About worlding public cultures
Montreal Team (Faculty): May Chew (Concordia University), Barbara Clausen (Université du Québec à Montréal), Analays Alvarez Hernandez (Université de Montréal), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Maya Rae Oppenheimer (Concordia University), Edith-Anne Pageot (Université du Québec à Montréal).
Research Coordinators: Varda Nisar (PhD student, Concordia University), Ashley Raghubir (MA student, Concordia University).
Working with universities, museums, and other cultural organizations, the transnational collaborative research project Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation seeks to reimagine cultural and educational institutions in order to better mobilize them as agents of social and political change that increase the understanding of global complexities. The project interrogates, from historical and contemporary perspectives, the concepts of “worlding” and “public cultures.” What does worlding mean and what is meant by public cultures? What are the implications of these entangled terms for the visual arts and global art histories? And, in this current moment of fear, anguish, and loss generated by the ongoing and future global effects of COVID-19 and racial injustice, what purpose does worlding public cultures serve? These are some of the Worlding Public Cultures (WPC) project’s guiding questions in an effort to multiply and decenter knowledge, narratives, and points of view.
“In this time of uncertainty and hyper-change, we need more than ever to think of the anticipatory – how to anticipate the future, to move from emergency to emergence,” said Alice Jim (Concordia University). “The arts are crucial to the efforts of imagining what the world’s future can be.”
Maya Rae Oppenheimer (Concordia University) adds that paying attention to how careful practice nestles alongside theoretical, anticipatory, imminent concerns is prevalent in these discussions. “Working through an ecosystem of intertwined futures is akin to mobilizing and empowering pedagogical moments that ricochet back and forth from the individual to the collective and back again; such exchanges are unfolding under new conditions, and the ability to pivot and to build upon imaginative, collaborative improvisations must be part of the work. This practice and rehearsal help us welcome lateral growth, tensile strengths and radical inertias for new work in spaces that are often hierarchical or pre-determined.”
Equally critical is an acknowledgement of, and responsiveness to, the existing systemic inequity and precarity that this period of crisis amplifies for QTBIPOC2S+ folks, artists, activists, independent arts and culture workers, and other marginalized communities. In response to the current context, the project aims to radically adapt its frame and modes of research and pedagogy so as to be informed by “compassion, humility, and a commitment to adaptive practice,” said Édith-Anne Pageot (Université du Québec à Montréal).
La crise sanitaire, la crise écologique et la crise politique commandent une profonde restructuration des régimes de pouvoir et de savoirs fondés sur le maillage productivité-colonialisme-patriarcat. Il ne suffit plus d’interroger le(s) contenu(s), mais il faut aussi interroger le(s) contenant(s), c’est-à-dire les approches, les méthodes, les structures, les hiérarchies, les catégories, les nomenclatures, etc., tout autant que l'individu ou l’entité qui effectue cette remise en question : Qui interroge ? Et d’où ? “Cette restructuration repose d’abord sur la reconnaissance de l’impérialisme cognitif de nos propres environnements de recherche, d’enseignement et des lieux de diffusion de l’art contemporain,” selon Pageot. Elle repose également sur un dialogue entre différentes postures épistémologiques. L’angle pluriversel et interversel de notre projet sollicite justement une production de connaissances à la croisée d’une multitude de traditions de pensées. “Par exemple, eu égard à la position géographique du Canada et à ses liens historiques avec l’Amérique latine et les Caraïbes, une des avenues privilégiées par notre équipe de chercheuses est celle de bâtir, avec ces régions, des réseaux d’échange académiques et artistiques, ainsi que de consolider ceux existants,” explique Analays Alvarez Hernandez (Université de Montréal). “Le projet préconise ainsi l'adoption d’incertitudes fécondes et de postures d’agentivité et de déterritorialisation, en déplaçant notamment les lieux d’énonciation, ” affirment Alvarez Hernandez et Pageot.
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Worlding Public Cultures is a project of the Transnational and Transcultural Art and Culture Exchange (TrACE). The TrACE network brings together an extraordinary range of geographical and interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars, curators, artists and early-career researchers.
The Montreal WPC team consists of Alice Ming Wai Jim, May Chew and Maya Rae Oppenheimer from Concordia University, Analays Alvarez Hernandez from the Université de Montréal, and Barbara Clausen and Édith-Anne Pageot from the Université du Québec à Montréal, with graduate students Varda Nisar and Ashley Raghubir.
National and international partners and team members also include: Birgit Hopfener, Ruth Phillips, Carmen Robertson and Ming Tiampo (co-principal investigator) from Carleton University; Paul Goodwin (co-principal investigator) from University of the Arts London, Chiara de Cesari from Amsterdam University; Monica Juneja and Franziska Koch from Heidelberg University; Toshio Watanabe from the University of East Anglia and Wayne Modest from Vrije University. The TrACE network collaborates with major research institutions and art museums, including ici Berlin, the National Gallery of Canada, Tate Modern and Tropenmuseum Amsterdam.
SSHRC and the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) provided the Canadian portions of this international grant.
Social Innovation Grant from the Trans-Atlantic Platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities (T-AP)