New on Mn Artists, the Walker’s arts writing platform highlighting the local artists community, is a collection of articles on the topic of violence designed by the writer and editor Christina Schmid. Here Schmid reflects on the series, which unfolded over the emergence of a pandemic and an uprising—casting the theme, as well as its connection to the body and healing, in a new light.
When this series launched, COVID-19 was a distant threat. George Floyd was alive.
Protesters had not yet taken to the streets, again, all across the nation, across the world, to proclaim that Black Lives Matter. Lake Street had not burned. The homeless, evicted and displaced, had not yet found temporary sanctuary in Minneapolis city parks. This was before the encampments descended into a thick fog of drug deals, multiple rapes, assaults, and threats of arson. In Powderhorn, we learned to tell the difference between gun shots and fireworks.
When this series launched, we lived in a different world, locally and globally: before masks, sheltering-in-place, quarantines. Pandemic-fueled economic hardship had not yet reached desperate proportions.
But the time of not-yet is over.
In the United States of Individualism, a novel coronavirus highlights the horrendous deficits in ethics, care and compassion, for each other.
Denialism is a form of violence: it actively endangers others, whether by casting doubt on the science of global warming, ignoring the wounds of settler colonialism, making light of the injustices of racism, or belittling a global pandemic.
Since this series launched, the questions that must be asked have changed.
How to respond to such violence?
Whose voices need to be heard at a time like this?
How can we hope to dismantle structural, institutional, systemic violence when we seem incapable of caring for each other and respect each other’s complexities and contradictions? How do we hold on to shared goals and ideals in the harsh light of incompatible ideologies?
When do we suspend judgment and focus on common ground—to end injustice, to house the displaced, to curb the spread of a virus lethal to many, to save the land and water we all depend on—and when is it urgent that we do judge rather than accept, tolerate, and compromise?
Creativity is another form of open space, whose very nature is to disturb, disrupt, and ‘bring us to tenderness’.
I am thinking about the words that come before all else.
I am thinking about those whose bodies have been violated for far too long; those who put their bodies on the streets in acts of courage and bravery, those who march and shout when others are incapacitated; those who cannot take to the streets.
I am thinking of witnesses rendered speechless when their voices are needed the most. The true witness is one who does not want to witness. That is the reason for the privilege accorded to their speech. It is the privilege of the speech that obliges them to speak despite themselves. What are our obligations to speak, to stay silent so others can be heard? To cede space, land, comfort?
I am thinking about the need for new protocols of forgiveness and reconciliation: victims and violators and witnesses, willing and unwilling. How do we hold each other? How do we hold each other accountable? If trauma is indeed everywhere, the question of how we might move backwards to move forward, or better yet, sideways, has never been more urgent to figure out.
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Movement and the refusal to move have been a constant in the texts commissioned for this series: moving beyond the constraints of the normative, seeking solidarity and building community, unearthing stories held in stone, in bodies of water, and under the skin.
The body—disciplined, directed, and undone; exhausted, resilient, resistant, and at rest—has been ever-present in these texts.
Remembering the small pockets of agency that remain even and especially in the face of overpowering systems of oppression, runs like a thread, a lifeline, through the words of the artists who contributed to the series. What they all share: experiences with trauma. A need for healing.
What is missing from their chorus: the voice of the perpetrator. The victim speaks with the authority of the wounded; the witness speaks with the obligation of having seen. But the perpetrator’s silence is loud.
In Rwanda, they say a person’s silence can be heard as a lion’s roar.
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European history offers few models for communal healing. “I think therefore I am,” Rene Descartes’ famous dictum, encapsulates the problem. The body: stripped of wisdom, deeply distrusted.
My body is a compass and it does not lie.
In South Africa, after the Apartheid regime came undone, the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation conceived of a different approach. The commission, led by Desmond Tutu, traveled the country to hold communal gatherings. One fellow traveler describes the work of healing like this: These events were framed by collective singing and dancing. Witnesses recounted unspeakable atrocities that had been inflicted on them and their families. When they became overwhelmed, Tutu would interrupt their testimony and lead the entire audience in prayer, song, and dance until the witnesses could contain their sobbing and halt their physical collapse. This enabled participants to pendulate in and out of reliving their horror and eventually find words to describe what had happened to them.
The art of titration. The art of retreat. Bodies act as resonance chambers in communal healing.
