We would like to announce an updated version of our AAA panel which we hope will be of interest to our colleagues. It includes a distinguished contributor not listed on the official program: Pascal Menoret.

our very best wishes,
Kirsten Scheid and Chiara De Cesari


OUT FROM ART: PRACTICES OF THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION

11/21/2019

2:00 PM - 3:45 PM

Location: Vancouver CC WEST, Room 210

AAA conference ID number (3-0890)



Participants: Chiara De Cesari, Pascal Menoret, Wayne Modest, Michal Murawski, and Kirsten Scheid


Abstract: Investigations into practices of imagination continue to resurge in different quarters of anthropology, despite sagacious questions over what exactly the return to “imagination” means (Stankiewicz 2016). In part, this continued reliance on a broad term—from Durkheim to recent work on ecology and new materialism—signals the need for a space incompletely determined by current material conditions yet deeply attuned to them. This panel aims to examine different forms of the political imagination starting from contemporary artistic practices as models of how the imagination works.

Empirical studies have not tested recent forays by artists, philosophers, and political theorists to forefront contemporary art's ground-up impact on politics and the imagination. In the context of the expansion of so-called social practice or relational art, this field is increasingly tasked with ‘imagining things otherwise’ (Esche 2004) in place of its traditional representational mission. Artists are asked to produce alternative social situations (as opposed to sublime representations) and to propose alternative socio-political imaginaries. Theorists such as Rancière have argued that art can produce social change by operating a “redistribution of the sensible.” The objective of this panel is to stretch this idea of art rethinking social and political forms. We hope to craft it into a lens to examine other practices and modes of the (political) imagination, from museums to dreams to driving.

We conceive of the “radical political imagination” as an immanent, creative force operating between the social and the individual. We start from Yael Navaro's (2012) notion of the “make-believe” (referring to Turkish Northern Cypriot administrative practices) which spotlights a “process of making-and-believing, or believing-and-making," thought and sentiment, materiality and affect at the same time (6). To provide a comparative look at the political imagination, the panel focuses on historically informed ethnographies of phantasmatic encounters. On the one hand we want to describe and analyze materials, sites and practices such as art, museums, dreams, films, cyberspace, language, or transportation practices that go beyond individual subjects and form intermediary zones upon which the many converge. On the other hand, we seek to know how participants and users meeting these forms and meeting each other through them may realign possible interactions and self-understandings. If these forms of the imagination promote social change, how does this happen differently in specific locations?

These questions are vital in a world that seems dominated by a sense of profound despair and uncertainty amidst spiraling populisms and the crisis of the welfare and developmental state. How can we think with art? How do people mobilize different practices to ‘imagine things otherwise’? How do differently situated actors critically reflect on social realities and inventively think about concrete alternatives and alternative institutions?


Organizers and chairs: Chiara De Cesari, University of Amsterdam & Kirsten Scheid, The Clark Art Institute - Williams College


Presentations:

  *   Perverting the Power Vertical: Towards a Typology of Radical Imaginaries and Subversive Aesthetics from the Global East
Michal Murawski – University College London
  *   Creative Institutionalism: How Can Artists Reimagine the State
Chiara De Cesari – University of Amsterdam
  *   Learning Politics with Art: Lessons from Art Curation under Occupation
Kirsten Scheid – The Clark Art Institute - Williams College
  *   Pipeline Protest and the Political Imagination
Pascal Menoret – Brandeis University
  *   Discussion
Wayne Modest – National Museum of World Culture, Netherlands


Abstracts:

•      Michal Murawski, “Perverting the Power Vertical: Towards a Typology of Radical Imaginaries and Subversive Aesthetics from the Global East”

•       While seeking to make sense of the Power Vertical, this paper also looks beyond it, exploring the heterodox and radical shapes, styles, ideologies and imaginaries populating the "Global East" - a loosely-sketched region encompassing the (post-)socialist world and its transnational entanglements. Moreover, it probes ways in which scholars can collaborate with artists, architects and activists from across the Global East: not only to analyse the Power Vertical (not only to take the Power Vertical seriously), but also to develop tactics, strategies and imaginaries to ridicule, trick, twist, undercut, queer, resist and pervert it.

•      Chiara De Cesari, “Creative Institutionalism: How Can Artists Reimagine the State”

•       This paper explores the potentialities of art being mobilized as a practice of the political imagination by reflecting on the work of contemporary Palestinian artists. They live and work in the West Bank, where the Israeli occupation is still ongoing despite the existence of a Palestinian quasi-state with very limited powers. Producing so-called social practice art, these artists and cultural operators have created several state-like cultural institutions. Blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, and between institution and artwork, these artists have created alternative museums and biennials that both mimic and function as ‘real’ ones in the absence of formal state institutions. Then, these experiments with setting up Palestinian museums and art and cultural events constitute a kind of artistic practice that does not just represent the social world: Palestinian museums and the biennials as artistic performances do have a real impact by (re-)imagining national cultural institutions before they actually exist and thus instantiating them even if in embryonic, experimental form. I argue that these Palestinian projects are ‘pre-figurative lived model[s]’ of what the future could look like (Mundy 2007: 275): critiques of present, global institutions, that is, anti-institutions that function both as prototypes of a future-to-be and as handy if tentative and imperfect devices of an evolving present. They mobilize a tactic of anticipatory representation, which calls into being institutions that do not yet (fully) exist. In this process, anticipatory representation affords forms of creative statecraft in the here and now that open up both possibilities and predicaments.

•      Kirsten Scheid, “Learning Politics with Art: Lessons from Art Curation under Occupation”

•       Studying the imagination shifts attention to the emergent and yet-possible. In 2018, I co-curated an exhibition that invited Jerusalem audiences to reimagine the city’s “possible” existence by building on ludic spatial-temporal moves that have distilled in contemporary Palestinian art. This paper explores the lessons artistic imaginings of a non-Euclidean city, a possible Jerusalem, one not confined to space-time coordinates we use to understand realpolitik, offer the exhibition’s participants and audiences. Following Alfred Gell’s call to study art “as a system of action,” I examine the actions that made an exhibition of Jerusalem at a Palestinian art foundation into a part of the Fourth Palestinian Biennale. This exhibition provided a critical space where actors could analyze the bundling of their lives into incomplete concepts, such as “Palestinian” or “Israeli Arab,” or artificially exclusive ideologies, such as “binationalist coexistence” or “nationalist resistance.” Using my curatorial challenges, interviews and walks with participant artists, and intermittent fieldwork since 1992 with Palestinians audiences and cultural activists, I aim to learn from the artistic imaginings a model for contributing to an anthropology of the political imagination.

•      Pascal Menoret, “Pipeline Protest and the Political Imagination”

•      As fossil fuel extraction expanded in North America, pipeline protests there became more visible and more frequent. Such defining movements as #NODAPL reshaped activist imaginations of alternative futures, and inspired new generations of politicians. New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, famously declared that she “first started considering running for Congress, actually, at Standing Rock in North Dakota,” the site of the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).[1]North American highly visible protests have tended to eclipse anti-pipeline movements in other regions. Low intensity protests are common around construction projects and are particularly hard to observe and map out, especially in more repressive environments. This paper is dedicated to understanding low intensity protest around a pipeline project in an Arab country. It maps out the actions of neighboring communities against a pipeline project that threatened land ownership, local agriculture, and people’s ideals of national equity.

________________________________

[1] Rebecca Solnit, “Standing Rock inspired Ocasio-Cortez to run. That’s the power of protest,” The Guardian, January 14, 2019.


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