As I discussed in class last week, I’m giving myself the next few weeks to open endedly explore different images that speak to the theme of roots and connection across space, place, time and loss. This week, I returned to the artist collective, Dignidad Rebalde, and went to look at some of their shows. Dignidad Rebalde is an artists’ collective out of California that specifically dedicates itself to making movement art. One example of how they brought visibility to gentrification in the mission is this amazing street sign post here:
More towards the themes I am exploring, I found they had done a show called “Future Ancestors: A Ceremony of Memory.” You can see the full show here.
Made by artists of color for their community, the show really sparked my interest because it centers it’s inquiry around connection to past and future generations based on reclaiming knowledge of indigenous peoples. I thought of our readings for last week in that the audience is a participant in the piece and the way that they become part of the show is that they are asked to dream. I thought of bell hooks’ quote “From what political perspective do we dream, look, create and take action?” I found these artists to be engaging with this question of connection to ancestors and future generations which gives rise to dreaming, perspective and action. Some examples of how they engaged their community out of their own self inquiry are below:
Hi Amanda:
Thanks for that very rich posting. You again talk about the “lines,” which I think of the lines of vulnerability and possibility. It is very visual to me and I can imagine a visual-performance piece where viewer-participants are challenged to cross a line, maybe after indicating (visually as well) what is being separated by that line. We could maybe a do a rehearsal of this idea in class one day.
We know that lines, borders, frontiers aren’t fixed in stone but are imaginary and that what resides on either side of it flow together unpredictably, mediated by contingent events. I think the relationship between crossing the line and healing that you suggest is very powerful, especially when the responsibility to a future is evoked.
The historian William Sewell, Jr. talks has a concept that he calls “path dependency.” Everything that happens is dependent on the path that already exists even when that path has been hidden or seemingly dormant for generations (this is an adaptation of Marx’s idea that nothing can emerge from “thin air” but is always built upon something that already exists). But the way continuations of that path emerge is not predictable or pre-determined. What is important in this context, and that you refer to you in your own way and what the website you provide a link to expresses, is that we are – each of us – making history at every moment and that history both merges and co-exists with what has already happened and with what will and is happening. As Freire writes, we mark the situation and the situation marks us. This is what we’d call a dialectical relationship.
The images you included in your post are probably most important for the participatory nature of the project and the value given to the voices of the people. Visually it seemed that the images were very text-based with the literal meaning of the words themselves being given more value than the imagery. This is an observation, not a criticism, and yet it is worth considering how you want text and image to play with each other. In contrast, in the first image with the sign about evictions (which we might think of as forced local migration), the imagery – by mimicking the form and color scheme (red print on white background) of the official parking sign has a strong subversive quality to it. The unsuspecting reader-viewer is forced to read the sign (to make sure it is not a legal demand on her) and then figure out what is going on.
Thanks, Gene. These are useful insights. I like this idea of participation around a line. It made me think about when I posted the question “what if there were no good and no bad, just experience?” Does or how does the decisions we must make about when and how to cross the line call into question the contradiction of the two sides themselves? (brings dialectics to mind as your mentioned) What is revealed, what is seeable from these different vantage points?
Amanda, it’s kind of amazing how the act of imagining discussed in this week’s articles presents itself in different forms. Yet, it is similar in both articles because imagining is an act of subversion. Your theme of roots and connection across space, place, time and loss will also be an act of subversion because it will ask for an awareness that will be brought by the imagination of the artist (you) and the audience. It will ask for them to see themselves differently from the “colonizing gaze.”
Yes it makes me think of the words of one of the artists in this piece. In our imaginative gaze we see ourselves differently and that means we can see our parents, grandparents and communities in a deeper way. It’s interesting how the way we see ourselves and the way we see our families are connected.