A Poetics of Care
2023 Bailey Morris-Eck Lecture
The Bailey Morris-Eck Lectureship on International Media, Economics, and Trade was established in 2004 through the generosity of Bailey Morris-Eck and her family. The Bailey Morris-Eck Lecture is delivered during programs held by Salzburg Global Seminar.
This year, Pablo Martínez Zárate, a long-time participant, cheerleader, and faculty member of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change delivered the lecture titled,
‘Art and Horizons of Possibility: towards a poetics of care’.
It is an honor to be standing here today with the enormous responsibility of sharing some of my thoughts on the world we inhabit together –
I want to stress this idea of inhabiting together, of coexisting on this planet (at least for now), one that is — indeed — full of dreadful challenges.
But even if our challenges are dreadful, this does not mean that we have to turn away from — or hide — our fears.
According to Paulo Freire, being struck by fear can also be a sign that we have dreams — dreams of transforming injustice, violence, oppression.
He says that if we are afraid, it might be because we have something to fight for.
That if fear runs through our veins, it is because we dream of making this a better world — for everyone, not only for us as individuals.
He distinguishes the fear felt by those in power, who see their privileges threatened, from the fear of those that feel the sufferings of the world, the struggles of the oppressed, and want to change them.
If we think about it, the first group reacts to their fear of being deprived of their comforts through oppression and control; whereas the second, reacts to their fear of violence and injustice, through liberation and communal support.
I want to believe that all of us, even if we are quite privileged only by the fact that we are here, today, belong to the second group — the ones that want to change the world.
The key, according to Freire, is not to rationalize our fear, not to let it paralyze us either, but to name it, accept it and transform it into a creative force.
And so, I stand here full of fear, fear not only for myself, my partner Isabel, our five-year-old son — Teo -, our daughter — Lía — who was born only in January in one of the countries with the highest women and journalists’ murder rates in the world.
I stand here vulnerable, filled with fear for all of us and the future that awaits us.
Nevertheless, echoing Freire again, I stand here not merely shaken by fear, but more determinately, I stand here full of dreams.
I want to share some — at least a couple — of these dreams — and fears — with you.
I am you and you are me.
I want to start with a provocation.
This manifested as an honest question when I was preparing this lecture.
How capable are we today of sitting together, in a room like this,
infused with a fascinating and multilayered history,
surrounded by the echoes of so many formidable (and not so formidable) people that have passed through this place,
and listen to a person, in this — unfortunate — case, myself,
speak his mind and heart for a little more — or less — than an hour,
and do so without drifting to ticktock, instagram, twitter, facebook, email, whatsapp, telegram or even our next research article?
If we end up turning away from the here and now (most of us do at some point) how are those online spaces related with what is happening here today?
That is, how is life inside this gallery transformed?
And how is the life flowing inside those spaces touched by what is happening here today?
How porous are the boundaries between these two realms of reality?
Can we shake the “status” of digital hegemony by a critical use of technology?
Again, what is of my words,
and my feelings,
and your thoughts on my words,
and your feelings,
and our impressions of today’s singular, unrepeatable atmosphere in this Gallery, inside this Palace,
- what is of all these life intensities — when they clash with the ever-overflowing digital maelstroms of these privatized spheres of communication that govern our daily routines?
What happens to our bodies?
I want us to participate in a small experiment;
first, let’s turn our attention — right now — to our mobile (please interact for a few moments on our preferred social network or whichever platform we want) — ready? -
and now let us turn our attention to the window (again, take some time to look outside, find a tree, a mountain, a castle to look at, and surrender to the pleasure of observation) — ok, good –
I could ask you now to look at each other in the eyes — but I won’t -
what was the difference in terms of how our thoughts and feelings — our breath and our pulse — manifested — the different ways of embodying sense and meaning and all the relationships with what’s around us?
It is not merely a matter of paying heed to my words, but also of being here with our own thoughts and feelings, with our reactions to today’s events — here — now.
It means making sense of our bodily experience;
caring for what we feel and think;
it is about detecting and healing what needs to be healed.
We are supposed to be gathered at this year’s Academy to imagine futures.
How is our imagination affected by our constant diversion to other places alien to those occupied by our bodies?
What is the role, in the building of fairer futures, held by our position inside these interaction spaces that define our daily media consumption?
