In our first group meeting I bring two things, first think in Minami Sanriku as former fishing village and the fish as an important character for the town in terms of what it represent, and potential to use that particular character “The Fish” in a fictional or real way in order to develop a project around him.
The other contribution was a collection of updated information from a local website of Minami Sanriku, in order to have more idea of what is the real scenario in the town at the moment, in the website they show different social activities like temporary flea markets, several music performances, children activities, and a fictional opening of the fishing session. This information was important to realize self-develop of communal activities. In the website they announced that all the residents were already relocated into temporary villas. Lilly mentioned later that the community starts to be fragmented and to have internal problems between the members of the community.
During our group conversation all the member’s contributions and ideas start to get connected, the form of fictional narratives, Fairytales, or storytelling, as a tool start shaping the project, and after the intervention of Jacky we decide to address an specific community, the children of Minami Sanriku. We start thinking to go totally in a different direction of a memorial to overcome the trauma, or an artistic representation of how to be recover from the traumatic experience; Instead of that we when towards the simple idea of playing with children to develop community, using a game, play and laugh as a tool to our project and gift. A game kit for the children of Minami Sanriku, to develop new playful and imaginative stories.
I really enjoy the text Realising Voices, reclaiming Power, The personal and collective potential of voice, as an example of a collective medium that include the experience of the personal and collective body through sound and voices as a powerful tools of exchange. After reading the text immediately came to my mind an experience a had in 2005 with an art piece or collaborative performance Murphy Canyon Choir in a military-housing complex in San Diego, when the Canadian artist Althea Thauberger work with eight military spouse to compose and perform a choral event.
“Her project Murphy Canyon Choir(2005) is especially revealing in this respect. Commissioned by in Site, a binational network that features works set in the region of San Diego and Tijuana, its impoverished, cross-border counterpart, Thauberger proposed to collaborate with families from San Diego’s huge military community. Her proposal initially met with, she says, an “ambivalent reaction”: inSite didn’t know how to position the project ideologically. In her statement, Thauberger writes that Murphy Canyon is the largest military-housing complex in the world, but the city’s military population “remains quite invisible…especially to the educated and affluent.”
“Over a period of five months, Thauberger and a local choir director and choral composer worked with eight military spouses to compose an original repertoire of songs they then performed in a school auditorium in Murphy Canyon. While the work was in production, many of the women, all of whom were in their 20s, confided in Thauberger about the difficulty of being left to raise children alone while their husbands were deployed overseas, often to an uncertain fate. In spite of this, the women authored songs that were sentimental and patriotic. Titles such as Wife of a Hero, Waiting and The Story of Love give some indication of the group’s collective view of their circumstances, as well as their ideas about how their feelings should be properly expressed. When an art audience from central San Diego was bused in for the performance, two largely ideologically opposed worlds were brought together, creating a dynamic, emotionally charged situation. The idea that artworks can push boundaries is a commonplace— if not a cliché—of the business, but Thauberger breached tangible divisions by insisting on re-examining assumptions about which communities are worthy of the art world’s attention. As a result, the project helped to expand the two communities’ awareness of each other.”
“…Thauberger has said that she sees her work as creating “a situation of witness.” It is a curious hope to have for art that implicates the viewer morally in terms of a responsibility for what one is looking at. This is true even as Thauberger’s chosen mode of working, community collaboration, is on the leading edge of contemporary art practice. This trend’s best-known exponents are the British artists Phil Collins, Jeremy Deller and Gillian Wearing and the Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez, although their respective practices are all quite different from one another.”
“…To dismiss her work on these terms, however, is to perpetuate the idea that when it comes to self-representation, distinctions between professional and amateur—and indeed between high and low art—should be maintained. But look beyond the surface of these works and the narratives informing the popular imagination become apparent. These include not only aspirations to stardom, but also assumptions about which occasions permit the expression of true emotion, and what kind of sentiments are appropriate, expected even, at those times. Viewers of Thauberger’s works who balk at the stereotypical content of their performances expose another set of stereotypes: the expectation that performers should conform to mass media–fostered norms of what singers should look and sound like. In this way, critics of Thauberger’s work reveal themselves to be, like the girls in Songstress, utterly conventional in their desires.”
El Puente_lab is a production platform for art and culture. Their objectives are “develop cultural projects on a local level, building bridges of communication with artists and experts through a strategy of international cooperation.
The projects developed by el puente_lab meet the specific needs of the social context where they are carried out, using artistic creativity as a tool of activation of cultural projects that initiate, facilitate and/or accompany processes of education, communication and urban and social transformation.”
Through and art exhibition in Tijuana in 2008 Named Proyecto cívico /Civic Project, I get in intrigued by a concept “State of Exception” from the Italian political Philosopher Giorgio Agamben. I think in the context of this class when we are trying to define and expand the definition of conflict, crisis and emergency the concept of State of Exception also designated state of emergency can play an important role in expanding the definition.
State of Exception (2005)
“In this book, Agamben traces the concept of ‘state of exception‘ (Ausnahmezustand) used by Carl Schmitt to Roman justitium and auctoritas. This leads him to a response to Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty as the power to proclaim state emergency.
Giorgio Agamben’s text State of Exception investigates the increase of power structures governments employ in supposed times of crisis. Within these times of crisis, Agamben refers to increased extension of power as states of exception, where questions of citizenship and individual rights can be diminished, superseded and rejected in the process of claiming this extension of power by a government. Agamben explores the effect of the state of exception on the individual by looking at the ideas of biosand zoe.
