This course is for activists, artists, and thinkers who wish to better understand and participate in social change. We will focus on the prolific and exciting overlap between socially engaged art and cultural practices generated by recent social movements around the world. Rather than assess the political efficacy of activities like mourning, listening, organizing, dancing, or partying, the lectures examine such cultural activities next to, and within, contemporary art practice. Included in the course are guest presentations by key artists, activists, and scholars, like: Rebecca Gomperts, Chido Govera, Gulf Labor, Hans Haacke, Sharon Hayes, Jolene Rickard, Gregory Sholette, Joshua Wong, and many more. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch and co-taught by Creative Time artistic director, Nato Thompson, the course challenges learners to treat the MOOC itself as a social and artistic form. This happens mostly through the practical components, local project productions, global exchanges, and critical feedback. While no prior art making or activist experience is required, projects also offer challenging options for advanced learners. For other course offerings or language versions in this series, just search 'ART of the MOOC' inside the Coursera course catalogue.
Regina José Galindo
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From the course by Duke University
ART of the MOOC: Activism and Social Movements
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From the lesson
Embodied Knowledges - Lectures, Guest Presentations, and Quiz
This lesson will use the notion of ‘embodied knowledges’ to link activism and socially engaged art to performance art, gesture, and ‘writing without words.’ Recognizing that knowledge is inseparable from one’s lived, physical, and social experience, ‘embodied knowledges” challenge the Western paradigms that separate information from matter, reason from affect, mind from the body, the worker from her labor, the individual from the collective. This lesson’s practical components will ask students to actively think ‘from’ their particular site of enunciation and ‘through’ their particular embodied knowledge.
Guest presenters: Mujeres Creando, Regina José Galindo, Mariam Ghani, Sharon Hayes, Chemi Rosado-Seijo
Meet the Instructors
Nato ThompsonChief Curator
Creative Time
Pedro LaschVisual Artist and Associate Research Professor
Duke Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Regina, than you very much for been here with us.
Let's start the conversation.
For a long time, your work has dealt with this relationship between word,
body and society.
It is very interesting to notice an inversion in your work.
You have said that when you write as a poet it is a very personal work, whereas
when you use your body it is something political, social external, public.
It is something political, social, external, public.
Most people expiereince such a relationship inversely, language is
something public, very open, apparently, and the body is something very private.
Can you talk a little bit about this reversal present in your poetry and
visual art?
>> Well, for me the word is basically what gives form to all my ideas.
What gives form to all my ideas.
I come from the field of poetry, I am a poet, and
I believe basically that poetry is the moving force behind all my work.
Poetry is always present and when I define a visual work,
I do research and I get to the idea.
When it comes to making it concrete, instead of crafting sketches or
drawing something,
since I haven't got such talent, what I do is to write storylines all the time.
Then what I do is to give form to these images by creating new images with words.
First, I jot them down on a piece of paper.
The work as a poet has been of great
service to me as I approach the kind of polished work that I do.
It is because of poetry that I have this obsession with cleanliness.
As a poet, you have the obligation of constantly cleaning and cleaning what
the text doesn't need to leave only the purity of what you want to say.
I use this discipline learned throught he
exercise of poetics in my visual artwork.
The first thing I did was to write.
I have texts with certain political inclination,
because I am a political being.
In poetry, I take all liberties with my own standpoint.
In the visual arts, on the other hand,
I never talk about a private story because it is not about me whatsoever.
It is through my body that I want to generate a visual experience all the time,
an experience able to encompass other people.
In my poetry it is exactly the opposite.
>> When you do a new work, for instance in Who Will Erase the Foot Steps?,
some of these works are intensely public,
totally open spaces that one often associates with power,
whereas other works happen in more private spaces.
However there is a public coming to see the event.
It could be in a gallery When you start a new work,
what leads you to define such pure and clean aesthetic?
Is it the context itself guiding the work, or is it political situation?
>> I work with the context, but the form of my work will always have
the characteristic, reflecting my obsession with cleanliness.
I suppose this is because I am as obsessed in my daily life,
the way I keep my house, my relationship and such.
But since I define my works depending on where I have to work,
it specifically has to do with the space.
For instance, half of my work is done in Guatemala, and I do it with my own means.
When I work in Guatemala, I generally use the public space.
When I work overseas, however, when I work with invitation,
I focus more on that other place.
I focus more on that other place.
What interests me is to find a niche, a bridge about which I can talk.
When I started my work during the first few years,
I travelled around the world to talk about issues in Guatemala.
