Curator Zoe Butt reflects on her bonds of unity with creators, colleagues and friends to dimension the power that lies in cultural work, and how knowledge is articulated as a lived experience to nurture the struggle and survival in a wounded world.
The makers that I have surrounded myself with come from various contexts and modes of living. Their ears are attuned to oral histories, to structures of everyday kinship, to the building of expertise in ways that do not detach them from knowledge as a lived experience. They are anchored in struggle—in the experience of disenfranchisement—and thereby constantly renew historical conscience and the need for repair. I am learning about the inherited memories of water-dwelling farmers whose rivers are now dammed; of mountain and jungle spirits whose bellies have been mined and deforested; of teachers whose students conceive of the world from enforced confinement in refugee camps; of displaced ethnic minorities who mine for precious stones that the wealthy believe will bring them good fortune; of the myriad dialects that we must recall and reinvigorate to reorder our relation to hegemony and all its political (linguistic) falsities. And so much more.
Culture, for me, is the last grey zone of human production that can apprehend our terrifying discomfort with difference, that can deter our need for control, that can reintroduce wonder to the unknown as a means of trusting, of being in solidarity with the systems of the planet we inhabit. For this pandemic crisis has acutely revealed that a society’s “democratic” right to socialize and work (despite the rising human death tolls) seems to take precedence over regard for communality. This attitude reveals again the violent arrogance with which people dismiss the idea that their “rights” to socialize and work contribute to the irrevocable destruction of the global material balance—material as human first, and then non-human. I say human first because it is only by establishing respect and integrity among our own Being that we can come to acknowledge our impact and dependency on others (as “Others” and others in all things useful and non-useful, animate and inanimate).
Respecting our own materiality begins with acknowledging our communality (our interdependence aids our survival), and thus, I believe, it is friendship and mentorship that must be rekindled, as we struggle to reassess, revalue, reword, and rebuild our world.
***
A Wh*tsapp message arrives from LIR, a curatorial duo (Mira Asriningtyas and Dito Yuwono), from Yogyakarta. They will be late for our Z**m meeting. Mount Merapi is threatening to divulge his volcanic insides. Evacuation procedures are poised and in place, replete with face masks and social distancing measures. An image pings through of them with artist Maryanto, Mount Merapi in the distance. They have just returned from field research beneath this looming explosion. LIR and Maryanto have been inspired by the fictional tale of Barata[1] (a local ancestral figure), an elephant hunter who lived below Merapi, who realized the arrogance of hunting and how it decimates community, and thus took up a calling to protect all forms of life. I smile at the stream of other images pinging through—of them trekking to particular villages and various waterways, exploring Merapi’s previous wrath; of how local superstition has provided resilience, a means to socially reconnect to the land in the face of the rising tourist industry and corporate greed for sand extraction. Landscapes and communities are in constant shift. They are apologizing for what will be an inevitable delay in the work for our (The Factory’s) Pollination project,[2] of which their research forms a part.
In their research for Pollination, LIR and Kittima, and through them, their artists, together question the definitions of ecology and sustainability, renewing the power of a local embodied knowledge[4] as a means of fighting and surviving the ongoing assault of the earth in all its conscious and conscionable actions.
Enabling friendships, despite this pandemic, via the exploration of shared artistic inquiry is heartening. Witnessing the resilience, flexibility, commitment, patience, understanding, and the will to continue, to fathom possible solutions, to persist, and ultimately to stay connected and informed and critical—this is what makes this cultural work rewarding.
Another online “gathering” has also been sustaining me, this one spanning across six time-zones (with participants dialing in from North Carolina, Eindhoven, Stockholm, Lisbon, Amman, Dubai and Ho Chi Minh City), with the unique quality that not many of us have met in person. We are a group of eight, hosted by Walter Mignolo, cofounded with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, whose informal platform Tents of Thought[5] invites us to share our present coping mechanisms, our questions, our anxieties, and our unique strategies for rebuilding value and meaning and purpose in the necessary process of relearning our minds and our communities. We are all differing cultural workers (philosophers, teachers, artists, curators) and what we share in common is a desire to speak, act, and create in ways that reorient our relationship to systems of presumed power and knowledge and its distribution.
