Discovering what effects and affects we are capable of

An original text by Gemma Medina, coordinator of the association Arte Útil, curator and educator.

Imagine an art project that is also a rainwater recycling system or a living research process to protect the wetland ecosystems of the Paraguay-Paraná Rivers. Your first reaction will probably be to think: But is this art? 

Now imagine artistic practices that abandon the traditional idea of art as an object and that go beyond the conventional boundaries of artistic language. What happens when art subverts its autonomy and supposed neutrality to engage with the everyday? What would happen if artistic practices abandoned the utopian sphere that has been attributed to them? What would happen if artistic creation and methodologies left the studio, the gallery and the museum to deal with contemporary problems, operating from different spheres, combining knowledge and learning, immersed in collaborative processes, in real situations and contexts? 

Perhaps then your question would no longer be if this “is art” but rather, how much art is in this project? How can we approach these artistic processes that immerse themselves in the everyday - in the world in which we live - to raise questions about how we live and how we would like to live, recovering our capacity as political beings to imagine and act in a possible society beyond the structures set by the neoliberal system? And above all, why is it important to share these practices? 

When art overflows into other fields, coming into contact with other contexts - political, economic and social - artistic thought and the creative act expand through collaborative processes and dialogue. With this, a whole series of learning and horizontal pedagogies of exchange and questioning unfold, blurring the conventional concept of art and allowing us to unlearn the imposed models and implement other ways of doing. This is to activate other possibilities, opening the way to a critical approach that not only questions the very idea of art, but also confronts the structures that govern society as a whole. In other words, it gives way to other ways of seeing the world and other ways of thinking about art, which thus recovers its transgressive and reflexive potential, converted into a tool capable of bringing about social transformation.

«When art overflows into other fields, coming into contact with other contexts - political, economic and social - artistic thought and the creative act expand through collaborative processes and dialogue. With this, a whole series of learning and horizontal pedagogies of exchange and questioning unfold, blurring the conventional concept of art and allowing us to unlearn the imposed models and implement other ways of doing things».»

However, despite the fact that this type of practice has been present throughout history and has gained special importance in the 20th century, even achieving recognition and visibility from some museum institutions during the last decade, they are still perceived as non-legitimate spaces. By their very nature, far removed from the production of objects, because they do not ascribe to the nineteenth-century discourse and are hardly framed within the neoliberal structure, they are still relegated and unknown to the vast majority. 

Perhaps the difficulty is precisely to accept the need to change the paradigm that defines contemporary art. This question demands a revision of the History of Art in order to open up avenues for multiple narratives. But also to develop a pedagogical work around these practices. Because in order to share and expand these reflexive processes, inside and outside the cultural sphere, we can't refer to conventional models. It is not a question of seeking unifying and normative answers, but of leaving space for the formulation of new questions. 

This requires a joint commitment. On the one hand, to reclaim their space for visibility and resources within the art institution without trying to turn them into exhibition objects, respecting the character of these projects. And on the other hand, to bring these practices to audiences not specialised in art, beyond the walls of the museum, reaching out to neighbourhoods, civic associations, hospitals, the communities that inhabit the wetlands, wherever they can be useful.

«Perhaps the difficulty is precisely to accept the need to change the paradigm that defines contemporary art. This question calls for a revision of the History of Art in order to open the way to multiple narratives. But also to develop a pedagogical work around these practices».»

As well as Concomitentes, There are several projects and platforms that, in addition to supporting and making these practices visible, are developing an important pedagogical work. I would like to mention three very different examples: Primal with its SHARE programme, Rio-Lab House and the Arte Útil Association, of which I am a member. All three share the desire to expand artistic thought to other spheres, to bring the questioning potential of art to the street and to activate other ways of doing things from the local, regional and international levels. 

At Primal They affirm that «the main driving force behind creative activities is to build relationships, dialogue and share learning through experience and reflection”. This transdisciplinary agent, located in Iztacalco (Mexico City), was founded in 2006 by Paola Sánchez, Héctor Juárez and Oscar Juárez, and has become a catalyst for common encounters, action and reflection to promote knowledge, dissemination and conservation of the city's natural and cultural legacies. To this end, since 2012 they have been developing a cultural programme called SHAREThe project is a platform-studio that hosts and gives space to different projects-nodes that connect nature, art, the city environment, the community, languages, food and culture. 