In Rwanda, following the unthinkable trauma of genocide, traditions of healing collided. Well-intentioned mental health workers, trained in Europe and North America, failed to understand local practices. One account describes how they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about the bad things that had happened to them. …Their practice did not involve being outside in the sun…there was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again when you’re depressed, and you’re low, and you need to have your blood flowing. There was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy.
The seclusion of talk therapy does not allow for bodies to move, to feel their way through pain, to re-discover the joy deep inside; art does.
Ain Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Remember to Exhale: For it Does Not belong Within YOU (2020). Silkscreen collaborative print, the title of an artist commission from London-based gallery Studio Voltaire, part of six-month engagement program called Desperate Living. Printed at Sister’s in Print founder Aida Wilde’s studio, Hackney Wick, London. Green serif text on orange background reads, “Remember to Exhale: For it Does Not belong Within YOU.”
The piece is a reflection on the role the exhalation has on relaxing your being and nervous system and the process of letting go.
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Art has a habit of tearing holes into the fabric of common sense, that stupefying cloth that too often veils the violence of the taken-for-granted.
Art as the counter-intuitive, as that which refuses to make sense.
Art as a tool to rearrange the visible and invisible, to create new communities of sense: where what makes sense is sensed rather than ideologically overdetermined.
Art as a means to mediate complexity rather than ossify entrenched points of view.
Art as a form of creative protest against how we habitually parse the world: a simple cut, and then another one. What if we focused on what connects us rather than what separates us?
Art as a proposal for what world we want to live in:
If every work of art must nowadays implicitly answer the question “What is art?” (i.e. what it proposes as the concept of art), then an image of society can be derived indirectly from that same work of art. This is not just a matter of acknowledging the political aspect of every artwork. It also means
that we must make an effort of the imagination as viewers of art; must think or imagine what kind of society this artwork recommends, how it conceives of its social and aesthetic ideals, how it organizes itself structurally, what are its modes of perception and action, its actors and its beneficiaries. This could be a test for every artwork, a mental exercise: what would society be like after this work of art?
Art as a way to weaponize rather than squander privilege: a weapon is a tool forged in anticipation of conflict. Can a weapon be an instrument of non-violence?
Art as infiltration and invitation to step into discomfort and embrace disturbance: What is the most uncomfortable thing you can do?
And then there is love. Love Poems. Love Story. Where Love is Illegal.
I used to think that the most anti-capitalist gestures left had to do with love, particularly love poetry: to write a love poem and give it to the one you desired, seemed to me a radical resistance. But now I see I was wrong.
The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.
Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt.
Perhaps the adage still holds true that a time of emergency is also always a time of emergence.
It is my hope that the voices gathered here are part of what continues to emerge in this aftermath.
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The italicized sections are citations from the following sources, listed in the order they first appear in the text:
Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds. New York: Picador, 2012.
Jacques Ranciere, “The Intolerable Image.” The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London, New York: Verso, 2009.
Terry Tempest Williams, Erosion. Essays on Undoing. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2019.
Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Viking, 2014.
Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2016.
Bojana Cvejic and Ana Vujanovic, “The Crisis of the Social Imaginary and Beyond” (manuscript)
Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory.” Mask Magazine. http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory
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Articles Commissioned by Guest Editor Christina Schmid
Performer, producer, pro Domme, and kinky community organizer Mistress Mara considers BDSM as a somatic and symbolic reconfiguration of violence, and how it offers tools for accessing agency in situations of powerlessness.
Interdisciplinary artist Lamia Abukhadra delivers a meditation on settler colonial violence that cuts between multiple perspectives—giving voice to limestone “witness stones” as a temporary archive, material witness, and intimate participant in the creation and destruction of Palestinian life.
Visual artist, writer, arts activist, and community organizer Shanai Matteson unearths stories of work and water on Minnesota’s Iron Range, weaving her own and other women’s memories to excavate the consequences of a culture of extraction, and untangle what happens when bodies are mined as resources.
“I Am Desperate”: Some Notes on Institutional Violence
Sculptor, architect, and interdisciplinary artist Pedram Baldari denounces the structural factors that devalue the labor of “artists and educators”, with special attention to the precarity of adjunct faculty, the inequality of institutions, and what happens when the value of people’s existence is measured by their achievement.
Eating earth, cleansing bones: Notes on a family exhumed
Moving image artist R. Yun contemplates the violence buried in multiracial family lineages, intimate misrecognition and the anthropological gaze, internalized racism and the politics of renaming oneself.
REST: A Transatlantic Reflection
A transatlantic collective of artists, working between the UK and Minneapolis, responds to the idea and practice of rest: as an antidote, a rebellion, and a refusal.
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