This assignment made me reflect on a seminar I took called “Poetics of the Unsayable”. In this seminar we constantly reflected on experiences that are ‘unsayable’; that is, those experiences that cannot be translated into words because words cannot be found to give justice to the emotions of the experience. Not because there is a lack of will; but because there is a lack of justice. In class we always returned to Adorno’s phrase “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz”. I keep going back to this statement and I am still not clear if there ever can be poetry or art after such horrific moments, and if there is, I do not know if it will be effective. The only thing that I believe now is that if there is art after such situations, it may have to fissure the traditional system. With this I mean, why would artists adhere to a system that has challenged or destroyed them? For example, I have been interested for a time in Germany’s counter-monuments after the Holocaust. Monuments traditionally have had nationalistic themes, and in a “counter-monument logic”, they are authoritarian because they give you one sole version of the past and thus tell you how and who to remember. Additionally, monuments reduce the audience to a passive spectator. For this reason, counter-monuments creators have tried to be ethically clear, but aesthetically ambiguous.
I honestly do not know if SEDOAC has been actively and constantly engaged with art in this way but I do know that they at least once engaged with art as a form of resistance and to make visible the struggles of domestic workers and migrants. For example, this year SEDOAC worked with the Italian poet and essayist Gian Maria Annovi and Collagist Ginexín, in the creation of his poetic installation titled Self-Seas: Retratos del Mar. It was exhibited in Matadero (a cultural center in Madrid) this summer, though I didn’t get to see it because I found out about it two weeks too late. Annovi created an imaginary universe that is supposed to resemble the inside of a ship in the middle of the Mediterranean full of migrants with hope of a better life. To recreate this imaginary boat Annovi contacted migrants in Madrid to get to know their experiences, but also to make them the protagonists and in some sense, co-artists, of the project. Through the voices and imaginary passports created by some migrants themselves, the artists created this visual and sonorous space full of emotion. SEDOAC’s members participated by creating their emotional passports with objects and pictures that are very intimate to them. Following Adorno’s line of thought, Gian Maria Annovi was trying to grapple with the possibility of evaluating poetically a space which is persistently dealing with death, displacement, fear, and nostalgia. Additionally, he was trying to (re)conceptualize the “Mediterranean as a transnational, mestizo, multi-denominational, and multicultural space”. Instead of observing it as the barrier between the global North and the global South. I would have loved to see this exhibit and I would love to know what the women from SEDOAC think about the final result.
Links to details from the exhibit:
https://www.arteinformado.com/agenda/f/self-seas-retratos-del-mar-171087
https://larueca.info/selfseas-retratos-del-mar/
This is a link to one of SEDOAC’s women talking about the passport she created:
https://twitter.com/NavesMatadero/status/1133382072347840512
The exhibit is SO great. Like you, I’d be interested in hearing whether unlocking this creative way of narrating the self through visual and installation art was meaningful in some incomparable way for those who participated. In New York, there is participatory art everywhere and a lot of it is eye-opening, inspiring, and playful. Some of it, on the other hand, seems to be utterly ephemeral. Art does not have to last, nor does its impact, but I imagine that when it comes to social movements, these creative activities do need to offer something distinctive that no amount of (rational) conversation or politicking can. A couple of other thoughts….First, have you heard or read much about Afrofuturism and its impact on POC organizing in the U.S.? You might find it really interesting. (Here’s an example: https://www.amazon.com/Octavias-Brood-Science-Fiction-Movements/dp/1849352097) And, last, it seems to me — quite the opposite from Adorno, who tended toward cynicism — that art and poetry — whatever forms they take — are all we have left after unfathomable waves of human suffering. The unsayable IS art.