by Dr. Natasha Marzliak Norberto

ANARKOARTLAB'S TRANSMEDIA ART: BUILDING CONNECTIONS AND NETWORKS BETWEEN SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL DEMANDS FOR A WORLD TO COME

1 - INTRODUCTION

We are in a terrible historical moment. The world notices a strong escalation of social inequalities, racism, sexism, nationalist fascism, a global health crisis, climate catastrophe, and relentless state violence. It is urgent to rethink modernity and coloniality, which is linked to rationality, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy and the oppression of social minorities. Redefining its objectives based on the current needs for social change, the current "seismic tremors" of contemporary art and its approach to the "moving contexts of present times”, in the words of art historian Terry Smith, as well as its discourse, can be an effective political instrument to promote new possibilities of being, relationship, cosmovision and knowledge.

The main case study of this project is the current art practice of the AnarkoArtLab1 collective (NYC), focusing specifically on the intersection of art and politics in their work, which is articulated from a feminist, queer, anarchist and decolonial set of positions. Their way of making art is situated in resistance to the hierarchical structures of that are imposed by a capitalist system, which are not only oppressive in a social sense, but also have a catastrophic impact on the world’s ecology. The critical work of the AAL takes issue with the dominance of binary gender, the marginality and violence to which the LGBTQIA+ community is subordinate, the racism to which black people and indigenous populations are subjected as well as the threatening extinction of primal forests. All those fronts of struggle, which are directed against the combined consequences of neocolonial and neoliberal forces, are assembled by the members of the collective, producing art in an intersectional manner by building networks and connections among different social and environmental demands.

Formed in 2007, AAL consists of visual artists, performers, musicians, poets and dancers, who are immigrants from around the world, mostly from Eastern Europe and Latin America. AAL performed in the space of The Living Theatre and, currently, their events take place once a year at Judson Memorial Church, both historically important places for avant-garde art. AAL establishes historical references to previous practices which are situated in the space between avant-garde art and activism, such as: Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, due to his criticism to the western world rationality, proposing an apprehension of the universe linked to the pre-verbal level of the human psyche; Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s The Living Theatre, which consider proposing situations of collective creation to provoke in the spectator new possibilities of feeling and acting in the world, against the status quo of the domination system; Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, considering that spectators can rehearse their own revolution, becoming aware of their autonomy in the face of everyday facts and moving towards their real freedom of action, as well as Fluxus, due to its transmedia events, and the Situationists, due to the marginal character in the proposal of actions that appropriate architecture and urbanism.

The interdisciplinary work of AAL takes the shape of urban interventions, performances, happenings, transmedia events and environmental projects, fashioning an approach that is immersive, collaborative, and participatory in nature and intended to stimulate critical thought. These means of production, circulation and reception of art are relevant to current debates and relate to the many critical/ resistant avant-garde art debates about the activation of the viewer, as Rancière's critique in “The Emancipated Spectator” (2009), which juxtaposes the Brechtian models (distance) with the Artaudian models (embodiment), that is, the condition of the spectator as a debater of the situation or as an actor in the scene, starting from the argument that he is never ignorant because each subject has a knowledge to share, if placed in a process of dialogue and exchanges of knowledge.

One of their main themes is "Meeting god", which consists of a set with a bed, bedside table, chair, skull and sarcophagus upon which videos are projected accompanied by a soundtrack. This installation became an event in the Living Theatre in 2009 when artists and public were invited to lie down, sleep, have sex and mimic events of birth and death. In its origin, the art manifestations that used simultaneity of languages, composing a unique flow of creation and incorporating the power of experimentation and freedom, were conceptualised as intermedia by artist Dick Higgins, in 1966, to explain the Fluxus collective’s events. In 1970, Gene Youngblood introduced the term expanded cinema to explain the experiences of the expansion of man's consciousness and the encouragement of corporeality through enlargement of media borders and light. "Meeting god” has a symbolic space that suspends chronological time and suggests a horizontal arrangement of the bodies in opposition to the social hierarchy to which they are uniformly submitted. The performance attempted to create a social architecture with the conditions for a