What’s the character of our imagination under this context?
How does it take shape?
What figures arise?
Furthermore, how is our capacity of being present — together — related to the character of the public spaces that we are all responsible for?
Aren’t these public spaces of interaction, like the one we have today but also when we share at table at dinner, a seat in a public transport, a spot on a town square, a walk on a park, aren’t they fundamental for future thinking?
For sensing possible futures?
I think that caring for our bodily presence is a powerful practice of resistance against the constant draining of our energy and attention, from which private tech corporations benefit the most.
I could go on with these matters, but I won’t.
I think these questions are enough to establish the point that our capacity to imagine futures requires that we pay at least minimal care for the spaces occupied by our simple human bodies — and those more-than-human bodies surrounding us; at the end, we are all critters codependent of this Earth — and its air and its water — and its fire!
These futures, in one way or another, in our presence and in our absence, in our survival or in our extinction, will involve all of us.
Imagining fairer and more equitable futures requires that we critically read– today! and tomorrow! and the day after tomorrow! — what we do with our time, our presence, our attention, our relationships, and how these spheres of practice, of being, affect our spaces of coexistence.
What we decide to do with the space in between our bodies, here, now, will shape all those possible worlds that we want to inhabit.
We are responsible for such futures to become a reality.
We are writing history every second — let us write it together — let us dream together.
When our dreams are individualist quests, they are harder to attain than when we work together towards a collective goal.
I dream of dreaming together.
It seems more urgent than ever that we enrich historical narratives from a multifocal perspective, one that recognizes contradictory positions as equally valid, something that’s rarely found in hegemonic worldviews.
The status-quo, by definition, is monolithic, static, inflexible.
History is never like that. Historical streams are non-linear, non-sequential, rhizomatic.
They include all our voices, whether we speak out or not.
Sharing this space today makes us quite privileged and bestows a huge responsibility upon us — we are part of that small percentage of people in the world that can speak out for those who are silenced, censored, murdered.
The question, perhaps, is if we have the courage to do so.
History is always potential history, says Ariella Azoulay, a history yet to be told.
Azoulay invites us to think of history not as the revision of the past, yet more importantly, as the projection of our collective possibilities into the future.
The possibility of renaming our experience constantly;
just as this palace is being redefined now by all of you;
you are no less than any of the names you’ve been hearing about the past week, don’t let anyone tell you the opposite.
You are already part of the history of this palace.
What are you gonna do about it?
In Spanish, we have the same word for story and history — historia.
Based on this, a few years ago I proposed a shift from what seems today the tyranny of storytelling.
Instead of storytelling, I propose we look at the opportunities offered by historytelling.
I argued that this shift supposes leaving behind, on the one hand, the monolithic, dichotomic, Manichean and simplistic story structures that have been a pillar of power and oppression for millennia; and on the other hand, overcoming storytelling as a market race for impact, a battle for the attention of the audience.
Currently I am doing some research on what I call eccentric pedagogy as artist in residence at The Netherlands Film Academy, part of Amsterdam University of the Arts;
as part of this, I am taking this concept of his-storytelling even further.
I turned to Indian philosopher Gayarty Spivak, who in her Critique of Postcolonial Reason, invites us to substitute his-story for her-story, in a clear provocation to leave behind the spell of patriarchy.
Building on this pronoun game, I thought about moving not only from his-story to her-story, but to them-stories.
I dream that we can be capable of weaving our themstories; queer, eccentric, polymorphous tales that can open new paths for surviving together in this challenging world.
At this point, the idea of direction comes to my mind.
Direction refers, in its most general reading, to a tendency, a course, a path, a line of development towards a particular end.
How and where do we direct our attention, our will, our energy?
What life trajectories emerge from these decisions; how do they overlap with others?
Direction, it’s worth remembering, is a very important concept both in managerial and in artistic practice.
Direction entails motivation and drive, also intention and vision;
more important even, direction evokes a work ethic that touches not only the life of our collaborators or the audience, but also the material and technical realms we manipulate during our creative acts,
the decisions we take,
how do we communicate them,
how do we make people feel,
the spaces we occupy both while making and while sharing our work,
the imaginaries we feed,
the world views we put forward.
For me, direction equals passion.
I dream of a world where our passions can coexist vibrantly, shaking us to extasy.