The study of Primal provides SHARE of an infrastructure with several areas for rainwater harvesting, solar energy harvesting, agriculture, a botanical garden, a humanised archive and a digital vault. This equipment is generally associated with other disciplines but in SHARE is used for the management of new forms of knowledge through a space for artistic residencies, audiovisual cycles and food performance. The latter refers to a vegetable garden for the community that provides weekly breakfasts open to the neighbourhood as a platform for practical learning about cultural heritage, the origin, transformation and consumption of food, and as an open laboratory for artistic research (“Food is free”); a transdisciplinary library, made up of books, specimens and seeds («Fermento»); and an adaptable rainwater treatment system that supplies the community with drinking water by means of an aesthetic device made by reusing glass containers and that poses a dialogue on water as a resource in the face of the growing difficulty of access to drinking water in different contexts of Mexico City (called “754 mm”). The projects by Primal and the artists in residence, with their respective learning, are shared in the studio and in the city through artistic interventions in the urban space.

For its part, Rio-Lab House is located in Punta Lara (province of Buenos Aires, Argentina), at the mouth of the estuary of the Río de la Plata. It is an independent organisation that brings socially committed practices closer to the different communities that inhabit this enormous river basin and connects aesthetics, environmental activism and community organisation. Through the transversal axes of art, environment, scientific knowledge, sensitive approach and local knowledge, Casa Rio activates collective learning processes. Defining itself as a bioregional articulation centre, it shares and develops joint actions with other organisations in the La Plata Basin in the face of the threat to these territories in the face of environmental and geopolitical conflicts affecting the area and the advance of extractive systems. 

The team of Rio-Lab House co-produces research that involves multidisciplinary teams with professionals from different fields, artists and inhabitants of the areas concerned, to share experiences and practices that generate capacities to promote the joint development of the areas in question. Furthermore, this allows experimenting with new ways of thinking about the territory and designing public policies in planning the use of coastal areas. Especially so that the existing ecosystems, uses, customs and wishes of the communities that inhabit them are considered and respected.

And they do so from the artistic research-action methodology, with exercises based on observation, dialogue, reflection and participatory research with which collaborative networks are articulated.. These exercises almost always begin with the questions: “Who designs the territories? Who do they design them for? This allows us to question our relationship with the space we inhabit and the role we play in its transformation. As a research centre, Casa Rio It also has a space for artistic residencies and an archive specialising in socially committed artistic practices. This documentary collection also offers access to the archive of the artistic-environmental organisation Plastic Wing (1991-2016), one of the pioneers of social practice in Latin America. Currently, Casa Rio develops two key initiatives: Territories of Collaboration, a transnational network for the preservation of wetlands in the Paraná Delta, which activates the methodology of artistic research to produce “living” reports with all kinds of contextual records that show the real situation of these threatened areas. For its part, Art on a bioregional scale proposes exhibitions to give visibility to these practices within the artistic field, linking environmental art projects in dialogue from different geographies, connecting the local and global issues that affect us.

«Useful art, as its name suggests, proposes art as a tool for social transformation, going beyond the field of representation to affect reality. The homonymous association is a para-institution made up of institutions and individuals who share the aim of promoting Arte Útil, social practice and the use of the archive, inside and outside the institutional sphere».»

Useful art, as its name suggests, proposes art as a tool for social transformation, going beyond the field of representation to affect reality. The homonymous association is a para-institution made up of institutions and individuals who share the aim of promoting Arte Útil, social practice and the use of the archive, inside and outside the institutional sphere. The heart of the project is the Arte Útil Archive, a nomadic device, an online and freely accessible tool, which continues to grow and evolve with the reception of new projects. It currently contains approximately 300 case studies, with concrete examples in which artist-initiators and user-communities have activated collective strategies to deal with local issues from the late 19th century to the present, implementing alternative options to the structures that govern society.

