[-empyre-] visualization between art and anthropology

[fiamma montezemolo]

Re:  “a feminist sensibility’ visualizes echoing pluralities beyond
identity— so maybe implying another kind of ethics outside the
authoritative practices of the InSite project"

Dear Christina going back to your last words/email, I would certainly say
that you got the main point of the Echo project: looking for pluralities,
beyond identity, possibly in any art project. The inSite project was not
particularly authoritative, although yes it was certainly planned as an
'intervention' of sorts, like many other art projects, especially since the
90s'. In art, we have been witnessing how a considerable number of
biennials, fairs, museums, curators, artists have been framing their work
through the so called 'social turn'. Many of those ambitious
projects---carried out of course through good intentions towards the
'other' and towards identity-based communities, (often involving
marginalized subjects including women, maquiladoras workers, etc)---ended
up not changing much in their site of intervention and forgetting the lives
of their interlocutors. Most often than no, it ended up being about the
glory for the artist but not so much for the subjects involved in those
projects. Ethics did become a problem, one that should be more at the
center of the debate, not in a moralistic sense, but rather asking
differently the question 'what is this intervention good for?'


Have a great weekend!

Fiamma

On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 7:17 PM, christina at christinamcphee.net <
christina at christinamcphee.net> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> In re a " but maybe yes a 'feminist sensibility’ “ — Fiamma,  the ‘echo’
> video project is online but has a password requirement
> http://www.fiammamontezemolo.com/#echo   Maybe you’ve already shared it?
>
> “A feminist sensibility” around the Narcissus/Echo relay is really
> interesting as a prompt…. Re-siting a historic InSite “beyond their
> expected ruins and remains” challenges a deep bias around identity— who can
> impose what kind of normativity on the historic record… who is Narcissus?
> who is Echo?   This undoing of categorization as you call it,  ‘border
> crossing’ , would you say that the Echo project even challenges the
> possible imposition of feminist norms?
>
> More the prompt suggests a sensibility or attitude on the part of maker(s)
> (participant-observer/artist)….
>
> Can you develop this a bit more?  “a feminist sensibility’ visualizes
> echoing pluralities beyond identity— so maybe implying another kind of
> ethics outside the authoritative practices of the InSite project—?
>
>
>
> Christina McPhee
>
> http://christinamcphee.net
>
> insta: naxqqsmash
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 11, 2016, at 12:41 PM, fiamma montezemolo <
> fiammamontezemolo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thank you for your question Christina.
>
> Yes, I did work on the 'aftermaths' of the InSite project in the border
> between Mexico and the USA. As an artist and anthropologist - using an
> inter-medial methodology - I was particularly interested in making an
> attempt to understand what is left after a biennial, a curatorial project,
> an artist leaves a scene of intervention. InSite has been a very important
> art initiative that lasted many years in the Tijuana-San Diego border. In
> 2005 they had their last intervention and moved later to Mexico City. In
> 2013-14 I made a video called Echo based on their archive and an
> ethnography. By revisiting the scenes of these curatorial and artistic
> interventions, “echo” emerged both as a concept and a practice that enabled
> a reassembling of these art works, their futures,  beyond their expected
> ruins and remains.
>
> Each work/artist and afterlife/echo of those works  -after the artists
> completed them and left to focus on another work - raised different and
> enriching questions on social art, on ethics, on methods, on the people
> involved in the projects, on the city itself and its urban cycle, on the
> future of public sculpture, etc. The assemblage of archival images and
> current reverberations, of all sort of data visualization through video,
> text, voice over, drawings, interviews, of affects and representation has
> been a real challenge in this work, as you mention: especially in terms of
> methodology.
>
> The result is that more questions were opened after the initial ones. The
> conclusion was inconclusive: Narcissus (all of us working, representing,
> intervening on the border: anthropologists, artists, curators, etc.) and
> Echo (the context, the artists, the collaborators, the public sculptures,
> the objects, etc.) are clearly part of the same scenario and they are both
> plural and problematic in their own way...
>
> In this sense, I am not sure mine was a 'feminist methodology', but maybe
> yes a 'feminist sensibility', or as a long literature that started with
> Adorno would define it: an 'unmethodical method', an undoing of
> categorization, indeed a sort of ‘border crossing’.
>
> Best,
> Fiamma
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>
>
>
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-- 
Fiamma Montezemolo
www.FiammaMontezemolo.com
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