I dream of a passion driven world that is not necessarily a safe space, but a brave space.
Taking a stance against destructive movements is not all the time a safe decision, but always a brave one.
When working with art and media, the way we direct our actions is both an aesthetical and a political matter.
What directions are we taking individually and collectively?
Are we the ones who are really in charge of them?
I dream of a world where the direction of art and politics, and business and community, and media and education, is that of life.
Again: the direction of the life of all critters, not only human, but mostly more-than-human.
Is this the direction that the world is taking today?
The world’s direction responds to different traditions or historical trajectories.
One of the heaviest ones is colonialism.
Colonialism is itself based on conquest and militarism.
It is a byproduct of patriarchy.
Most of the technologies we use today are the heirs of this political program.
Competition is at the heart of conquest and colonialism.
Competition is intolerant to difference, it eradicates otherness.
Competition, beyond fair play (and even there), is rarely inclusive or equitable.
We are brought up in this world to compete.
We compete at school, at home, at the playground.
We compete to come up with the best joke, the smartest remark, the sassiest attitude, the sexiest outfit.
We compete for likes and followers, for readers and viewers.
We compete by comparing each other’s successes and miseries through the deceitful windows of social media.
We compete when driving or biking to work, when training at the track, skatepark or pool.
We compete to be first on the airport lines, on the highway, on the sidewalk.
We compete even without wanting to, without realizing it.
Competition is everywhere, not only in economics; it is also, of course, at the heart of our political and media systems.
What is the future of a political system based on competition?
Democracy, understood as the rule of the people and not the rule of the market, is for me impossible if competition is our sole guiding force.
Considering our democratic present, I am very suspicious when people — mainly people in power positions — speak of democratic futures.
Competition is so ingrained in the machinery of the western dominated world, that we barely question its impact on our wellbeing.
We replicate its patterns feelingless and thoughtlessly, yet many times quite aware of what we are doing.
Regardless of what our patriarchal and capitalist imaginaries repeat incessantly, competition is not the sole form of coexistence.
Without cooperation, competition would drive humanity, or any species for that matter, to extinction.
Aren’t we rushing in this direction already?
Much has been said from biology to anthropology, from psychology to art.
Voices such as bell hooks, Laura Rita Segato, Lee Anne Betasamosake Simpson, Donna Haraway have insisted on the need to shift our core values from competition to cooperation; even more, to transform our will of domination into a will inspired in care.
We need to cure ourselves from the military impetus of competing fearlessly against each other.
We need cooperation, as a practice of care, to reinstall the value of life in the veins of contemporary society.
Witnessing my partner, Isabel, become a mother of two beautiful children, I have learned about the amazing strength of motherly care.
The world needs to take this example of superhuman force and resistance, and transfer its teachings to all spaces of society.
We need a motherly art as opposed to a patriarchal art.
Patriarchy, we could say, has worked against the full potential of the figure of the mother as the most basic role in almost every society.
We see this materialized in obstetric violence everywhere in the world.
The strength deployed by a single female during the act of birth is certainly stronger than one million armies;
it is pure creative power.
It is full of pain, of course, but the joy and pleasure that comes with it has no comparison.
In a matriarchal system we can see care as extreme sacrifice and absolute love;
care as the willingness to give your life for those you care for;
care as a practice of resistance.
I dream of incorporating care as one of the core values sustaining our daily interactions.
Even more, as an artist, I dream of a poetics of care.
The word poetics comes from the Ancient Greek poiesis.
Poiesis means to make, to create, to bring something new into the world which was not there before.
This introduction of new things is basically a restructuring of the world — the reconfiguration of material and intellectual elements — the recomposition of our shared landscape.
We usually think of art and media as platforms for “representation” of life;
if we take the previous definition of the poetic, this preconception is not very precise.
Poetics, then, more than representation, means intervention, transformation, active and conscious participation in the writing of history — quite literally — the reshaping of the world.
In this sense, the poetic potency of art and media is one of the keys to transforming our horizons of possibility.
When I say poetic potency, I mean the power — that we all have — to alter the conditions not only of what is imaginable, but of what’s possible.
Our interventions might be discrete, minimal, but aren’t the most simple gestures capable of moving us deeply?
What are the powers, then, of art and media as spaces of care?