The archive was initially compiled to be the cornerstone of the exhibition “The Museum of Arte Útil” in 2013 (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, PB) and as a tool that opens the way to a parallel art history, tracing the journey of these practices as an artistic movement through history. This was a continuation of the research that the artist Tania Bruguera had been developing for a decade on the concept of Arte Útil.

This research was articulated collectively through a continuous process of debate and questioning between the artist, several museums, a team of researchers of which I was a member, a “committee of experts” (artists, curators and theorists linked to these practices from different continents) and an international call for projects. We started from the joint desire to question the role of art and art institutions in the 21st century, to reflect on the condition of the author and the spectator, as well as to create a space for analysis to demonstrate the capacity of art to affect and transform the reality that surrounds us.

After the exhibition, it was clear that the archive had to leave the museum to unfold its potential for use, to open up and expand these questions to other voices, to be activated in other forums to bring these practices and their inspirational capacity to non-formal spaces where they could also serve as a tool for artistic, social and political action. With each activation of the archive, a network of communities and users has been articulated through the platform of the Asociación de Arte Útil. It is an archive and research that remains alive through the interactions generated, both by its members and by independent collectives that appropriate the archive. In my case, the project Broadcasting the Archive (2015-2018) of which I was co-curator together with Alessandra Saviotti, allowed us to share and emancipate the use of this repository of artistic strategies, inside and outside the cultural sphere, in different places in Europe and North America, generating a pedagogical methodology that applies the idea of useful art through activities, urban tours, workshops and educational modules based on the use of the archive. In a process of collaboration and dialogue with artists, museums and local collectives, we connect some of the most pressing issues of each place with the strategies that the Arte Útil has implemented. We listened to the voice of community initiatives, invited the initiating artists of the archive's case studies to join those conversations, and visited locally active organisations linked to the issues in question. However, the subsequent continuity of those exchanges depended on the commitment of the organisations and individuals involved, underlining, in many cases, the lack of resources and institutional support. But just as useful art expands autonomously, so does its inspirational potential.

Examples such as the Arte Útil Offices (self-managed spaces that range from museums to community venues), the Useful Art School (an educational and artistic project that appropriates the museum's gallery), and some direct infiltrations in the academic sphere, through workshops, seminars and different collaborations with university programmes like the International Master Artist-Educator (iMAE) of ArtEZ (Arnhem) or the Uses of Art Lab at John Moore University (Liverpool), are just some of the lines of use that have been developed for the moment both by the association and autonomously. The archive has served as a catalyst for debate, a repository of strategies, an educational and research resource, as well as an object for questioning, both for art institutions and for independent organisations, collectives and individuals from the most diverse fields. In a text called “Elements for a cartography of the group”, Peter Pál Pelbart reflected on Deleuze's and Guatari's theories, stating: We are, then, a degree of potency, defined by our power to affect and be affected. But we never know in advance what our potency is, what affects we are capable of. It is always an experimental question.

As these three examples show, socially committed artistic practices become a time and space of crossing, of contact, of learning, of interaction between different people and subjectivities, generating effects and affections that activate that necessary “degree of power” that defines us. After a period in which we have learned to keep our distance, it is important to remember what we can do if we meet again. Because in the day to day, we forget that we are political beings with the capacity to choose and transform our ways of life, and that art can be a transversal tool to facilitate this process.

To download the article in PDF click here here.

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References:

Tania Bruguera, Introduction to useful art, April 2011

Stephen Wright: Towards a lexicon of Usership, Van Abbemuseum 2013

www.arte-util.org, To find out more about the archive and the Arte Útil Association

The Museum of Arte Útil, on the exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum

useful art archive: Nouveaux Commanditaires

Broadcasting the archive, On this page, all the activities and interactions of the project are listed. 

Casa Rio Lab: https://www.casariolab.art/  and also https://territorios.casariolab.art/

Primal: https://primal.mx y https://local.mx/ciudad-de-mexico/arquitectura/primal-studio/ 

SALT's Arte Útil Office: https://www.arte-util.org/studies/office-of-useful-art-at-salt-galata/