This course is for activists, artists, and thinkers who wish to better understand and participate in social change. We will focus on the prolific and exciting overlap between socially engaged art and cultural practices generated by recent social movements around the world. Rather than assess the political efficacy of activities like mourning, listening, organizing, dancing, or partying, the lectures examine such cultural activities next to, and within, contemporary art practice. Included in the course are guest presentations by key artists, activists, and scholars, like: Rebecca Gomperts, Chido Govera, Gulf Labor, Hans Haacke, Sharon Hayes, Jolene Rickard, Gregory Sholette, Joshua Wong, and many more. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch and co-taught by Creative Time artistic director, Nato Thompson, the course challenges learners to treat the MOOC itself as a social and artistic form. This happens mostly through the practical components, local project productions, global exchanges, and critical feedback. While no prior art making or activist experience is required, projects also offer challenging options for advanced learners. For other course offerings or language versions in this series, just search 'ART of the MOOC' inside the Coursera course catalogue.
Mariam Ghani
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From the course by Duke University
ART of the MOOC: Activism and Social Movements
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From the lesson
Embodied Knowledges - Lectures, Guest Presentations, and Quiz
This lesson will use the notion of ‘embodied knowledges’ to link activism and socially engaged art to performance art, gesture, and ‘writing without words.’ Recognizing that knowledge is inseparable from one’s lived, physical, and social experience, ‘embodied knowledges” challenge the Western paradigms that separate information from matter, reason from affect, mind from the body, the worker from her labor, the individual from the collective. This lesson’s practical components will ask students to actively think ‘from’ their particular site of enunciation and ‘through’ their particular embodied knowledge.
Guest presenters: Mujeres Creando, Regina José Galindo, Mariam Ghani, Sharon Hayes, Chemi Rosado-Seijo
Meet the Instructors
Nato ThompsonChief Curator
Creative Time
Pedro LaschVisual Artist and Associate Research Professor
Duke Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Hi Miriam, thanks for taking the time.
>> Thank you Drew, it's my pleasure [LAUGH].
>> So you've at this point spent many years collaborating with
a choreographer, and you think a lot about the body.
And this module in our MOOC is on embodied knowledges.
What took you in the first place to collaborate with the choreographer and
as a visual artist?
And in general, when you work together, but also in your own individual practice,
how do you think of this idea of embodied knowledges, or the body in general.
>> Right.
Well, I was actually trained as a dancer from
the time I was a pretty small child up until I was eighteen.
I was training pretty seriously as a dancer.
And so, embodied knowledge has always been part of how I
think about the world and how I approach producing knowledge in the world.
So for me it was pretty natural to think about collaborating with a choreographer.
And especially at a point in my practice when I was starting to think very
seriously about site specificity, or site responsive work.
And wondering about how to incorporate that into a video practice or
a lens based practice.
So, I was really wrestling with a lot of questions around, how do a make
something that responds, really specifically, to the place that I am in?
But at the same time is specific to this medium that I'm working in,
which is a lens based medium.
Which is video and photography.
And how can we translate the essence of this place
into something that can be carried to other places.
I was friends with a choreographer, Erin Ellen Kelly,
choreographer and performer who is trained in Butoaie and Qi Gong.
And this was something she had been thinking about a lot as well.
A lot of her practice as a performer, for quite a long time before we started
working together in 2006, had been site specific or site responsive performances.
So she'd performed in a lot of really odd places.
And so we've been talking about this, just this part of our friendship for
a long time.
And then I did a residency at the Schloss Solitude in Germany,
which gave me a budget and a space to invite someone to come and work with me.
And so I I rang up Erin and I said do you wanna come to Germany for
a month and make a project in the Black Forest?
And she said, yes.
[LAUGH] >> Sounds like a great beginning.
>> Yeah, [LAUGH] >> Something that keeps coming up in
the work of the different artists and activists were covering in the MOOC,
also in our core lectures, is this idea of public audience.
So you already spoke about the relationship of the artist or
performers body, and the lens in the camera, right?
>> Yeah.
>> But often, even when you do say these, Erin does these site specific pieces,
is there public there, is there no public there?
How does that get mediated and worked out?
Because there's also the collective body.
>> Yeah. >> Of the people who are together.
>> Yes. >> Producing a work, right?
>> Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think that's varied a lot over the different projects that we've done.