Both art and media have a deep influence in the ways we imagine the world and ourselves within it.
Art and media are pillars not only for imagining distant futures, but for representing our own identity.
I think of my five year old replicating narratives of conquest, annihilation and violence in his tender imagination.
I see him competing for the attention of his parents, or with his classmates at the park, even alone, playing with toy cars or fighting an imaginary foe.
Sometimes it is very hard to work in a different direction.
Yet at the same time, I see how art has shown him to care for the land and all its critters.
But art and media are never solitary endeavors, messages are not magically seeded in our imaginations.
Messages settle in our minds and hearts through complex mediations.
Imaginaries are a product of our interlocutions with the world.
For example, after engaging in various mindful dialogues with my son on weapons (yeah, weapons — and bulldozers! — are a thing even for a 5-year-old!, something very uncanny), now every time he builds or draws a gun, he makes it clear to me that it shoots flowers, or that it has the power to restore nature where it has been destroyed (I’ve tried something similar
with bulldozers — in the like of “we build stuff but without tearing down the trees”).
It is worth reflecting for one second on this fact that guns and bulldozers are two of the most popular generic toys for kids — boys at least.
So my boy is still building guns, yes, yet his imagination has shifted the political programs of this technology of death, and transformed them into technologies of life.
Critical appropriation of technology, for me, is a way in which creative practices intervene in the order of the world.
Critical appropriation of technology is subversive imagination in action.
I think that art and media are like these guns that my son builds and draws;
they can either shoot bullets and draw blood, or they can shoot seeds for something beautiful to grow out of them.
At least in our imagination — and if we can imagine it, we can inhabit it.
I dream of a world where our weapons are not for killing each other, but for procuring and multiplying life.
If we think about it, it is not as outrageous.
Weapons, as one of our primal technologies, were invented to protect us from the perils of the world.
Today, the perils of the world are related with our capacity of destruction, so our way of surviving in this planet — those of us who won’t afford drifting off to live in some other orbit — is not only by protecting us from “evil” but protecting the environment we’re part of and generating the conditions for all life-forms to reproduce — we have the technologies to do so.
As we all know very well, resilience is nature’s thing.
Yet, how long can it stand — or can we stand?
Art, of course, is not merely about beauty — about planting those flowers my son’s imaginary guns shoot-, yet it is worth asking: what do we consider beautiful today?
Beauty is not solely aesthetic human silhouettes or picturesque landscapes.
Beauty is fundamentally a matter of value.
It invokes desires and aspirations.
What attracts us?
What moves our guts?
What excites us?
What are our aspirations for the world and ourselves as part of it?
What directions are they tracing for our maps of the future?
Most of the times — especially “our times” — it is very hard to know in which direction we’re going, which winds alter our course.
Art and media have a crucial role in our struggle for better futures, yet they can also foster the values that so far have obliterated our horizons of possibility.
Artists have, throughout the centuries, been either on the side of power or against it — it is hard to be an artist and be completely indifferent to the state of the world.
Artists always take a part: framing reality through a photograph, a painting, a text implies taking a stance, positioning ourselves within that reality.
When creating images and sounds and texts we are revealing a world view, either directly or indirectly. That is why art is rarely indifferent — at least honest art.
This is not only a matter of critical thinking but, mostly — I feel — of heightened sensibility.
Perhaps one of the things that art can offer us today is to remind us of how important sensibility is for imagination.
Modernity’s instrumental rationality kind of automatized our way of sensing — and making sense — of the world.
Art and film also played a crucial role in this.
In our current age, feminism and indigenous thought have warned us of the importance of challenging this sort of emotional atrophy.
Art is also at the vanguard of this struggle.
Indigenous thought in Mexico uses the neologism sentipensar –feelthink or sensethink — as a way of solving this excision of thought and feeling that we inherited from even before the Industrial age.
It is impossible to divide our thoughts from our feelings, and the other way around.
These currents of contemporary thought identify in this false separation one of the symptoms of our civilization’s disease.
I dream of embracing healing as a creative practice.
Some institutions seem to turn blind to this urge to heal, even after the pandemic.
This global health crisis that we experienced recently has revealed the nervous collapse of our society.
Mental health issues are on the rise as much as irrational violence is;
and when I say violence, I also mean the violence against plants and animals — and mountains and rivers and all those spirits that we ceased to see and listen to so long ago.
