partying at the Société des arts Technologiques [SAT]. We, The Boredom Patrol, presented our workshop, “Shhhhh, Infiltrating Public Space <3 A Rebel Clowning Teaser”, in response to the question of the day “What is (there) to Occupy”? I enjoyed the workshop tremendously and as always, learned so much from the participants. Right after the first exercise, a brilliant comment was made about appropriation and reinterpretation of movement, and how this can be a generative process. Again later when practicing group movement, one participant referred to the group one is working with as a prosthesis, which puts collective art practice in a different light.

One hugely fortuitous event, was the fact General Confusion, one of the first members of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army in the UK, the original clown army gaggle, was at Artivistic! I think it is not just coincidence, but is largely due to the Artivistic organizers selecting a terrific group of presenters, one of the great strengths of the event. Working directly with people who have dedicated so much time and thought to creative resistance was the best part of Artivistic. I made connections with people that I plan to build on long into the future.

Again, I did not attend all the panels and workshops. Yet, there was so much amazing work being shown and done that I wish I could have seen more. Hilary Ramsden, from the UK, for example, was also working on a project of shifting one’s relationship with the city and intervening in the normal operation of public space with her piece “A walk around the block”. I did not have the time and energy to see much of it, but it was another piece I wanted to learn more about.

Ok, this review is getting long and you and I may be running out of energy. The same thing seemed to happen at the closing panel. The acoustics of the venue were not very good, which continually frustrated me because bad acoustics and no mic privileges people with loud voices, mostly men. Still, the closing panel nicely filled the desire I had for more discussion of community organizing with presentations by Aaron Lakoff of Solidarity Across Borders about local direct action campaigns against the precarity created by borders and poverty, by Squatfest about their culture jamming to shift ideas of property through squatting like their unReal Estate project, by Collectif au travail/at work.

Having worked on a video about Occupied Social Centers, Okupa!, and having a great deal of interest in the creation of autonomous spaces and networks, I found all the discussion about squatting really interesting. The presentation by Judith Cayer of Montreal from the Centre social Autogéré de Pointe-St-Charles presented a lot of the inspiring work that they are doing in Montreal, working directly with the community of Pointe-St-Charles to provide services like a free health clinic. At the end of the panel, people generally faded away after a juicy discussion of Precarity following the presentation by Roberta Buiani & Alessandra Renzi of Toronto and their projects Fuze and http://precarityto.wordpress.com .

One thing that I feel was missing from the conference is sex. There is a rich milieu of queer and transgender art/activist practice going on, and it was almost totally absent. There was some discussion of gender in the Imaginary Border Academy and in our Rebel Clowning Workshop, but at least one workshop dealing with sex and gender activism seems reasonable.

When describing her piece, Gina Badger said “it is about messiness and not being afraid to dig holes or make scars in this effort to develop a loving relationship with the space we inhabit.” To me, this underlies a lot of the most powerful aspects of Artvistic and the interplay of art and activism: the fertile messiness of interdisciplinary practice and cross-cultural dialog, the commitment to create change that arises out of love for people and places and the courage to make those changes a reality, given that we may make mistakes and get dirty along the way, while ultimately working from and towards love.

See my photos from Artivistic and around montreal at flickr