Third Text 184/185 Sept-Nov 2023 Volume 37 Issues 5-6
| Weight | 0.285000 |
|---|---|
| Binding | Magazine |
| Pages | 84 |
| Date Published | 2024-03-27 00:00:00 |
| ISBN13/Barcode | 9770952882030 |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Third Text |
Anthropocene as Capitalocene: Soil, Land and Territory in the Artistic Research of Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán 545–564
Cristian Nae
If the Anthropocene designates humanity’s environmental footprint, the Capitalocene underlines the economic and political premises of the current climate crisis, tied to long-term colonial dispossession and exploitation of ‘cheap nature’. The current article explores the matrix of violence embedded in the Capitalocene as it is appears in the research-based critical art projects produced by Romanian artists Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán. I show how, focusing on devastated or fabricated landscapes, as well as on contested sites of conflict from the Global South that are often camouflaged or disguised under eco-veils, Benera and Estefán’s art practice rethinks post-socialism from a planetary perspective. I also claim that their body of work, which employs archival and cartographic formats of visualisation, proposes an alternative epistemological matrix, directed against the global exercise of environmental and political violence.
The Implied Who: Recognition Attempts in Postcolonial Films 565–580
Mario Ulloa
This analysis applies theories of recognition explicated by Frantz Fanon, Nancy Fraser and Pierre Bourdieu towards the semiotic analysis of ‘Le Joli Mai‘ (1963), ‘The Battle of Algiers‘ (1966) and ‘La Haine‘ (1995). This article argues that embodied affective histories (constituting the habitus) seek to be validated and recognised at the level of the individual, the collective group identity and the nation-state. The films analysed constitute attempts at recognition within the global Bourdieusian field of cinema through means of semiotic communication. In doing so, this project hopes to analyse film from a social action perspective, focusing on the effects of the film with audience interaction in mind, and how to explain the role audiences and publics have within the conceptualisation and execution of semiotic communication within the context of a postcolonial film.
‘Since They Can’t Put Venezuela in Their Suitcase, They Take Mosaic Tiles from the Maiquetía Airport’: Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Kineticism in the Time of Migration 581–600
Natalia Sassu Suarez Ferri
In the process of displacement caused by the current political and economic crises in Venezuela, the Caracas airport has become a place of powerful significance. The floor of the Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía features ‘Additive Colour‘ (1974–1978), a mosaic by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923−2019). This public work has acquired exceptional symbolic meanings of political migration due to traveller rituals, documented in newspapers and on social media. Migrants are taking tiles of the airport floor as personal memory triggers of the democratic Venezuela that commissioned Kinetic art. This article analyses how these airport tiles, and Kineticism more generally, have come to acquire meanings of collective memory and national identity for Venezuelans and explains how and why Cruz-Diez’s work has become an intrinsic part of Venezuelan culture.
Crisis and Collectives Shaping Art Events: From Events that Matter to Events that Care 601–615
Julie Ren, Charlotte Matter, Rosa Sancarlo and Virginia Marano
Art events like biennials and large-scale exhibitions typically strive to address urgent, timely issues; curatorial approaches respond to various crises from the environment and war to Indigenous rights – notwithstanding the way existing exhibition structures often reproduce exploitative relations or other forms of everyday precarity. In our analysis of crisis, we eschew the concept of crisis as a disruptive event with a clear end for a framing of crisis as a condition. Especially for art events on the ‘periphery’, working under conditions of crisis is hardly new. We investigate the collective practices of three artist collectives, ruangrupa (Indonesia), Womanifesto (Thailand) and Atis Rezistans/Ghetto Biennale (Haiti). In practices like sharing resources, centring non-productivity and giving attention to nourishment and health, these collectives are reshaping art events from events that matter in terms of their pursuits of relevance towards events that care.
Kang Yong Suk’s ‘Dongducheon Commemorative Portraits’: The Politics of Banality and the Lived Experience of Blackness in 1980s South Korea 616–634
Haely Chang
‘Dongducheon Commemorative Portraits’ series features the nightlife entertainment of black American GIs and Korean prostitutes in the city of Dongducheon, the home of a prominent camptown in South Korea. Since Kang published the series in 1988, it served as a metaphor of the unequal relationship between South Korea and the United States forged amidst Cold War politics. Deviating from this indexical interpretation, this article restores Kang’s photographs back to the belated moment of private commemoration, highlighting the racial specificity of the sitters in segregated entertainment venues. This re-temporalisation reveals unexpected banality and silence pervasive in the photos, disconnected from the zeal and hubbub rampant in the Seoul Olympics and the Minjung movement during the 1980s. The photos feature Dongducheon as a refuge where minor feelings could remain untouched, highlighting overlooked forms of solidarity among the marginalised figures − black GIs and Korean prostitutes − at the crossroads of racial discrimination and misogyny.