Dear people

Dear people,

I’m not quite sure what I’m doing here. Invited to reflect by the host of this house (thank you Miguel Ángel) I confess that, it’s been while since I became “obsessed” with contemporary art. Although my thing is more recent, there are days when the existential dimension of art opens up a direct path to the ultimate goal of this pursuit and I am convinced that those of us that are dedicated to it have the power to change the small world around us, just as those involved in teaching, cooking and politics do. Even the smallest contribution to connecting someone with beauty, with their own sensitivity, with meaning or sense of being and existing at a specific time and place perhaps as members of a tribe feels worthwhile. On other days, everything seems like an absolute absurdity; I don’t understand (nor I do share) the commodification codes of what I consider a common good, and I can’t find a way to address my concern about this vast encompassing world, which seems too big for me to even figure out where to begin.

 

I can imagine that almost all of us, dear people, seek to feel seen, heard and approved in whatever we want to do and be in life. I also think that, in power struggles, we tend to defend ourselves from a place of pain. From that pain of not receiving understanding or respect at the right moment, from someone who repeatedly experiences abuse, abandonment, or neglect, from someone who has never had a role model to learn the qualities of consideration, tolerance or empathy, even in disagreement. Since our most automatic reactions are often reflections of those situations that hurt us, it is inevitable that in conflicts we revert to old feelings and get stuck in a self-centered place. If it’s true that a power vacuum does not exist, when we are in that position, whether on one side or the other, we do not think about other people, nor do we try to understand their motives, their feelings or their deeper reasons. We only think about me, me, me. There is no otherness. 

 

If there is one thing I have discovered about art during this period of dedication, it is to realize the cloudy and soporific state of my own egocentrism, from which I want to get afloat each time. When I manage to do so, even if only briefly, my struggle shifts from to wanting to be understood to trying to understand. Because the privilege of being heard (or read here) to me it comes with the responsibility to listen, to ask, to show interest. Ultimately, curiosity leads me to understand that seeking for approval or understanding might not be as necessary anymore. Perhaps this is the true value of contemporary art: that it doesn’t matter if it’s misunderstood. 

 

Sam Gilliam’s (1933-2022) mother, who observed her son drawing on the ground in his hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi, was advised to provide him with paper and colors after noticing his talent. As a child, he wanted to be comic book artist, and as an adult, he thought that would be the closest he would come to what is now known as political art. In an interview a couple of years before his death, when asked if abstract art could be political, Gilliam replied something like this: “Abstraction challenges me, messes with me, it confronts me. It manages to convince me that what I think is not all there is. It’s a constant challenge to understand something that is entirely different from what I think, and I realize that just because it resembles what I believed does not mean I have an understanding of it. If I have a problem, I need to figure out how to solve it. That only comes with listening and practice.”

 

An internal mandate pushes me to lift an invisible curtain each day to openly share what I understand as the politics of art: a path of knowledge, emancipation and collective building. I work with artists who, in very different ways observe, experiment, play, argue, translate and transform. There is one idea and a one or thousand ways to carry it out. Artists who push their own limits and give the rest of us time to push ours. I find myself fascinated by subtle forms, places where you need to look twice to see, words that resonate long after they were spoken, perhaps initially whispered. I rest in non-literalism, ambiguity comforts me, I try not to entirely dispel doubt. Can these forms be considered political art? I continue to think about the politics of art in my small room, where the motivation to produce a form (and share it) is as important as the conditions under which it is created. That is where I want to be and invest my effort, where absurdity and meaning shake hands for me, where previous/prior individual experience and immediate shared experience are sufficient in themselves. At the risk of seeming timid or fussy, I choose not to uphold grand political principles to justify myself in this craft, because I cannot guarantee that my actions won’t have contrary effects to those initially intended. I only know, very deeply, that I choose to move between honorable and the useful, between listening and practice, and that this is enough for me. 

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Laura González Palacios (1980) has a degree in journalism and publishing, with specific training in creativity and organizational innovation. In 2018 she founded Chiquita Room, a small contemporary art center in Barcelona that functions as a gallery, artist residency, productor and curator of projects, after having started the publishing project of artist books Chiquita Ediciones in 2013. Her professional background comes from the strategic communication of cultural entities and events such as the Photographic Social Vision Foundation and the World Press Photo exhibition in Barcelona, the Ohlalà Francophone film festival, Barcelona Creative Commons Film Festival and DOCfield Documentary Photography Festival.