When our gatherings began, I was in awe, intimidated by this new little community I found myself to be a part of. But now, after a year of regular chatting, there is a shared camaraderie, a willingness to be barefaced and bold. And this is followed up with care and generosity and thought-provoking honesty. Under this virtual tent, there is a generosity in understanding how our words codify and can render “things” subsumed, controlled, spoken for. There is a critical awareness of how context shifts the meaning of our phrases and thus there is a sensitivity and patience around speech, which, within this group, is linguistically brilliantly diverse.
Munir refers to us as a Mujaawarah, an Arabic term for the most basic building block of a community: people who choose to be together. We discuss the presence of orphan images in art, refugee objects whose stories of kinship have been denied by the colonial lust to control material possessions; we discuss the right not to belong in a capitalist media ontology that identifies, categorizes, divides, and rules; of the need to understand the impact of internal and external forms of migration on concepts of indigeneity and ethnicity; of the need to heal, to nurture, to offer different modes of renewal in the idea of psychological soil, cultural soil, spiritual soil; of the inherent need to return to a hospitality that is as essential as breathing. What we all find ourselves committed to is the need for learning as a process that begins beyond the definitions of language, in the field of relation, in observation, with respect to differing modes of time and space. It’s an attitude. As Walter might say, it’s the necessary de-learning of (the de-linking from) Time.
It is sadly ironic, that in this pandemic moment, many of us have found solace in knowing we are not alone in our experience of social isolation. Many have found psychological comfort in such solidarity, despite the fact that this predicament is ultimately the calamitous result of human disrespect and divisiveness. As someone who curates and guides, as a leader and a friend, whose primary everyday mode is speaking and writing, I am struck by the current exhaustion that abounds from such daily deliberation over words. I mourn the loss of a full-bodied everyday. In this viral moment where loved ones and collaborators afar are relegated to the virtual world of the verbal, there is an urgent and daily need to fully recalibrate the senses. It is the sharing of such diverse images and the particularities of stories that jolt my senses. For in their hopeful articulation of struggle my imagination is nurtured; in their creative reasoning (offered with laughter and affability), I am reminded of how finite our planet is and that it is in this difference that we interlock, innovate, and thus repair.
(Saigon, November 30, 2020)
Curator Zoe Butt reflects on her bonds of unity with creators, colleagues and friends to dimension the power that lies in cultural work, and how knowledge is articulated as a lived experience to nurture the struggle and survival in a wounded world.
The makers that I have surrounded myself with come from various contexts and modes of living. Their ears are attuned to oral histories, to structures of everyday kinship, to the building of expertise in ways that do not detach them from knowledge as a lived experience. They are anchored in struggle—in the experience of disenfranchisement—and thereby constantly renew historical conscience and the need for repair. I am learning about the inherited memories of water-dwelling farmers whose rivers are now dammed; of mountain and jungle spirits whose bellies have been mined and deforested; of teachers whose students conceive of the world from enforced confinement in refugee camps; of displaced ethnic minorities who mine for precious stones that the wealthy believe will bring them good fortune; of the myriad dialects that we must recall and reinvigorate to reorder our relation to hegemony and all its political (linguistic) falsities. And so much more.
Culture, for me, is the last grey zone of human production that can apprehend our terrifying discomfort with difference, that can deter our need for control, that can reintroduce wonder to the unknown as a means of trusting, of being in solidarity with the systems of the planet we inhabit. For this pandemic crisis has acutely revealed that a society’s “democratic” right to socialize and work (despite the rising human death tolls) seems to take precedence over regard for communality. This attitude reveals again the violent arrogance with which people dismiss the idea that their “rights” to socialize and work contribute to the irrevocable destruction of the global material balance—material as human first, and then non-human. I say human first because it is only by establishing respect and integrity among our own Being that we can come to acknowledge our impact and dependency on others (as “Others” and others in all things useful and non-useful, animate and inanimate).
Respecting our own materiality begins with acknowledging our communality (our interdependence aids our survival), and thus, I believe, it is friendship and mentorship that must be rekindled, as we struggle to reassess, revalue, reword, and rebuild our world.