The state of exception invests one person or government with the power and voice of authority over others extended well beyond where the law has existed in the past. “In every case, the state of exception marks a threshold at which logic and praxis blur with each other and a pure violence without logos claims to realize an enunciation without any real reference” (Agamben, pg 40). Agamben refers a continued state of exception to the Nazi state of Germany under Hitler’s rule. “The entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system” (Agamben, pg 2).
The political power over others acquired through the state of exception, places one government – or one form or branch of government – as all powerful, operating outside of the laws. During such times of extension of power, certain forms of knowledge shall be privileged and accepted as true and certain voices shall be heard as valued, while of course, many others are not. This oppressive
distinction holds great importance in relation to the production of knowledge. The process of both acquiring knowledge, and suppressing certain knowledge, is a violent act within a time of crisis.
Agamben’s State of Exception investigates how the suspension of laws within a state of emergency or crisis can become a prolonged state of being. More specifically, Agamben addresses how this prolonged state of exception operates to deprive individuals of their citizenship. When speaking about the military order issued by President George W. Bush on 13 November 2001, Agamben writes, “What is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally
unnamable and unclassifiable being. Not only do the Taliban captured in Afghanistan not enjoy the status of POW’s as defined by the Geneva Convention, they do not even have the status of people charged with a crime according to American laws” (Agamben, pg 3). Many of the individuals captured in Afghanistan were taken to be held at Guantánamo Bay without trial. These individuals were termed as “enemy combatants.” Until 7 July 2006, these individuals had been treated outside of the Geneva Conventions by the United
States administration.
“The exhibition Proyecto Cívico/Civic Project investigates civic responsibility and citizenship under political and social conditions defined by legal and illegal vacuums and exceptions to the rule of law…”
Nationally in Mexico and in Tijuana—the city in which this exhibition takes place and upon which it reflects—the public agenda is dominated by heated debate on the possibility of substantive constitutional changes during a time of exceptional criminality; a public security crisis so extensive that it touches every region in Mexico, every class, gender, and age group, making us question what part each of us plays in a ociety so bent on self-cannibalization.
I saw this video maybe a year ago, is a video/investigation produced by Bernardo Roca Rey and Hernando de Soto, Research Director Ana Lucía Camaiora, A Becket Films LLC and Institute for Liberty and Democracy Production.
The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto focused during his carrier in developing economic strategies to empower the marginal people to benefit from their own land, in the cities like Lima he addressed the informal housing problems through legal property rights. In this video he explore and present similar approach but to the indigenous and tribal population of the Peruvian Amazon.
After reading a couple articles from the website of Tess Thakara, Survival International, an organization working for tribal peoples’ rights worldwide, and environmental issues. I was intrigued by an article about “uncontacted Indians From Peru”, as Peruvian I am aware of several cases of tribal’s population being threatened not only by oil and mining foreign companies but by their own Peruvian government interested in develop and exploiting their lands to export their natural resources at any cost.
After reading the article about “Uncontacted indians from Peru” I remembered a you tube video when the ex president of Peru Alan Garcia, who was a big suported of transnational companies in Peru, said about what he referred as ”the pantheistic absurd ideologies of the peruvian indian and tribal people,” obviously because he was only interested in exploiting the business potentialof the land even if it has religious, environmental or social impact for the people and their villages that originally and historically have settle in this lands for centuries.
Below I try to translate the embarrassing interview, to understand what the ex-president said and realize that first of all the governments of our countries need to have more respect for the ancient culture even though their land are rich in natural resources.
Translation of the interview:
First of all defeat the pantheistic absurd ideologies than believe that walls are gods, the air is god, returning to their primitive religious form, when they say “don’t touch this mountain because is an “APU”* and is full of the millennial soul…and I don’t know what!? Well if we arrive to that, let’s don’t do anything, no mining, don’t touch this fishes because they are god’s creatures, and are the expression of the god Poseidon. We return to this primitive “animism.” I think we need more education, but this is a long process.
The population from the villages said don’t touch this zone because is a sanctuary and I ask myself, sanctuary of what? If it is an environmental sanctuary very well!, but if it is a sanctuary because they contain the soul of the ancestors, hey! the soul of the ancestors are in paradise not here, and left the people who are alive to consume and use those resources, and create work with new investments in these mountains [making the allusion to accept the mining development in this ancestors areas].
For the international community it is more clear that the threats against Indian and tribal lands need to be taken seriuslly, but for the nationals it seams like this is not clear enough, first of all because every decision is taken from the center, the capital Lima, without any real knowledge of every local situation, and the other problem is that this tribal land does not have ” legal property rights” of their own lands, sometimes because they live as nomads or because their understanding of the land ownership is not individual based but community based.
Apus,
Peru is characterised by the great Andes mountains. In the Quechua language of
the Andes, “Apu” refers to the spirit of each mountain which is not unlike a
god. In every snow capped peak, to smaller hills, there is an Apu. Each Apu is
different, with individual characteristics and personalities. They have in
common that from them emerge the life giving waters of springs, lakes and
rivers, as well as the forests and creatures that dwell in them. Like gods, the
Apus possess the power of giving and taking life. Andean people look first to
their local Apus and then to Mother Earth when they are undertaking a pilgrimage
or enterprise.