When I travelled to Italy to be in the Venice Biennale,
I started to notice that I was no longer interested in the vision of the public
towards me as an "other." In the vision of the public towards me as an other.
I started noticing that when I talk about misery in Guatemala,
the others don't feel empathy, because they simply see it from a distance.
Well, those are the miseries happening in a third-world country, but
they don't have any kind of reflection nor feel any empathy.
And there was always this division, this vision from above, from power.
Then, there was this moment of my life, 2005, 2004, when I said stop!
If I am going to be constantly traveling what I have to do is different, and
besides, it was through these trips that I began to really open my mind,
and understand that my country is in trouble, full of miseries and filth.
But when traveling you realize that not only is my country full of conflicts,
but that conflicts are pervasive in the thid and first worlds.
Then, I was getting rid of the prejudices about what was happening in my country.
I started to conceive this stratgy that if I get invited to Chile,
I am going to try to find a point from where I can talk,
talking about something that I don't understand.
For instance, this last work, Desierto,
that I did in the Gabriela Mistral Gallery.
But I always find a niche, like a common point, because I don't like going to
places with this attitude of critique about a topic that I don't manage.
Instead, I am interested in demonstrating thorugh a visual experience that
both the problems over there and over here are similar, and
that there is always a connecting thread.
Like when, for instance, I did Looting, when I put the fillings inside my mouth.
I did this process during one year, and when I traveled to Germany, the dentist
removed all these gold fillings from my mouth in front of the public.
I used this image, which I knew was easily recognized by them,
because it is the image of the Germans extracting the gold from the Jews.
But I am talking about a contemporary issue I am talking about the looting of my
land by these great powers and my mouth was the perfect metaphor for this.
Or when I go to Chile and I start doing my research.
In Guatemala we have all these environmental problems as well,
due to industries such as the African Palm, exported to Europe as fuel,
while causing incredible damage to the environment, to the ecosystem.
Then, I started working on these environmental themes.
Which are becoming of big interest to me, all this organic part,
I got to the point where I am interested in understanding how the lands were
divided during the war in Guatemala.
And how these lands were later used for hydro electric plans, mining districts,
or mono crops, and to understand that the same is happening in Chile.
We know that the United States intervened in Guatemala in 1954,
it replicated all these procedures in South America with Plan Condor.
And then to understand that all these conflicts started in the 50's and
60's in Guatemala.
Lands were grabbed, and indigenous people killed.
In Pinochet's government, the same happened in the 70s.
They take away lands from the Mapuches, and then oligarchic families grab them.
Many of these lands are later turned into monocultures of pine and eucalyptus.
When I do this piece in Chile, I completely transform the gallery into
a desert, which instead of being made out of sand is made our of sawdust.
I am making a timely critique of what is happening in Chile, because these
monocultures are going to generate a tremendous desertification in the country.
I am taking from our own experience because
our lands were also taken by force and turned into moncultures.
So I am interested in talking about my tragedy but
through an example that you will also understand.
>> A key person in the Guatemalan art scene but
also at a global level whose work is less known in certain contexts but
well known in others, is Anibal Lopez who unfortunately recently passed away.
Can you tell us about the way Anibal has influenced your work but also how he has
influenced this important community that has taken Guatemalan artwork elsewhere?
>> Well, Anibal is a link,
he was a very peculiar link because he does not belong to my generation.
He was 10 or 15 years older than me.
During the last years of the war, the group of arists that kept working had
changed, for instance, some of them did other kinds of work.
The Imaginaria group kept on working, the group that hosted Daniel Chauchel,
Luis Gonzalez Palma, Pabolo Sueici,
Anibal was the link between this generation and us.
But it was, at the same time, a total rupture, because Anibal's work
isn't only a violence, it is simply this venom, this critical precision,
and this formal way of developing things that was really peculiar.
He came to completely break with what the previous generations were doing,
where Moises Barrios was working.
Moises Barrios is a very contemporary artist.
When Anibal started working it was like an earthquake in the country, and
for me he was truly influential, especially because I have no formal
preparation I don't come from an art school.
When I met Anibal, it was a magical friendship.
>> We hope that the same happens to our students out there.
Many of them are not art students', but
if they can learn from your work and Anibal's.
>> It was Anibal who started passing me information,and not only information but
he also documented me since the first performance, and
his critique of the kind this is a piece of crap, accompanied me for years.
I think that it was what formed my character.
Look for Anibal because it is very interesting to get to know his work.
Anibal Lopez, and A153167 was the way he signed and was his ID number.
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