***
A Wh*tsapp message arrives from LIR, a curatorial duo (Mira Asriningtyas and Dito Yuwono), from Yogyakarta. They will be late for our Z**m meeting. Mount Merapi is threatening to divulge his volcanic insides. Evacuation procedures are poised and in place, replete with face masks and social distancing measures. An image pings through of them with artist Maryanto, Mount Merapi in the distance. They have just returned from field research beneath this looming explosion. LIR and Maryanto have been inspired by the fictional tale of Barata[1] (a local ancestral figure), an elephant hunter who lived below Merapi, who realized the arrogance of hunting and how it decimates community, and thus took up a calling to protect all forms of life. I smile at the stream of other images pinging through—of them trekking to particular villages and various waterways, exploring Merapi’s previous wrath; of how local superstition has provided resilience, a means to socially reconnect to the land in the face of the rising tourist industry and corporate greed for sand extraction. Landscapes and communities are in constant shift. They are apologizing for what will be an inevitable delay in the work for our (The Factory’s) Pollination project,[2] of which their research forms a part.
In their research for Pollination, LIR and Kittima, and through them, their artists, together question the definitions of ecology and sustainability, renewing the power of a local embodied knowledge[4] as a means of fighting and surviving the ongoing assault of the earth in all its conscious and conscionable actions.
Enabling friendships, despite this pandemic, via the exploration of shared artistic inquiry is heartening. Witnessing the resilience, flexibility, commitment, patience, understanding, and the will to continue, to fathom possible solutions, to persist, and ultimately to stay connected and informed and critical—this is what makes this cultural work rewarding.
Another online “gathering” has also been sustaining me, this one spanning across six time-zones (with participants dialing in from North Carolina, Eindhoven, Stockholm, Lisbon, Amman, Dubai and Ho Chi Minh City), with the unique quality that not many of us have met in person. We are a group of eight, hosted by Walter Mignolo, cofounded with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, whose informal platform Tents of Thought[5] invites us to share our present coping mechanisms, our questions, our anxieties, and our unique strategies for rebuilding value and meaning and purpose in the necessary process of relearning our minds and our communities. We are all differing cultural workers (philosophers, teachers, artists, curators) and what we share in common is a desire to speak, act, and create in ways that reorient our relationship to systems of presumed power and knowledge and its distribution.
When our gatherings began, I was in awe, intimidated by this new little community I found myself to be a part of. But now, after a year of regular chatting, there is a shared camaraderie, a willingness to be barefaced and bold. And this is followed up with care and generosity and thought-provoking honesty. Under this virtual tent, there is a generosity in understanding how our words codify and can render “things” subsumed, controlled, spoken for. There is a critical awareness of how context shifts the meaning of our phrases and thus there is a sensitivity and patience around speech, which, within this group, is linguistically brilliantly diverse.
Munir refers to us as a Mujaawarah, an Arabic term for the most basic building block of a community: people who choose to be together. We discuss the presence of orphan images in art, refugee objects whose stories of kinship have been denied by the colonial lust to control material possessions; we discuss the right not to belong in a capitalist media ontology that identifies, categorizes, divides, and rules; of the need to understand the impact of internal and external forms of migration on concepts of indigeneity and ethnicity; of the need to heal, to nurture, to offer different modes of renewal in the idea of psychological soil, cultural soil, spiritual soil; of the inherent need to return to a hospitality that is as essential as breathing. What we all find ourselves committed to is the need for learning as a process that begins beyond the definitions of language, in the field of relation, in observation, with respect to differing modes of time and space. It’s an attitude. As Walter might say, it’s the necessary de-learning of (the de-linking from) Time.
It is sadly ironic, that in this pandemic moment, many of us have found solace in knowing we are not alone in our experience of social isolation. Many have found psychological comfort in such solidarity, despite the fact that this predicament is ultimately the calamitous result of human disrespect and divisiveness. As someone who curates and guides, as a leader and a friend, whose primary everyday mode is speaking and writing, I am struck by the current exhaustion that abounds from such daily deliberation over words. I mourn the loss of a full-bodied everyday. In this viral moment where loved ones and collaborators afar are relegated to the virtual world of the verbal, there is an urgent and daily need to fully recalibrate the senses. It is the sharing of such diverse images and the particularities of stories that jolt my senses. For in their hopeful articulation of struggle my imagination is nurtured; in their creative reasoning (offered with laughter and affability), I am reminded of how finite our planet is and that it is in this difference that we interlock, innovate, and thus repair.
(Saigon, November 30, 2020)
