Suchergebnisse

Questions about the relation of art and politics often become more urgent in moments of political turmoil and crisis. The present-day context of neoliberal globalization and militaristic neoconservativism has prompted many artists to abandon representational politics and the fostering of dialog in favor of intervening more directly in social relations. In this paper, an artist discusses her own work through the lens of Jacques Ranciere's philosophical writings on aesthetics and politics. The question of artistic autonomy-long considered antithetical to radical or committed art-s-is reframed as a privileged position from which foundational assumptions about what the political field is can be challenged and reformulated.

Based in the hilly, unglaciated Driftless Area of the upper Midwest of the United States, Common/Place is a self-organized, off-the-grid platform for ecological resilience, cultural inquiry, and land-based pedagogy. The rustic setting offers a space to examine how such rural spaces have been both produced by and mobilized within the linked projects of capitalist extraction and settler colonial extermination and to connect and grow the nodes of resistance always present within such systems. Our primary project up to this point has been a series of experimental seminars assembling artists, writers, and cultural workers to learn from and with naturalists, historians, farmers, citizens of the Indigenous Ho-Chunk Nation, and the land itself. This grounded creative research and pedagogy generates a network of informal relationships that connect the urban and rural to break through the present moment of political retrenchment and set the stage for social and ecological cooperation in the face of the climate chaos to come. This practice-based, epistolary essay reflects on the first four years of Common/Place, highlighting constitutive tensions and continued negotiations around property, relationships, ecology, and time—individual, generational, and geological—that can quickly become sedimented in infrastructure and no longer open to question.