1 In this research project I will use the abbreviation AAL to name the collective AAL.

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liberating experience. "Meeting god" is libidinous, it is the AAL's orgiastic sauna, a heterotopic space of sexual politics that has an aesthetic of resistance for re-existence that requires the constant use of fantasy, fiction, the capacity for simulation, invention and creation, in Foucault's line of thought in "The History of Sexuality” (1976, 1984). In an update, Preciado’s "Coutersexual Manifesto” (2018) defends the critical analysis of gender and sex differences that are commonly judged as a product of essentialist and biological explanations of heteronormativity. The author does not reject the hypothesis of social or psychological constructions of gender, but displaces them as mechanisms of a broader technological system. Both gender and sexuality determination would be the result of devices inscribed in a complex technological and sociopolitical system. However, the body cannot be understood as passive matter or a mere receptacle for all discourses and gender practices that act on it since its own manifestation must be considered, as suggests “Meeting God”, which is an event built in the relations of gender and sex established between body and machine/technique, with the purpose of denaturalising its traditional notions.

Figure 1. Meeting god (2009) - Transmedia happening and performance at Living Theater (NYC)

Recurrently confronting the conventions of public architecture, AAL seeks to uncover the ideological codes of social space which rely on a status quo of white-cis-hetero-patriarchal capitalism. For instance, they stage their acts in front of the facades of Manhattan buildings; to be precise, those situated in Times square where NASDAQ, one of the main stock exchanges, is located as well as containing one of the largest concentrations of the entertainment industry in the world. They have also performed in front of the Federal Plaza Immigration Court building, which is considered by the group as a place that leads immigrants, usually Latinos and blacks, to be imprisoned in deportation camps for later expulsion from the North American territory in favour of white supremacy. The collective also participated in the Black Lives Matter movement.

Figure 2. Collapse of Consciousness (2021). AAL performance in front of Federal Plaza Immigration Court building

Since 2019, AAL has turned its attention to the conflicts faced by indigenous peoples in Brazil, in addition to the climate problems in the Amazon which are aggravated by the inertia of the Brazilian government of stopping the territorial expansion and extractive operations by large corporations, most investing in mining, timber industry and agribusiness and, thus, mobilising a network of invaders which range from large farmers to illegal landholders. To support the survival of indigenous populations and protect the Amazon ecosystems, AAL organised a protest with 1000 people from the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as Indigenous representatives and twenty other NGOs. On this occasion, AAL presented a public art performance called “Burned Radar” (2020) and carried on foot, from Brooklyn to Manhattan, a burned tree which represented the Amazon. While the Brazilian artist Adriana Varella shouted through a megaphone activist statements, litres of blood and fake dollar bills were scattered on the ground, setting the stage for the performer, Amy Gillian Wilson, to simulate the despair of today's society, which is submitting to the will of international corporations.

Figure 3. Burned Radar (NYC, 2020)

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In addition, AAL and indigenous artists/activists created performances and happenings at the NYC Anarchist Art Festival in 2019, at Judson Memorial Church. As "Meeting god”, it is a transmedia and collaborative event, but now to be supportive to Brazilian indigenous culture, art and cosmology.

Figure 4. AAL Performances and happenings (NYC Anarchist Art Festival - 2019)

A similar motivation underlies the current project "Transarchitecture” (2019-in process), an environmental and collaborative artwork that not only aims to condemn hegemonic, architectural beliefs and ideologies but also to promote effective modes of change. "Transarchitecture” started in collaboration with the Guarani-Kaiowá Indigenous Women's Association, from Mato Grosso do Sul (Brazil). It intends to build two central interconnected elements: a community healing, monitoring and reforestation centre, located in the Guarani-Kaiowá village; and an extension centre in NYC that will act as a direct mode of communication from indigenous communities to people and communities beyond Brazil’s borders. It foresees the construction of collective spaces for leisure, coexistence and indigenous health, reforestation areas and the insertion of technological devices for invasion monitoring. As an expansion of this project, the desire is to create in the future transmission points not only between the Guarani-Kaiowá community and the centre in NYC, but also covering other indigenous villages throughout the Brazilian territory and other cities in the world. Promoting networks and alliances between local spheres for a decolonial world to come, “Transarchitecture” focuses on Guarani Kaiowá's architecture knowledge associate to surveillance technologies to face genocide and ecological destruction.