We need what the Mexican feminist collective The Pocha Nostra called radical tenderness.
Radical tenderness is strong enough to resist complete hopelessness, so common nowadays.
Radical tenderness is the antidote against extreme brutality — tenderness, says Claudia Tate in dialogue with Cristina Sharpe, is the opposite of brutality.
Radical tenderness resists cynicism,
cynicism destroys true journalism, according to Ryzyard Kapuscinsky,
and true poetry, according to Franco Bifo Berardi.
I dream of a world where cynicism is not a synonym of intelligence nor resistance, but quite the contrary.
Radical tenderness manifests regardless of our exhaustion and pain, just as affective parenting does when a child explodes in a tantrum.
Radical tenderness is an endless struggle;
it demands constant exercising of mind, body and spirit;
it requires extraordinary strength and endurance.
Radical tenderness is choosing to fight with love.
Olga Tokarczuk, when receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, gave a lecture entitled “the tender narrator”;
in it, she appealed to embody this tenderness as a thoroughly engaged way of narrating our life’s experience, one that resonates with all the other life intensities surrounding us.
I dream of being able to live by radical tenderness in all fronts of life.
I have thought a lot about the world radical recently.
For many years I referred to my art and my pedagogy as radical, but only last year I delved into the etymology of this term.
Radical refers, yes, to a drastic position or change in relation to a specific political situation, mainly that represented by the status quo or the establishment.
A radical movement, being in art or politics, is then one that calls for such transformation.
But that popular understanding doesn’t grasp the full spectrum of the word.
Radical comes from radix, meaning root.
The word radical suggests, then, turning to the roots, it appeals to what’s fundamental, what sustains life.
Radical art and media are, therefore, fundamentally transformative.
This is of capital importance: we cannot transform our reality if we ignore our roots — our past and present conditions.
Radicality recognizes tradition to transform it — even those traditions that we are not proud of, we need to acknowledge them, to name them.
I think that a poetics of care has the need of radical imagination;
an imagination that calls for urgent transformations and turns to the roots at the same time.
Something quite similar to what is being labelled today in the epistemologies of the Global South as ancestral futures — futures that revisit the origin.
In the beginning there was light; in our age, in what some call the beginning of the end, darkness seems to fall upon us –
even when we’re engulfed by flashing screens.
“So much light and so little that we see” — this phrase comes from the script of my short film Tanta Luz (2016).
I am not a pessimist, though.
Art, said German painter Gerhard Richter, is the highest form of hope.
It is so because constantly, as artists, we face frustration and the feeling that our work, our energy, is pointless.
Art is the highest form of hope because creating art implies sticking to what is, in appearance, totally useless;
and on top of that, believing that we can change the world by doing it.
For centuries, art theory and aesthetics — as a branch of philosophy -, spoke of the uselessness of art.
That changed in the XXth century by two contradictory forces; firstly, the political turbulence in Europe and beyond transferred a sense of urgency to artistic practice;
secondly, the market economy took over the art world;
these roles seem to have deteriorated.
So, what is then the purpose of art today, in our postpandemic present?
Does it help us in any way to envision better futures?
Yasnaya Aguilar, a brilliant mixe linguist from Mexico, in her speculative essay “Art, Literature and the Collective Aesthetics of the Land”, imagined a future where art as a field of authority has disappeared;
the weight of the author, totally absent;
a constant, creative flux flooding every aspect of life.
Everyone, in this utopian future of hers inspired in traditional Mexican cultures, is an artist;
or more precisely: everyone participates in artistic creation.
Something very similar to what Bertolt Brecht dreamt of,
but for Yasnaya there is more depth in the sense that ideas coming from art and science, but also commerce, politics, education, media, rituals, celebrations, all work in the direction of the common good, all help build a better, more engaged understanding of our coexistence.
As it is for most of the original peoples of Mexico and Latin America, there is an inalienable regard for the land and all its critters.
There is a beautiful idea from Lee Anne Betasamosake Simpson that gives name to an article of her authorship, which can help us repurpose artistic practice here: “land as pedagogy”.
Drawing from her belonging to the Nishnaabeg, an Ojibway First Nation off the shores of Lake Superior, today Canada, Betasamosake Simpson appeals to Nishnaabeg intelligence as a source of alternative ways of knowledge.
