Directing Energy as a visual and arts based researcher

How can a non-artist direct energy to directly address the social conditions in our society? Matta-Clark provides an arts based social ethnography perspective that can be transformative to artist and non-artist in our society. His reading was intriguing. I had never head of his work until this week’s readings. I gathered that he was influential in dealing directly with social conditions such as: lack of access to affordable housing, nutritional inequalities among marginalized groups through the arts and visual social projects with intention to transform and take ownership of the public spaces as artists and non-artists.

His framework reminds me of the Community Health Course that I took in 2010. We had to choose a social issue, survey the condition within the community, and come up with a solution to the problem. I chose school lunch as a social issue. Most public-school students that attend high schools are surrounded by  food deserts. The communities have local McDonald’s and bodega’s which are more attractive than the school lunch program.  Meeting with the students, I had several discussions on what ways we could improve the lunch selection so that more students can eat their school’s food. As an environmental health activist and educator, using video, pictures and drawings to evoke a better understanding of the issues that impact the decisions we make as members of our own community would have been more powerful than just the discussions.

As a non-artists this reading and the Pink article that quoted Dicks et al., work (2006:88) “photographs allow us to see modes that are visual: colour, shape, size, position and light”. Art  such as images, pictures and videos  could be use to spread awareness and direct energy towards solving some of the social issues and broaden the ideas and the types of solutions that can transform our society and inner cities.