Figure 5. Healing, monitoring and reforestation center Guarani-Kaiowá (Mato Grosso do Sul - Brazil) and Extension Center in NYC

“Transarchitecture” references the social sculpture concept of Joseph Beuys, who also viewed art as a power for social and environmental transformation. Beuys's expanded concept of art would act with the individuals and inside their bodies, that is, the work of art could make people aware that each human being is a potential creative being and capable of using this potential to shape society they belong to. Transarchitecture can be understood as a social sculpture because they are malleable and mouldable by human thought and knowledge. This project is quite extensive and, in addition to its embodiment of indigenous territories, foresees architectural and educational interference in Brooklyn schools, influenced by the Free School program, which has more control over how to conduct education; also it embraces architectural interferences in private homes of LGBTQIA+ people, influenced in Dörte Kuhlmann’s critique in "Gender Studies in Architecture - space, power and difference” (2013) due to its analysis of a range of feminist, psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and constructivist discourses to understand the problematics of gender and power in architectural and urban design. The actions of AAL wish to create gaps in the dominant power system in order to enable the emergence of subversive thinking, repositioning bodies and discourses and promoting social change in favour of a new humanity. Since 2007, AAL produces two important anarchist art and literature festivals, the NYC Anarchist Art Festival and the NYC Anarchist Book Fair, which hosts over 60 exhibitors including publishers, writers, designers, artists, musicians and other activists and include performance, art, music, film, readings and a wide range of workshops and panels. At the NYC Anarchist Book Fair festival, theorists are encouraged to deepen their reflections on contemporary anarchism, decolonialism and queer feminism theories in order to acquire the methodological-theoretical rigor and complexity necessary to understand and transform the present.

From 1960 onwards, a new range of methodologies, centred in intersectional, anarchist, queer- feminist, postcolonial studies, have emerged in an attempt to break with historicist narratives of Western culture and its globalisation project. A wide-spread mobilisation and organisation of social movements have occurred, which, especially from the 21st century onwards, have become reflected in artistic collectives and theoretical writings in the fields of art history and aesthetics. This project seeks to rescue at the theoretical level the political role of anarchism and women, expanding the framework of post-anarchism and female

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empowerment through queer, intersectional and decolonial complementarity. My methodological framework is based on a constructive approach to the formation of social and subjective identity for the resistant mechanisms of change, as first articulated in the post-structuralist work of Michel Foucault (1978), Gilles Deleuze (1988), Félix Guattari (1981, 1988, 1996) and Suely Rolnik (1996), and later expanded upon in the feminist/queer work of Judith Butler and Paul B. Preciado (2018), in the post-anarchism of Saul Newman (2011), Jamie Heckert (2011), Richard Cleminson (2011) and Allan Antliff (1998, 2002, 2003), in the intersectionality of Stuart Hall (1997), Anthony Giddens (1986), Judith Butler (2017) and Ange-Marie Hancock (2015), in the decolonial thinking of Walter Mignolo (2000), Orlando Fals Borda's criticisms (1978, 1987, 2015), and Enrique Dussel (1995). At the intersections of art and politics, the criticisms of Jacques Rancière (2013), Grant H. Kester (2011), Nicolas Bourriaud (2009) and Nato Thompson (2014) are relevant. These theories will serve to systematise the information already produced and support the development of my research. Departing from these border knowledge areas to think about AAL'art is justified due to the fact that their artworks are positioned in a symbolic crossroad of subjective identity and social disobedience to imperialism and to modern hegemonic project of rationality, patriarchy and colonialism. By studying their artworks, my project wishes to draw on current frontiers debates of resistance to then contribute to the new art history and aesthetics.

Anarko Art Lab is a collective of new-media, visual artists, performers, musicians, dancers and genre benders that was in residence at The Living Theater.

For years has been conducting monthly experimental, interdisciplinary art happenings. The collective grew to be a large amorphous group that presented monthly live events ;

we create a CONCEPT and it becomes a LIVE, collaborative, multi-media art experience that is immersive and participatory. The Anarko Art Lab has grown into a vibrant community exchanging and experimenting with ideas about art, equality, collective anarchy in action.