The massive deployment on the global art market of “participatory”, “community” or “relational” practices since the early 90’s functions to reinforce poverty, oppression and inequality as problems of specific communities, and not of capitalism, while suppressing the implication of artist and audience in the structures that produce and maintain uneven power relations. The crisis, for me, is provoked by the ways in which both aesthetic pleasure and the philantrophic mobilization of art often function to “manage” the threat of systemic critique.
Mariame’s post (linked here) on anti-blackness prompted some further reflection on militarization and also on merit-based immigration, extending the question of who and what is rendered invisible. One of the key questions mentioned in her post had to do how anti-blackness operates to frame the relationship between race and migration. Mariame received many comments on the facebook note,… Read more »
How can we make sense of the ways in which structures of inequality are not natural or given, but instead are made, even while this making is hidden by both right-wing politics of criminalization as well as liberal notions of “diversity” ?… The myth of Chicago as a city of immigrants in a nation of immigrants glosses over the erasure of indigenous presence – while celebrating a false notion of undifferentiated arriving
Displaced, made to appear always out of place, the migrant is assigned by the law of the market to secure housing in all its forms. The cost-effective solution to worker mobility is captive workers, flexibly tethered, whose location can be re-tuned tactically to market advantage. Can we build a border abolition movement, one that seeks to abolish not simply the border but citizenship itself—with its corresponding displaced, tethered and exploited populations?
interview with Nicholas de Genova. “What is finally at stake, I think, is for us to more radically question the whole politics of citizenship itself. Rather than imagine that the migrant struggle is a “new civil rights movement,” as many were quick to assert, we might begin to appreciate anew what people of color have always known in the US—that citizenship is no guarantee of anything. We need to relinquish those liberal illusions in favor of a more profound reckoning with the fact that we are all denizens.”
As a political project, as a space-making process let’s say, the domestic has something to do with the production of social distance, so that “work” and “home” can appear as spatially and temporally separate; so that production and reproduction, domestic work and market work, and so on… can be understood as external to each other in space and time.
… intervention has at times also complicated notions of visibility, in the sense that it has tended toward disrupting the processes by which things become normalized or “hidden in plain sight”. And it has often been accompanied by much experimentation with, and debate around, what we could call an ethics of conflict – an attempt to explore ways of practicing social conflict that are an alternative to violence and annihilation.
Essays from the Compass Collaborators and their extended networks of colleagues and conspirators. This is a collection of stories about learning where we are by inhabiting, traversing, and exchanging narratives in the expansive region that some people call the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor. Edited by Rozalinda Borcila, Bonnie Fortune and Sarah Ross