I have another collaboration index of the disappeared,
which is another long term collaboration.
And that one is an entity that has sort of evolved over time but
always has the same identity.
Whereas my, and the same kind of configuration of collaboration.
But my collaboration with Erin configures itself differently for every project.
Which I think stems from the fact that it's all about site, and place,
and responding to specific situations and places.
>> And has the same happened to the medium, to the idea of the lens?
Has it transformed with each project?
>> In some ways, yes, but in other ways, no.
Because I think, we should probably, I can explain this,
but the different elements of the project play pretty specific roles in the work.
So, what Erin and I kind of came to over the series of different projects
that we've made together, was a kind of understanding of our
work as fitting in to a discipline of landscape archaeology.
>> Uh-huh.
>> And we took a set of theories from the contextual school of
landscape archaeology.
Which basically says that to understand any place you have to look at it along
three different axis.
And the first one is the historical uses of a place.
So, all the different ways that that place has been used over time.
And then the second, is the contemporary understanding of a place.
So, what is actually that place's position in our contemporary,
kind of, mythology of the American landscape, for example.
Or the Black Forest.
Or of the German Palace, so on and so forth.
And then the third is the phenomenological experience of a place.
By which I mean, what is it like to be a body in that place?
And that's where the performing body becomes so important.
Because it provides this sort of human measure of the place for
the viewer who can't physically be there herself, right?
They can understand that place on a human scale,
and they can understand, actually, what it's like to touch it.
What it's like to have the skin kind of pressed against, right.
The textures of that place.
They can see that in the performing bodies responses to it.
And that's why for me it's so important to have performers in these pieces.
So the St. Louis project which is called The City & The City,
actually came about because Erin is from St. Louis, it's her hometown.
And I thought it would be great if we could make a project in her hometown.
You know, we've worked in so many different places.
I thought it would be really great to do something that would be really local for
her in a way.
Although she hasn't lived there full time, in a long time.
But she goes back really frequently and I've been there twice with her and
I found St. Louis really fascinating.
And so, I had this fellowship called the Freund Fellowship which is a joint
project between Washington University and St. Louis and the St. Louis Art Museum.
>> Okay.
And to start this fellowship I arrived in St.
Louis, right after the Michael Brown shooting.
And I began teaching at Washington University,
and working on this project for my show at the Saint Louis Art Museum,
during what became known as Ferguson October.
So a month where there were activist actions every single day in St. Louis.
And it was a really astonishing time there.
It was really difficult.
It was very contested.
Many different people, having many different feelings,
about many different things.
And a lot of things that had been sort of beneath the surface in St Louis for
a long time.
Kind of suddenly boiling over.
And I came to it, and I had one of those moments you have as an artist sometimes,
where you think, how can I possibly make work in the middle of this emergency?
Right, of all this urgency.
And all of this also really amazingly creative expression
by the activist movement that was happening at the time.
Where they were creating these incredible images, like this mirrored coffin
was being carried through the city everyday, to all these different places.
Which I thought was just this beautiful performance of protest.
So I really had to struggle with it a little bit, how to actually
understand where to place myself.
And where Erin and I could find something that we could make.
That would contribute to this moment without appropriating it.
>> Yeah.
>> Because I feel like that's always a danger, when you come in from outside.
>> And at the same time, you're quite familiar with U.S. racial politics.
>> Yes.
>> But you don't embody that history of pain and suffering of African Americans.
>> Exactly. >> Particularly, so, but it is,
the question is not can they do work or not.
One can, but how to do it.
>> Yeah. >> In a way that is sensitive and
bold at the same time.
>> Yeah, I mean it's this funny thing, and
I've had this same experience actually growing up in Baltimore.
And being neither black nor white, you come in and
you're sort of in the middle of this very,
this fundamental tension of American society.
And you're neither one thing, nor the other, which in a way is
sort of an ideal position as an artist Because if you can see both sides.
And you can sort of operate within both of them.
But it's also a very difficult position to be in because
no one is going to fully trust you, because you don't belong in either side.
And I completely understood that because that's basically where I grew up,
in Baltimore in that exact position.
>> As well as an Afghani, and
Lebanese [LAUGH] >> Yeah
[LAUGH] >> Yeah
>> Either-or.
>> Yeah, but I think the thing that was really interesting for me in St.
Louis was understand how much it was like Baltimore, which is where I grew up.
