[ESP]
︎PIPA!
Research and production residency that seeks to develop a collective work process to generate a common work among various art agents. One of the objectives of establishing this articulation is to dismantle the hierarchical, atomized and competitive relationship that exists between the agents linked to the field of contemporary art. As a collective work, we want to promote a reading that puts in tension the idea of the global south from different concepts that cross it, through aesthetic/political discourses, intersubjectively connecting the experience and knowledge of the participants. This includes a process permanently open to other artistic agents to activate its development and result, as well as the dialogue and sharing of the emerging processes.
︎PIPA!
OTRO(S)URES
[Other(s)ouths]
Research and production residency that seeks to develop a collective work process to generate a common work among various art agents. One of the objectives of establishing this articulation is to dismantle the hierarchical, atomized and competitive relationship that exists between the agents linked to the field of contemporary art. As a collective work, we want to promote a reading that puts in tension the idea of the global south from different concepts that cross it, through aesthetic/political discourses, intersubjectively connecting the experience and knowledge of the participants. This includes a process permanently open to other artistic agents to activate its development and result, as well as the dialogue and sharing of the emerging processes.
︎︎︎ NEITHER ACCENT NOR SKIN IS A BORDER
15 november to 15 december 2021
For this first edition, held between 15 November and 15 December 2021, we invited the artist and transdisciplinary researcher Guillermina Mongan (ARG), the international curator Carolina Chacón (COL) and the visual artist Glenda Zapata (BOL). We also had the collaboration of the independent organisation FelipaManuela, a space for research residencies where two of the guests stayed and where we also held some meetings with local agents. The following text is a memoir written by the three residents and narrates partly the process and partly what motivated the research and its results.
One of the first things that went through this residency was the recognition of the differences in our own particular accents, concerns, languages and ways of doing things in order to arrive at common processes and questions in terms of a collective project. Then came the search for the way in which the above could be articulated with the question of the other south, with the territories from which each one of us comes, as well as our different migratory conditions that brought us together in the Spanish state.Through the questions: How does structural racism continue to be perpetuated? What happens to undocumented immigrants from Latin America who die in Spanish territory? What mourning do migrants and racialised people experience? What strategies do we find to sustain language, to insist on our own voice? We imagine the space of the Otro(s)ures residency as a refuge from which to build alliances with migrant and racialised collectives and people from Latin America, considering their contributions to the production of counter-hegemonic narratives and actions.
These complex questions marked a possible working route: research on the fate and whereabouts of the bodies of undocumented migrants; on the different types of death and mourning that migrants go through; and on the circulation and production of visual images that have historically been deployed from the hegemonic representations of coloniality and their continuities in contemporary visuality, as well as in the exercise of symbolic violence towards migrant and racialised bodies.
The fruit of this process was an open and continuous archive that can be extended collaboratively, contemplating sound and visual records that dislocate and subvert the hegemonic narratives of the colonial order. In this context, we also include a commemorative gesture, an obituary published in the newspaper El País, offering condolences to the families of undocumented immigrants who died in Spain.
Images of the sounds and files exhibited at the opening of the process.
Stories, voices
We set out to collaboratively collect counter-narratives that would produce a broader picture of the situation of migrants in Madrid. But how to access the stories of the transients who inhabit Madrid's marginalised streets, in the geographic and symbolic south of Madrid, spaces mostly relegated to migrants?
All that is needed is to create a space for them to speak, for them to have a voice.
Suddenly, the flow of indignation begins to flow by itself, the indignation that has been fed with each day of outrage for the mere fact of living in a country that is not one's own and for laws that want to expel them/us from their streets at every moment.
Their voices are a complaint, a claim, a cry for justice.
When we ask the man who attends the neighbourhood shop if, after 15 years, he wants to return home; when we ask the lady who looks after the elderly or a person whose friend died without documents and does not know where he is to leave flowers, if he has felt racism, they answer with a capital YES. These and other stories of other migration experiences tell, on the one hand, how helpless so many people are in the face of migration laws that expose them to situations of extreme vulnerability, and on the other hand, the resistance that, as a survival strategy, embraces other forms of mourning and being together.
