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Creative Strategies Building the Common
Amanda de la Garza, Alejandra Labastida, Ignacio Plá
Text from the publication of the solo exhibition “Conquering and Constructing the Common”, MUAC, Mexico City, 2013.
Andreja Kulunčić’s artistic practice is characterized by the exploration of new models of social relations and communication. Kulunčić understands art as a process of research, collaboration and self-organization. This exhibition is part of a broader project, entitled Creative Strategies, which seeks to develop a transdisciplinary platform for understanding, exchanging, and producing creative community strategies. Each module of this investigation, begun in Croatia, focuses onactivating initiatives of self-organization in the real fabric of society. Kulunčić’s interest in these subjects should be understood in relation to the historical and geopolitical context of her gaze: Croatia was part of the former Yugoslavia, a socialist country in which the idea of community was ideologically imposed by the regime.
Conquering and Building the Common began during an artist’s residency in Mexico City in 2011. During her stay she convened a working group with researchers from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), the Colegio de México, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and representatives from four community organizations in the city:
- the Centro de Reflexión y Acción Laboral (Mexico City), Proyecto Obrero de Fomento Cultural y Educativo, A.C., dedicated to advancing the defense of workers’ rights and organized labor;
- the Unión de Colonos, Inquilinos y Solicitantes de Vivienda Libertad, A.C., located in the neighborhood of Colonia Cananea, Iztapalapa, whose objectives are to improve popular housing in urbanized and urbanizing areas, to defend the rights of its members and to promote educational, social and cultural activities for workers’ families;
- the Asamblea Comunitaria Miravalle in Iztapalapa, whose mission is to consolidate participation among institutions and neighborhood residents with the aim of creating better living conditions, social justice, and environmental sustainability; and,
- Calpulli Tecalco, A. C., located in San Pedro Atocpan, Milpa Alta, an organization that works toward the renaissance of the Nahuatl language as a means of reconstructing the values of indigenous culture, as well as preserving the natural and cultural landscape of the area.
In the first phase of research, the working group focused on tracking the history of self-organization in the city and investigating the strategies used to resolve problems of everyday life in marginal urban contexts. One of the discoveries of this process was the need to articulate a history of social organization in Mexico, confronting the official version, and written from its own experience. Likewise, a wide range of initiatives was identified in which social creativity is made manifest as a tool that has been translated into processes of identity constitution and validation, and into projects such as urban gardens, community libraries and kitchens, art and trade schools, popular housing and the provision of urban services, among other things. In its second stage in 2013, a new working group made up of representatives of the associations and invited artists was able to identify a series of problems that the organizations have confronted over the course of their histories, from formation through consolidation (internal divisiveness and corruption, instrumentalization as political capital by political parties, etc.).
Kulunčić’s exhibition contains a video installation that presents the public with her research materials and a program of activities conceived in collaboration with the social organizations.
The principal objective of the project is to produce a platform for sharing the experience and knowledges that have been constructed, which would allow for future collaboration between these initiatives and lead to the creation of a manual or “tool box,” made on the basis of organizing experiences, and which may prove useful for other collectivities.
Parallel to the exhibition, there will be a channel of communication with a wider public through newspaper inserts and a webpage that will function as a database about social organizations in Mexico City.
Although Kulunčić’s work could be inscribed within what some authors have dubbed the “social turn” in art, the artist distances herself from different lines developed under this heading. By contrast to relational aesthetics, for example, her project is not a matter of simply reproducing forms of sociability in the space of the museum, out of a field of action wholly determined by the artist and the codes of art. Rather, the project assumes a critical posture toward the uses that have been made of actors, themes, and social contexts in such artistic practice.
The proposal being presented at the MUAC is advanced as a platform in two senses. is clear about the risk of a work that tries to exist in two worlds that play by different sets of rules. Her balancing act consists of insuring that her world will not neutralize that of the other. On the one hand, this facilitates the use of the museum, understood as a privileged place of visibility that external actors are able to use. At the same time, however, this generates a series of viral mechanisms-interventions in public space and in the mass media-with the aim of reinserting the demands and actors that are temporarily inside the museum back into the public setting and making use of artistic language. The key to the operation is creating conditions of equality of enunciation for all actors.
The subjects who have collaborated on the project participate actively in making decisions about the direction in which it has been moving. The artist has defined the formal solution of the work in the exhibition hall; there is no hypocritical attempt to present her role as something other than what it is. It functions as an apparatus, a container in which people can find each other, a pathway along which to channel these social energies, but many of the decisions about the project have been made collectively, from the activities that will be developed in this apparatus and the design of the webpage to the very title of the project. Although it is impossible to safeguard a project completely from instrumentalization in the complicated mesh of political and economic forces that traverse the institution of the museum, Kulunčić is assured that this instrumentalization will at least be mutual.
Kulunčić’s work shows self-organization to be an essential part of urban experience and history. Furthermore, she echoes what the organizations’ experience produces: the idea of community and of the “common good” is not a given, but rather something that is constructed and-to use their own terms-conquered, insofar as it acts to oppose the social logics and logics of subjectification prevalent in capitalism.
Mexico City, 2013