greetings.
gita hashemi:
artist, writer, educator, toronto-based
recent collaborative endeavours:
http://negotiations2003.net
http://olivefair.net
http://creativeresponseweb.net
http://wordroom.net
from an upcoming article in fuse magazine:
"We started this project [[Negotiations: From a Piece of Land to a
Land of Peace]] a year ago from the conclusion that neither the
sloganeering of trendy anti-· [fill-in the blank] movements, nor the
ambivalence of intellectual ironicism [irony + cynicism] nor their
attendant conceptual paradigms and creative practices were adequate
responses given the urgency of the conditions here in North America
as in Palestine-Israel. The rise of renewed fascism to state power in
the United States - the world's military capital - coupled with the
resurgence of militarist colonialism the world over - both readily
justified through discourses of "democracy," "free trade,"
"security," and "anti-terrorism" - necessitate that we substantiate
our critical deconstructive strategies with constructive social
exchange towards building and strengthening heterogeneous [not
"pluralist"] and accountable networks of resistance and solidarity.
Such networks are crucial to the formation and fortification of the
collective will to dissent from the given and move towards the
envisioned, from preaching "peace" prosaically as the abstract
absence of conflict to working through our geopolitical, social,
economic and historical differences and power asymmetries towards
building the necessary conditions for a just peace. To this effect,
we made the notions of collaborating across "divides" (national,
cultural, political, disciplinary) and public participation central
to our curatorial concepts and integral in our programming
approaches, reasoning that only in the space of shared labour could
meaningful negotiations take place, and that art, as a medium of
communication and imagination, could not only mediate such social
dialogue but also facilitate broader participation in it.
Negotiations brought to Toronto a wide range of collaborative
projects and programmes by cultural producers of different
backgrounds and belongings. Most of these drew on public
participation in their creative processes and/or creatively
capitalized on the collaborative nature of dissemination space to
actively engage the audiences in the issues they raised. In our own
work, we conversed and collaborated with diverse individuals and
groups in anti-racist, feminist, indigenous rights, union and social
justice movements; and consciously built in our programme multiple
platforms - post-screening discussions, panels, workshops and a
public forum - for presenter-audience as well as presenter-presenter
dialogue. The totality of this space of shared labour was where
differing political claims and social visions were problematized and
negotiated, openly, collectively and transparently. Inevitably, these
negotiations led to new understandings, relations and networks, thus
manifesting the "use value" of artistic engagement as visionary
social construction. This, to us, was the topmost measure of
Negotiations' viability. "
on cultural resistance:
http://negotiations2003.net/will/statement.html
http://negotiations2003.net/statement.html
the conference you're planning is of great interest to me as i am
currently thinking and working through _ethics_ of collaboration.
be well.
gita