Creativity Is the Key to Resistance

This opinion piece comes from Salzburg Global’s current session;?On the Front Lines: Artists at Risk, Artist Who Risk.

Yesterday upon arrival, I did as I was told, and I started to engage in different conversations with people.

I thought I was starting with easy questions:?“What is your name?”, “where are you from?”,?(a challenging question for many of us.) and “what do you do?”

Very rapidly, I heard the following answer: "I am an artist at risk."

And just like that, in the middle of coffee and strudels, what seemed to be the provocative title of this gathering became immediately true and urgent.?

I am an artist at risk means a lot.

I am an artist at risk is a call for action.

I must be honest; thinking about risk is not something I usually do, and as a matter of fact, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, a little uneasy.?I am not a natural risk taker or at least I was not, until a few months ago when I decided to quit my job, a powerful curatorial position in a large organization in my home country, Chile.?

The formal answer to this “big quit”, was the pandemic, and maybe my personal systemic change. At some point, a millennial feeling inside me. At some point a gorgeous boyfriend inviting me to live with him in Buenos Aires.

There was also an unformal answer for this transition. I was tired of being an insider, a gatekeeper.

Yesterday we heard a lot about this. About how institutions and institutionalism sometimes stand as an oxymoron as we feel protected and safeguarded, but at the same time oppressed by invisible barriers.?Yesterday we named some of these barriers, we spoke about the relationship with authority. We spoke about content. We spoke about funding. At some point, here in the room, the group inherently decided we liked the word “independent.” At that point I thought we had reached an agreement as a group. But of course, we had not.?

Someone stated that “independent” can also be a dangerous word in some contexts. And then, someone raised a hand and asked: "Independent from what? Is there such a thing as artistic freedom? Is there such a freedom when we depend on systemic social mechanisms to work in the arts?"

We depend on political and religious freedom of course, but also in democratic states we seem to confront some other challenges and paradigms such as racism, populism, unfair working conditions, gender discrimination, money and even aesthetics.

We spoke about the importance of this “decolonial” moment, about how institutions are being triggered today by artists and audiences into ending different forms of supremacy. We, of course, made a distinction within different forms of institutions because as someone also said: “in order to challenge institutions, you need to respect them.”

Being a part of these institutions means respect, but there was also in the group an open invitation to “hack them”, to understand them, to act as promoters of change.

Yesterday we had a good exchange, but some ideas might have been missing in the conversation. These ideas need to include some rearrangement in our positions as well: we need to include ourselves in the middle of the problem in order to be able to find new solutions.

Even though government authorities and institutionalized models will probably continue to be the main group of violators of artistic freedom, imposing censorship practices is something that has increasingly being taken on by other actors, including private individuals and the artistic communities themselves.?

We need to reflect on social media as a tool of criticism and power, we need to address cancelation among peers, we need to think over market censorship imposing models of actions in the arts and also, we urgently need to question our colonialized idea of “quality” as fixed agreement in the arts world and in our institutions.?

We are invited today to continue all these conversations, and as I told you at the beginning, I always do as I am told. So, as I was asked for some provocations in the conversation, I immediately thought we should also feel invited to speak about these topics as insiders, as actors that are responsible for finding new solutions but also as professionals that are accountable for the models and paradigms that we have allowed in our own spaces and artistic practices.?

We must acknowledge our privileges, the fact that we are in this room, in Austria. The fact that we have the personal economic means to stop for five days and be able to have these conversations. The fact that we have a certain type of standardized “education” or knowledge that allows us to debate in these forms. The fact that we have a shared language to do that, because in some of our territories there are brilliant people that deserved to be heard but unfortunately the “epistemic injustice” of communication is preventing their voices to take part in these conversations.?

As Gabriela Mistral, a famous Chilean poet once said: “Speech is our second possession, after the soul.”

To finish I must make a statement:?

We are always outsiders, we are the rebels in the room, even when we think we are not. Culture has always been on the border, everywhere. The arts have always been and will always keep being a threat to our social systems.?

As someone said yesterday: “Creativity is the key to resistance.”

Pamela López?is an arts manager and independent consultant in Latin America. She was most recently the director of programming and audiences at Gabriela Mistral Cultural Centre (GAM) - a performing arts space located in Santiago, Chile. Pamela holds a master's degree in arts administration from Columbia University (2011), undertaken with a Fulbright Fellowship for postgraduate studies and a national grant (Becas Chile). Pamela is an advocate and researcher in performing arts and management issues and serves as a lecturer at several universities in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay.

Ref:https://www.salzburgglobal.org/news/latest-news/article/creativity-is-the-key-to-resistance