ANDREA ABBATANGELO

h 10.00

Who is J.E.?

Jaider Esbell

he is an Artist, he was born in Roraima (Brazil) 

and he is originary from the indigenous group Macuxi

As an Indigenous Contemporary Artist

he crossed platforms of what is political or belong to his cosmovision of the spirituality 

or doing something in and for the art system

He moved fluently from one another 

doing this he fought back the meaning of colonialism

Framing the indigeous culture in the context of contemporary art

to preserve it from modern colonialism

to protect its sacred cosmology and environmental communion 

This is the role of Indigenous Contemporary Artists

To show it and to protect its mystery from us

From western art market and from western artists

 

He died a month ago in Sao Paulo at the age of 42 

he will never die, a generation of indigeous artist is raising

h 11.00

Jaider Esbell’s legacy is represented 

by his last public contribution in life:

a group exhibition he curated at MAM Museum in Sao Paulo 

the project is in the context of Sao Paulo Biennial

Esbell paid most of the expenses of the project 

Moquém_Surarî: arte indígena contemporânea

34 indigenous contemporary artists 

who embody visual translations of their cosmologies and narratives, 

making present the temporal depth that underlies their practices. 

Contemporary indigenous art is not hostage to the past.

Ancestry is mobilized in the now, reconfiguring enunciative positions 

and power relations to produce other forms of encounter between worlds not based on colonial extractivisms.

To understanda the complicate and antagnistic relationship

between colonialism and indigenous culture

Sao Paulo Bienniale is an event that take place in 

what was Guarani territory 

h 12.00

Guarani were one of the first populations to be contacted by Europeans when they arrived in South America some 500 years ago.

Today, about 51,000 Guarani live in Brazil, in seven different states. 

They are the largest indigenous people in the country. Other groups live in neighboring countries: Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina.

Sugar cane plantations that have occupied much of their ancestral lands are employing

Guarani, adults and kids.

They are deeply spiritual people. Many communities have a house of prayer and a religious leader, the pajé, whose authority depends only on its prestige and authority.

Guarani have always been looking for a land without pain, or "Land without Demon", where souls can rest in peace after death.

For hundreds of years the Guarani have traveled vast distances in search of this land.

In the 16th century, a chronicler noted their "constant desire to find new lands, in which they believe they will find immortality and infinite rest."

Deeply touched by the loss of almost all of their territory in the last century, the Guarani suffer a suicide rate that is unmatched in South America.

The problems are particularly acute in Mato Grosso do Sul, where the Guarani once occupied some 350,000 square kilometers of forest and plains.

Guarani cosmovision, language and history is actively erased by a colonial education curriculum. In São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, descendants of the original inhabitants live in invisibility and struggle to keep their traditions, despite São Paulo’s celebrated cultural diversity.

h 13.00

This is the implication of over-consumption of resources.

It started a long time ago.

“Entrepreneurial capital historically emerged in the modern bourgeois city, transforming the economic and social relations of agrarian economies. As its markets penetrated 

the people's living place and working place, the city came to invade the countryside, the market to dominate the farm, the mind worker to control the hand worker, and the capitalist 

metropole to imperialize the pre-capitalist periphery.” T.W. Luke

Hyper-regions originated in sites where industrial revolution settled and established the “ephermaculture” (opposed to “permaculture”), with its dependence on constantly increasing, wasteful mass consumption.

Between 1880’s and 1890’s Europeans and Northern Americans entrepreneurs found fewer and fewer pre-capitalist eco-regions to penetrate commercially. 

Every eco-region (from the Antarctic to Africa to the Arctic to Asia to the Antipodes) soon was mapped to its fullest extent for any economic utility or “ecological possibility”, which means resources.

Funding archaeology, geography, anthropology and palaeontology campaigns, Entrepreneurial Capital gradually rewrote the borders and political / economical competences on the surface of the planet. The modern system of European Nations extended outward from the original Eurocentric orbit of commercial exchange and captured the inhabitants of numerous non-European zones. 

Until every frontier was closed and all unexplored territories were mapped. 

h 14.00

For a moment, let's focus on what it means “to map”.

Forget for a second that we aim to research, to preserve, to collect.

forget we purely aim to research, identify and catalogue. 

 

A map tells us what/who/whom is there and what/who/whom isn't.

The focus is generally on what/who/whom IS 

not on what/who/whom ISN'T

A map doesn't gives us a how/why this or those what/who/whom ISN'T there

This is an evidence

 

A map is factual

is also elusive

Imagine a question which embrace also part of the answer

Is that genuine or manipulative?

Can we see now a Map and what they show us (or erase) differently?

h 15.00

What is outside our maps?

Here there are two examples that, of many others

could help us to understand what is on a daily base 

excluded or ignored  

For example, QTBIPOC is the acronimous of Queer and Transgender People of Color. Is “an intentional space to build community, envision and work toward our liberation, and have a chance to decompress and enjoy creative expression. This space exists as a disruption to the White classist hetero-normative standards of the institutions we are engaging with and part of and creates a means of coalition building between QTBIPOC on campus and in community”. 