Obituary
The lack of answers to the question about the bodies of undocumented migrants who have died on Spanish territory has made us feel the need to amplify the question to other migrants, as well as to a sphere of society that has been indifferent to their response.
One of our gestures consisted of inserting an obituary in the Spanish newspaper El País, which circulated in the printed edition in Madrid on 9 December 2021, offering condolences to the families of the people who died in Spanish territories and whose bodies are not available, after their families did not have the economic or legal means to access the repatriation of their bodies. A Christian (Latin) cross accompanied the announcement, not only to maintain the form of the vast majority of obituaries in Latin America, but as a way of pointing out the ideological continuum since the conquest and its prolongation of coloniality through religion.
Obituary in the newspaper "El País"
We extended this gesture to Vallecas, at the front of the Espacio de Todo (Space of All), which is the industrial building of Todo por la Praxis, our host space and collective. The question “What happens to undocumented immigrants from Latin America who die in Spanish territory?” was extended to the public visual space in the south of Madrid, making more evident the void of answers and the ritual need for a collective mourning.
Anarchiving and images
How do we imagine futures by performing images and narratives from the South? How is the racism of those "first" images that produced the colonial discourse perpetuated in the present? These were the questions that also functioned as a starting point for tracing and circulating these counter-narratives, with the aim of collaboratively constructing a constantly growing visual essay. The images were received through different virtual media and collected from spaces such as the Museum of America, Prado Museum and Museum of Anthropology.
Visits to museums
Acknowledgements
Allies: Felipa Manuela. La Parcería, Yo soy el Otrx.
Voices: Dagmary Olívar, Valentina Silva, Nicolás Koralsky, Bernardo Nvinic, Juan, Marlene, Juan Carlos, Nancy, María Collado, Andrés Pinto, Abdiel Segarra, Carolina Bustamante and Miranda Porras Bustamante.
Feedback during the process: Mabel Tapia, Jesús Carrillo, Ale Simón, Diego del Pozo, Museo en Red del Museo Reina Sofía, Inland Campo Adentro.
Dinners at FelipaManuela and meetings with various local agents [La Parcería, Museo en Red, CAR, and others] during the process.
︎Opening of the process “NEITHER ACCENT NOR SKIN IS A BORDER”
11 december 2021
In order to socialise these collective approaches to the questions and to share in many dimensions, we invited to the opening space all the people who accompanied us in the process and to whom we offered a very eclectic meal, linked to our countries of origin, which ended up becoming one of the most affective spaces of the residency. A moment in which we remembered that we were brought together by the need to abolish border systems, to refuse to understand skin and accent as borders, and that we would like to insist on imagining strategies where intimacy is produced as a gesture of the common.
*You can see the recipes prepared by residents Guille, Caro and Glenda for the opening of the process in ︎︎︎Recipes.
*Glenda Zapata. Born in La Paz-Bolivia, she studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts, then attended workshops in photography, performance, cataloguing of cultural property and is currently studying forensic anthropology in Madrid. Her work interrogates and investigates mortality from multiple perspectives and delves into people in adverse situations.
*Carolina Chacón Bernal, Colombia. Curator, artist, teacher and researcher. Master's degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture (UCM, Spain). Her work is developed from anti-racist, decolonial and gender perspectives in specific contexts. Her recent projects have addressed the relationship between contemporary art practices and communities of meaning that intervene in museum narratives. She was assistant curator at the Museo de Antioquia between 2013 and 2019 (Medellín). She is a member of the transfeminist and decolonial research platform Frente Sudaka.
*Guillermina Mongan, Argentina. She is an art historian (FdA-UNLP), teacher, researcher, curator and artist. She is a member of the research, discussion and collective position Platform from Latin America, Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern Conceptualisms Network) and the curatorial research collective Frente Sudaka. Since 2012 she has been a member of the group Serigrafistas Queer, where she also coordinates its ASK archive, and since 2016 of Cromoactivismo. She researches and produces both individually and collectively around the methodologies, narratives and performativities of artistic research, artistic-political practices and the archive as a space for experimenting with narratives and memories.