Reflection Thalia Hoffman
The resistance to social-political forms and structures of ongoing violence and racial injustice that is reflected in the art field stood at the core of the conversational group and is the center of this research documentation. The group gathered to think about and discuss various models of artistic interventions and organizations and asked to develop personal art tactics and skills, tailored to each of the participants and their living conditions. The general research questions of the group discussions were:
- How do/can/should we act as artists in relation to the local surroundings?
- How do/can/should we overcome fragmented forms and structures of the socio-political conditions we live in as artists?
- What do/can/should we do when the art field we are part of or wish to be part of is a sort of continuum of these structures?
The motivation to begin the research group Here/Then and Now كان ועכשיו , grew out of two main needs. Firstly, the art scene in Israel is very centralized, primarily in bigger cities in the centre of the state (i.e. Tel Aviv area). But, graduates from the art department of Haifa University, where I teach, often return to their rural life and family in Northern parts of Israel. Meeting in Haifa– one of the cities in northern Israel–is therefore more accessible for those who live in the area. Secondly, working as a politically-engaged artist for the past decade has urged me to rethink my understandings and to constantly see them in different lights. Within the group I unlearned used standpoints, worked and developed new propositions that established the research tactic of the group. During the years the group was active I conceived a set of group tactics that were modified each year and this is their final version.
The meetings usually began with new thoughts or updates from each of the participants and/or significant topics from our socio-political surroundings or art field. These usually developed into spontaneous conversations in which standpoints and questions were raised from all the participants. Social scientist Sherry Turkle claims, “face-to-face conversation is the most human—and humanizing—thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy” (Turkle, 2015). The conversations constantly found their form and variation according to the needs and desires of the participants at the moment of the meeting. Rarely was there an aim to the conversations or did we lay a concrete path to track. Furthermore we did not seek agreement, but an ability for the conversation to contain differences, uncertainties and fluidness of contant.
"There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly" (Barad, 2007). Inspired by thoughts of Keren Barad we practiced continues fluidity in each converstaion. Within the group conversations, there was no need to reach consensus or persuade others; the conversation leads the participants to refine their own definition of things better that way. In other words, these conversations constantly kept all group members aware of how they position themselves as an artist in society.
The infrastructure of the group and the methods it practiced seeked to allow these transformations, or at least allow us to confront the conditions and beliefs each of us hold within our artistic practice. I use the word infrastructure following Lauren Berland, who describes it as 'the living mediation of what organizes life, the lifeworld of structure' (Laurent, 2016). This is a fragile position to maintain since most of the participants in the group were Palestinians living outside of what is thought of as the centre of the art scene in Israel. As the local art scene is very centralized and because the rest of the country's systems are mostly Jewish, this flipped balance offered to change the dynamics of what comes into the discussion and the way it is conversed.
The group addresses infrastructures not only in the organisation of the group members but also in the content that is conversed. The conversations confront the conditions of each of our art practices and how these convert into different art forms. Berland redefines infrastructure as that which binds us to the world in movement and keeps the world practically bound to itself. The discussions in the group emerged from this movement and seeked transformational opportunities within the conditions and beliefs of how each one of us acts as an artist within her surroundings. For me this was another way to resist the oppressing and violent socio-political forms and structures in which artists here are obliged to practice.
Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, 2015. Print.p.145
Barad, Karen. "Preface and Acknowledgments". Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2007, p. x
Berlant, Laurent, The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2016, vol. 34(3), 393-419