Source: UCLA

Global South*, is meant to refer to: 

1 an alternative to the term “Third World", meaning to economically disadvantaged nation-states and as a post-cold war. 

Btw, most recently this term is also employed in a post-national sense to address spaces and peoples negatively impacted by contemporary capitalist globalization.

2 captures a deterritorialized geography of capitalism’s externalities and means to account for subjugated peoples within the borders of wealthier countries. 

There are economic Souths in the geographic North and Norths in the geographic South. 

3 it refers to a transnational political subject that results from a shared experience of subjugation under contemporary global capitalism. 

The use of the Global South to refer to a political subjectivity draws from the rhetoric of the so-called Third World Project, or the non-aligned and radical internationalist discourses of the cold war. In this sense, the Global South may productively be considered a direct response to the category of postcoloniality in that it captures both a political collectivity and ideological formulation that arises from lateral solidarities among the world’s multiple Souths and moves beyond the analysis of the operation of power through colonial difference towards networked theories of power within contemporary global capitalism.

By the way

I could include the term 

Global Majority to this note too

*Source: Virginia University

h 16.00

Agnes Denes

Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space

Map Projections: The Doughnut
1979

courtesy:

Whitney Museum of American Art,

New York; purchase,

with funds from Charles Tanenbaum

© artist or artist’s estate

Agnes Denes, among tens of very inspiring works

She also addressed the topic of mapping and its implications.

This is from the series of studies "Map Projections", in which topography interacts with isometric projection, (a method of visually representing three-dimensional objects in the two-dimensional format) of a technical sketch. 

Here, she projects an accurate geographical rendering of the globe onto an unexpected structure—the form of a snail. This and other works from the series are aimed 

 to reimagine to earth and the place of humans on it. 

As she remarked, “longitude and latitude lines were unravelled, points of intersection cut, continents allowed to drift, gravity tampered with [and] earth mass altered.” 

h 17.00

The art system is an entity aimed to map and lead the arts

this map includes also the makers and those whom collaborate in the making

And again this map excludes.

To fit “in” is one of the main struggle of contemporary artists

I’m personally very comfortable (and versatile) on working inside or outside this map

I’m enjoying myself a lot in the context of public art for example

I’ve been very privileged to work in some periferic places 

where art really matter for their communities 

There to make art is something more than being in a map

Because the map wouldn’t include them in any case.

It was relevant to me as it was for them. 

We were the art system even if there wasn’t wifi

Even if we was outside the frame; the big lens of the art system 

h 18.00

For Jaider Esbell

to curate the exhibition

Moquém_Surarî: arte indígena contemporânea

at the MAM Museum, 

as part of the Sao Paulo Biennial (in former Guarani territory)

meant to give international recognition to

Indigenous Contemporary Art

and a well deserved sense of belonging of indigenous people to the contemporary World

Inscribing Indigenous Contemporary Art in the maps

means at the same time to show to the World their Cosmovisions 

but also to protect them from Western cultural appropriation.

Despite he died, his legacy will stay with us

34 indigenous contemporary artists had the occasion

to exhibit their works and present / preserve 

their identity and all their ancestry brought them  

We can expand the meaning of mapping

we can engage that what/who/whom have been previously cut out from the map

We can’t dictate the terms of it

we don’t rule there

h 19.00

Artivism

Is a form of Art that embrace also Activism

Differently from propaganda which is based on opinions 

Artivism means to take time to understand the dynamics of every action.

Let's start with Nature and Environmentalism

The perpetual destruction of nature originated with human desire to control the environment. The failure of controlling or predicting the future needed the development of infrastructures capable of protecting the inhabitants, their memories but also their accumulated treasury.   

This greed for power developed, the commercialization of art in the design salons and artistic studios of every individual imagination mobilised by the market constantly, so stimulated individuals to desire more. The revolutionary development of the commercial arts over the past century parallels in lockstep the emergence of  the hyper-regions. 

Commercial art and commercialised artists are simply one of the professional / technical expressions of the aestheticized commerce that rests at the core of late capitalism, and that liberates new wants and mobilises fresh desires in order to justify corporate capital- ism's wasteful consumption of natural resources 

Without arts and design, epherma-culture will be an intolerable environment to live in.

As artists we can choose the level of collusion with epherma-culture in the hyper-regions.

Through our choices and actions we can establish spots of eco-regions inside hyper-regions.

This space is aimed to promote awareness on what decolonial environmentalism could mean.

h 20.00

This is a detail from my work “Forms & Objects for a Post-Kingdom”

I’ve started the production of the four elements days after the Brexit Referendum 

It was June 2016

I was also working on my solo performance at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich 

for Manifesta 11

The burn of watching nationalism raising and hitting so hard was consuming me

Being an european citizen in a post-brexit UK wasn’t easy at all

It was personal and political at the same time

I thought there was communities historically impacted

by nationalisms, structural racism or colonial espoliations  

This is how I started my work on this topic

This is how I imagined a “Post-Kingdom”; the life after the hyper-region’s culture.

h 21.00

You can tell me

studio@andreaabbatangelo.com

h 22.00

This is the end of the session

Thank you

All