by Jelena Vesic and David Riff
The third meeting of “The Position of the Speaker” panel began in a far more political key than the previous meetings, perhaps also under the influence of the lunch lecture on the day before. But this, one senses, is a very different form of politics, questioning artistic involvement in activist movements rather than the construction of power discourses in the media. The artist Graziela Kunsch from Sao Paolo is involved in activist film-making practices, working as a participant observer in the free transport movement (Movimento Passe Livre, http://saopaolo.mpl.org.br), and documenting the favela squatter movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favela). For her, direct involvement in the struggles is key; artistic practice becomes a form and expression for solidarity.
Graziela is most concerned with exploring temporary spaces of self-organization through artistic practice, and her work is processual rather than product-based, accumulating and distributing an open-ended archive. She sees it as the production of spaces, in which she herself takes on various roles of the activist, artist, and teacher. This results in a large footage archive of filmic excerpts, as she calls them, distributed over DVDs, through Indymedia, or shown at presentations very much like this one.
The films vary in length and setting, and all focus on the central issues of the two movements she is involved in: the struggles for transport and housing. The excerpts include extremely short pieces and scenes of self-organized protest manifestations, like a closeup of people holding open the backdoor of a bus to avoid paying in front, crowding in and calling upon other people to join them, as well as other pieces on everyday life in the favelas, where self-organization takes place out of necessity. Also, they include documents of discussions about the work itself. Some of the footage is shot collaboratively, using either Graziela’s own camera, or mobile telephones of other companions in her political-activist work.
This is a very interesting example of real artistic involvement through image-making and footage accumulation by participating in a social movement, and the mode of the presentation has an intriguing openess, as Ashley Hunt commented. But at the same time, such direct involvements have recently been subject to extremely intense critical discussion, and are now in doubt. One could even speak of an aesthetic turn in political art, one that documenta 12 itself, as an exhibition, reflects.
Graziela’s talk became an occassion to examine this entire problem, and vacillated between constructive debate, self-criticism and tribunal, which is impossible to retell here in full. Nevertheless, in our next post, we would like to provide something like a script, because we think that the discussion is very symptomatic.
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