Text on the Run

This seminar/practice course is a hands-on
observation on how our art experiments, mediums
and subjects are altered by the language of
persecution. Can text be the starting point to
split, cut, and interfere our interdisciplinary
practices? Through a micro-politic of text, bodies
& surfaces, we will reflect on topics of escape,
disappearance, and eruption; followed by weekly
prompts to make artifacts, pamphlets, actions and
performances that are out of view, half
constructed, or in hiding. We will review video
actions from Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA),
Laura Aguilar's desert photographs, Xandra
Ibarra's performance-sculptures, Park McArthur's
film Day, Etel Adnan's paintings and poems, David
Wojnarowicz's Memoir of Disintegration; and
intersect them with political actions done by BLM,
Act Up and The Young Lords in the US, Galería Cima
and FPMR in Chile, South Lebanon's Liberation
Army, Anti-Apartheid Resistance in South Africa,
among many others. Writing in this case is a mark
to acknowledge our presence within or outside
borders of oppression. Each session will give us
the opportunity to reinterpret history using our
own artistic languages and mediums. Collectively,
we will move from the studio to the streets, and
from public space back to the studio. Materials
used in this class are: a phone camera, hardened
paint, choreography, synthesizers, trash, singing
voices, and the unframed canvas damaged during
installation. Recommended for students with
interdisciplinary interest across the Institute.