And once I kind of had that understanding click in then,
I understood what I could make there.
Because I understood okay, St. Louis is a place where spacial politics and
racial politics overlap to a really astonishing degree.
And it's also a place where these divisions and
these hierarchies are not enforced externally.
They're enforced internally.
We do it ourselves, most of the time.
But we do it ourselves, because there's these external hierarchies and
these external pressures.
And these external decisions that have been made, that
create this necessity within us to do that.
These structures, all these structural inequities,
that then lead us to create these self-reinforcing decisions.
These ways in which we don't look at each other, we don't see each other,
we don't talk to each other.
So then I started to think about this novel of China Miéville's, The City and
The City, which came out in 2009, which is this sci-fi noir.
And the premise of that book is that there's a city that becomes so
divided it actually becomes two separate countries.
And the way that the citizens of those two city-states enforce that division
on a day-to-day basis is that they learn from birth to un-see everything and
everyone that belongs to the other city.
They just look away from it so reflexively,
it's like it's not even there.
>> Yeah.
>> And in the book, this unfolds very subtly.
And at first, you think it's really like a science fiction mechanism
that's making things un-seeable.
And gradually, gradually you realize,
no, it's not, it's just everyone doing it themselves.
>> Mm-hm.
>> That was really an image that had stuck in my head.
>> Mm-hm.
>> And then the narrator of the film,
Derek Laney is actually one of the people who made the mirrored coffin.
And also one of the people who had done the action at the St.
Louis Symphony where they interrupted the symphony to sing a requiem for Mike Brown.
>> Yeah. >> And that's how I found him, actually.
I was going through different activist's groups looking for
someone with a really good voice.
Everyone was like, talk to Derek.
You need to talk to Derek.
I met Derek and I pitched him the project, and he was like, I love sci fi and
I love mystery, so this is perfect.
[LAUGH] Yeah.
Yeah, well Index of the Disappeared as I said, has been going for
a long time, it's 11 years now.
And when we first started out
we started from a place of immediate immigrant rights activism.
And we were really looking at a more narrow domestic picture.
>> In the US mostly.
>> In the US, looking at immediate post 9/11 detentions and deportations.
And then gradually, over the years, as we came to understand how everything was
connected to everything else, we expanded the index archive.
To look at the way those post 9/11 policies where resonating in
all these other parts of the world.
And then how things that were enacted in other parts of the world.
Like the policies that were developed at Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib,
then came back, circled back to affect US prison policy here at home.
And there's just all these giant circles of things that people,
as well as policies, who circulate from one place to the other.
As well as taking us into our current research into black sites and
the rendition network.
Which is 34 different countries were involved in that.
So it's really kinda a massive research project.
But its, one of things we had to do over the course of all
this research was basically become,
not jailhouse lawyers, but like artist lawyers I guess.
Because we worked so much with declassified documents.
And it became a really big part of the index project.
This idea of like building an archive around redacted documents,
around documents from which many, many pieces of information have been removed.
And this kind of quixotic project of sort of archiving around
what was not there until we had a fairly clear picture of the missing things.
And when we first started out,
we thought, yes this is quixotic, this is a crazy idea.
But we're gonna try it and see what happens.
And it actually worked.
[LAUGH] To the point where we've spent so much time doing this.
And we've read so many, of these documents, and
we've followed so many lawsuits over so much time.
And so many individual cases, over so much time, that we actually became experts.
We're working with the Yale Law School in this coming year.
This is the second time we're doing a year long academic residency.
We did one with the Asian Pacific American Institute at NYU previously.
I think for this kind of project, it's really helpful to have institutional
backing, because it kind of requires institutional resources.
[LAUGH] >> And legitimacy,
so you don't get shut down [LAUGH].
>> [LAUGH] Yeah, that helps, that helps, that helps.
But I think mostly, it's just the resources of having an actual staff.
Because the project that is so massive at this point.
And also, right now it's really helpful for
us to have law students working for us.
Because we've reached a point where we want to file our own freedom
of information act request.
So having law students working for
us will be extraordinarily helpful in that respect.
>> Is that a particular goal of the project, this filing the-
>> It never was a goal before, but
we have specific things we wanna find for the block site project.
Things which haven't been requested by anyone else yet, who's working on this.
>> And this would be part of the Yale collaboration?
>> Yeah, it will be part of the Yale collaboration.
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