Collectively Annotated bibliography: On Artistic Practices in the Expanded Field of Public Art (original) (raw)

2020, Collectively Annotated bibliography: On Artistic Practices in the Expanded Field of Public Art

Abstract

Contribution to: Collectively Annotated bibliography: On Artistic Practices in the Expanded Field of Public Art (Visible Project; Public Art Agency Sweden, 2020) Available online at https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/annotated\_library/, https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/text/collectively-annotated-bibliography-on-artisticpractices- in-the-expanded-field-of-public-art/ Annotated review of 1. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019) 2. Katya Garcia-Anton, ed., Sovereign Words: Indigenous Art, Curation And Criticism (Oslo/Amsterdam: OCA/Valiz, 2018) 3. Ros Gray, Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968-1991 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2020) 4. Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018) 5. Jennifer Bajorek, Unfixed: Photography and the Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020) 6. Malcom Ferdinand, Une écologie décoloniale: Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen (Paris: Seuil, 2019) 7. La Colonie, ed., Colonial and Postcolonial Prostitution (Paris: La Découverte/La Colonie éditions, 2019) (English and French) 8. Åsa Sonjasdotter, Peace with the Earth: Tracing Agricultural Memory, Reconfiguring Practice (Berlin: Archive Books, 2020) 9. Sakiya: Art | Science | Agriculture, vol. 01 (Ramallah: Sakiya, 2019) 10. Industria, June 2020

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References (13)

  1. This is something that Ros Gray and I addressed through a postcolonial lens in our editorial introduction to 'The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions', special issue of Third Text, vol. 32, nos. 2-3 (2018), pp. 163-75.
  2. See Norman Ajari, La dignité ou la mort. Éthique et politique de la race (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2019), esp. 'Les deux sources de la pensée décoloniale', pp. 12-20. For an English-speaking summary of the decolonial movement in France and the attacks its proponents have faced, see Claire Gallien, 'A Decolonial Turn in the Humanities', Alif, vol. 40 (2020), pp. 28-58, at 44-48. Regarding the similarities and divergences between the 'postcolonial' and 'decolonial' in the academic sphere, see Gurminder K Bhambra, 'Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues', Postcolonial Studies, vol. 17, no. 2 (2014), pp. 115-21. appropriating the Colony: An interview with artist Kader Attia about La Colonie in Paris', Spike, 16 January 2017, https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/re-appropriating-colony. See also Françoise Vergès, 'La Colonie: un lieu pour penser et agir des politiques de réparation', grand théâtre magazine, n°2 -Les exotismes, 16 December 2019, https://issuu.com/geneveopera/docs/gtm\_numero-02.
  3. On the importance of La Colonie for the décolonial in France, see Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux's entry, 'Décolonial', in Anne Chemin, Marc-Olivier Bherer, Julia Pascual and Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux, '"Racisé", "racisme d'Etat", "décolonial", "privilege blanc": les mots neufs de l'antiracism', Le Monde, 26 June 2020, https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2020/06/26/racise-racisme-d-etat-decolonial-privilege-blanc-les-mots- neufs-de-l-antiracisme_6044230_3232.html?fbclid=IwAR3u_jSGlufeKrZ9ncd6lgnkR0HVl8q_xG- vAs67QbbIXb_v0TADFZUmpAk. With thanks to Olivier Marboeuf for sharing this article.
  4. See Harriet Swain, 'Payback time: academic's plan to launch Free Black University in UK', Guardian, 27 June 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/27/payback-time-academics-plan-to-launch-free- black-university-in-uk.
  5. A crowd-funding initative was launched to support La Colonie's re-opening. See https://www.e- flux.com/announcements/340938/support-la-colonie/.
  6. See Gallien, op cit.
  7. See 'New French PM says battle against "radical Islamism" a priority", Al Jazeera, 16 July 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/french-pm-battle-radical-islamism-priority- 200715203155476.html.
  8. For a critique of the 'decolonial fever' of the past few years, see Morgan Quaintance, 'Decolonising Decolonialism', Art Monthly 435 (April 2020) and Olivier Marboeuf, 'Decolonial Variations: A conversation between Olivier Marboeuf and Joachim Ben Yakoub', May 2019, available at https://oliviermarboeuf.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/variations\_decoloniales\_eng\_def.pdf. 30 The original Swedish was translated into English by Katarina Trodden. 31 Sonjasdotter was nominated by myself for a Visible Award in 2019. See https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/project/potatoes-perspective/.
  9. www.sakiya.org. Sakiya was nominated for a Visible Award in 2017 by curator Nat Muller. https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/project/sakiya-artscienceagricultrue-ramallah-palestine/.
  10. I had the luck of being a participant in and witness to two events organised by Sakiya: 'Under the Tree: Taxonomy, Empire and Reclaiming the Commons' at the Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah in 2016 and 'Re-Wilding Pedagogy: A symposium on Land, Knowledge and the Commons' at the Ein Qiniya site in 2019. 36 From: Silvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2019) Wright is a community gardener and beekeeper who has established community gardens for art institutions such as Tate and The Showroom in London, regularly leads greenspace walks in urban and woodland areas and is an advocate for access to culturally and socially diverse programmes for lower income participants. In her contribution, she invites the reader to leave their (confined) space and accompany her on her at-the-time-daily-rationed one-hour walk. 40 'Walking whilst being Blak Outside' explores the politics of access and social cleansing in the South London borough of Southwark, performing an urban archaeology that traces the memories of now-'regenerated' areas and their cultural and social heritage, the movements of migrant communities, the presences and absences of the area's non-human inhabitants, official and unofficial monuments, and the ghosts of ancestors and those sacrificed by the spell of 'Rule, Britannia!' or murdered by state-sanctioned racism. Where Ferdinand is faithful to specific Caribbean sites in order to scale up to the level of the globe and the practice of worldmaking, Wright's home-borough is a metonym for what is taking place across the UK and beyond.
  11. Wright's exercise is a poignant example of 'walking as method' or 'walking as pedagogy', both as a form of storytelling and a political claim to public or common space (see Sakiya). Two editions of 100 copies of the printed publication were produced and posted out for the cost of postage plus optional charity donation. 41 Since the print-run has now sold out, a pdf of the publication can be accessed for free at https://www.we-industria.org/industria- publication-download. '[H]ow do we enact a pause or a break from "business as usual", when normality has been so fundamentally disrupted in ways beyond our control? […] Institutions becoming more online could permanently open things up to those of us whose "normal" necessarily more closely resembles life in lockdown. […] Our industry already (intentionally) confuses the boundary between labour and leisure time, and our now always-online world with no transition between spaces has muddied this even further. […] Without real space, it is even harder to draw boundaries between the disparate elements of our multifaceted "portfolio" existences' (industria editorial collective, pp. 17-18). 'Amidst the barrage of online content, […] we realised we wanted to slow things down and put together something that would be sent out first in print and eventually made available online. Something to hold and read slowly, hopefully outside or by a sunny window. […] we wanted to give these commissions physical space, to let them be held onto rather than scrolled through. Each of the three elements we're delighted to bring together here enact or look at some kind of pause amongst everything' (industria editorial collective, p. 21). 'So another reason to kill Black men is added to the list: exercising in Nature' (Carole Wright, p. 34).
  12. For the video of a Zoom walk led by Wright in May 2020, see 'Trees Marking Passages in Time', https://urbantreefestival.org/trees-marking-passages-in-time.
  13. The donation was split between United Voices of the World strike fund (supporting precarious and migrant workers to enable them to take action to transform their working conditions) and Colours Youth Network (a crowdfund to invest in the futures of LGBT+ young people of colour).