installation and participatory performance

Zavé Martohardjono and Lilian Mengesha.

Zavé Martohardjono

manifestroom is a conceptual “action headquarters”. It serves as a meeting place for contemporary political needs and is a space for interaction with historical documents from radical and artistic movements from around the globe. manifestroom is at once an archive and a place of creation.

For manifestroom, the artists have built several structures, called “nodes”, within a room of the Ellen Gallery. There are a variety of documents available to visitors in the space: manifestos, speeches, lyrics, and bylaws from twentieth and twenty-first century separatist movements and radical contemporary artists, choreographers, and musicians. Manifestos include those of the Zapatistas, the American Indian Movement, ACT UP, the Quebec sovereignty movement, Idle No More, Yvonne Rainer, Rebecca Morris, and Marvin Gaye. Over the course of a week, gallery visitors are invited by the artists to enter the “nodes” and follow specific prompts for experimental and performative actions using the available texts. During designated hours of the week, Martohardjono and Mengesha will also perform movement actions that interrogate, deconstruct, and reconstruct the texts. Three typewriters in the center of manifestroom, fed with a seemingly endless loop of typing paper, serve as a writing and transcription station to capture much of the action that takes place in manifestroom. Ultimately, by the end of the installation, a product will emerge from the various collaborations and ruminations shared by all participants: an entirely new manifesto recorded onto a single loop of paper.

Mengesha and Martohardjono conceptualized manifestroom as a playful revival of the radical politics and thinking that brought their generation to its current moment—one both shaped by legacy and marked by political memory-loss. Interested in what remains and what has been lost of radical movements and thinkers, Mengesha and Martohardjono aim to create a space for participants to define, redefine, and demand that their contemporary needs be met while engaging historical legacies and voices. Inspired by their catch phrase, “We’ve been waiting for the future for as long as we can remember,” the artists describe manifestroom as a place where past and future can be brought to the present.

manifestroom is the second collaboration between Lilian Mengesha and Zavé Martohardjono. Their first participatory installation, created at Collage Festival in Philadelphia in 2011, entitled autogeography: word play, invited audience to construct a modern-day story of identity and belonging from fragments of text inspired by the Mahabharata. manifestroom continues the artists’ interest in finding ways to engage audience participation in narrative-building, deconstruction and recontextualization of historical text.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

zavemartohardjono.com
lilymengesha.com

Installation and participatory performance space

Created by Lois Weaver in collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency and presented in Montreal with the collaboration of Jo Palmer, designer and Joanna Donehower, dramaturg.

Campbell X Vue de la Library of Performing Rights à la Queen Mary University, London

An invitation to gather, converse, and peruse a growing collection of materials on performance and human right. A roving archive that collects materials, documents, and traces of performances that engage issues of social justice, the Library of Performing Rights is a playful and political appropriation of institutional space.

The Library brings together artists, activists and academics involved in performance and human rights work. As both archive and gathering place, the Library is a space for reflecting upon the significance of human rights in a time of war and globalization, for forging links between international and local communities, and for testing the innovative practices that might facilitate performance and human rights experimentation.

The portable, purpose-built architecture of the Library references old fashioned libraries, and includes shelves of books, daily newspapers and recent journals, a reading room, monitors for independent video viewing and web searching, as well as performances by librarian personae.

Visitors to the Library may bring materials to add to the collection throughout the Encuentro, or peruse previously archived materials from the Library’s installation in London, Vienna, and Brazil. During Library hours, visitors can also sit and gather at the Long Table dedicated to facilitating conversations between artists and activists, or participate in the Circulation Desk, a ventilating system for impromptu talks, screenings, and dialogues that spill out from the other Encuentro events.

The Library of Performing Rights is a quiet place to go and be for a while, but it is also a space to search for and find new stimulus or information, to find partners in dialogue, in struggle, and in creation.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

publicaddresssystems.org
publicaddresssystems.org/projects/the-library-of-performing-rights
splitbritches.wordpress.com
sed.qmul.ac.uk/staff/weaverl.html

Installation and exhibition

With Emory Douglas, once Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Caleb Duarte, Mia Eve Rollow, Saul Kak and EDELO (Where the United Nations Used to Be).

Zapantera Negra, Black Panther Artist Emory Douglas visits Caracol of Oventic, Encuentro 2012

At its peak in 1970, 139,000 copies of The Black Panther newsletter were distributed weekly throughout the US, Emory Douglas, the Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, filled its pages “illustrating conditions that made revolution seem necessary and constructing a visual mythology of power for people who felt powerless and victimized” while establishing a Black Panther aesthetic of Black Power and revolution.

In 1994 the Zapatistas uprising, a Mexican Indigenous movement from the southern state of Chiapas, produced and leveraged a different form of mass communication with the use of the image, the body, and instant communication through the use of the Internet. The distribution of actions, images and video spread throughout the world in real time bringing awareness while building solidarity for what the New York Times called the ‘the first post-modern revolution.” A struggle against neoliberalism, against 500 years of oppression, Zapatismo moved forward with banners waving image and hiding faces with text as poetry of their time for recognition.

The Black Panther and the Zapatista movements occurred in distinct cultural, political, and historical milieus. Nonetheless, the two share a common appreciation of the power of the image and the written word to build their respective social movements into personal, collective, transformative, and public experiences. In contrast to the strong self-definition established and disseminated by these two movements via pertinent media channels, today’s multimedia, plugged-in landscape seems to promote the opposite development.

Zapantera Negra gathers the visual residue of four encounters, beginning in 2012 and ending in 2014, between the Black Panthers and Zapatistas guided by the works and presence of Emory Douglas. For this encounter, Emory teamed up with Zapatista women embroidery collectives, Zapatista farmers and painters, and with local artist, activist, and musicians to create new works that reflect and celebrate these two powerful movements. Each movement presents a distinct position in terms of cultural and political milieus, yet both build from a shared understanding of the power of art. From public interventions, installation, video art, performance, mural painting, lectures, and living and working with Zapatista families, we present to you a collection of works ignited collectively by the public’s urge and necessity to demonstrate, protests, and create. And in times of much revolutionary fever and economic inequality, we feel it is important to share what art can and has done to create change and break societies notions of normality.

caleb duarte
EDELO (Where the United Nations Used to BE)
Chiapas, Mexico

ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION

calebduarte.org
edelo.org
miaeverollow.org