She evokes the production of maple syrup, and the extraction of the sap from the acer trees, as an example of how ancient ways of life have still so much to show us towards the imagination of more sustainable futures.
So, how can art become a herald of new ways not only of producing knowledge about the world, but most importantly, new ways of understanding each other and coexisting with the world?
Yasnaya Aguilar, on her side, comes from a mixe community, one of the more than 60 indigenous groups subsisting in Mexico today;
some of these communities maintain ancestral values at the core of their organization;
many of them even govern themselves with certain autonomy from the Mexican Federal law, since in the constitution it is established that their traditions should be respected.
The Zapatistas are of course a famous example of this indigenous autonomy; they are also a unique example of imagined futures that have become a reality;
they call their community caracoles — caracol means seashell in Spanish, so it suggests both a home and a metaphor of the infinite — and they have developed a schooling system that promotes an autonomous life based on the dignity of the land. They also host international art festivals for film for better futures or “women that fight”, for example.
It is interesting to note that until recently, these alternative ways of coexisting were considered underdeveloped, and now we are turning back to them to learn a thing or two — or many more- or perhaps not only learn but remember — how to recover this beautiful planet, which we have almost destroyed.
In his writings about Mexico and the Tarahumara people from the north of our country, almost one hundred years ago, French playwright Antonin Artaud said that these people had the key to reveal the future to come, that which would save us for modernity.
Less than a month ago, I was at a gathering where many activists and artists from these communities were present;
I heard some quite inspiring interventions by Jaime Martinez Luna, better known as Tio Yim or Uncle Yim (there is a documentary under that same
name — Tio Yim — made by his daughter, the fantastic filmmaker and activist Luna Marán);
Uncle Yim offered a concept that I’ve never heard before –
instead of having obligations — let’s say as citizens with a particular state, as employers of any given corporation, as children of a family-,
he spoke of ombligation — ombligo, in Spanish, means navel –
so his argument was that once our umbilical cord is cut, we are not necessarily liberated, nor obliged, but ombliged –
that is, connected — and committed — to the world through our navels, as we were to our mother’s bloodstream when in the womb.
Instead of remembrance — remembranza in Spanish — he spoke of “sembranza” — in Spanish sembrar means to seed or cultivate the land — so the concept “sembranza” refers to a way of embodying memory through an intimate relationship with the land -
one that needs to be cared for to flourish.
For us living in cities or, as it is my case, a megalopolis, we need a “stronger inhabitation” than the strength deployed by the city itself –
a way of living that installs the value of life in our every day, in most of our actions, instead of replicating the neurotic city rhythms that make our individual and collective bodies so ill (there is a book written by the radical collective Night Council called just that: A stronger habitation than the metropolis itself);
this is especially important if we consider the figures that expect 70% of the world population will live in cities by 2050.
Furthermore, ombligation and sembranza, or the idea of them-stories that I shared before, are some examples of new names for experiences that don’t have references yet.
The creation of concepts or words to name the realities that we would like to inhabit is a good way of summing up the difficult task of imagining futures.
We need to come up with the names for the futures that we want to inhabit, since most probably those realities are ineffable for us today — there are no words that can refer to them.
To come up with a name we need to listen to the land, to the context we live in, to our bodies, our pulse. We also need to trust our intuition.
The act of naming, when done with care, is a profoundly amorous act.
Let’s think again of giving a name to a newborn and then calling her constantly by that name — Lía.
Art and media are two of the main scenarios where new referents emerge — those new images or concepts that we are looking for to be capable of naming the realities that we want to inhabit together.
It seems a very simple task, yet the power and complexity it implies is enormous.
Even if those names don’t exist, the key to their discovery is already here, among us.
We need to pay close attention to everything around us, digital info feeds as well, and be able to block the noise that’s pulling us away from the clarity that’s so hard to attain when diving into the future.
We can work through it by combining existing tools, both technical and narrative.
We have that power and yes, that responsibility.
It is literally at the reach of our hand.
The human hand that has, for millennia, been at the core of invention.
This hand that, aside from being the basis of most human crafts, is also the basis of love, of contact among people.
I got caught up with this idea of ombligation as soon as I heard it because it clearly names our interdependence, our unavoidable contact, communion, without leaving behind a high sense of responsibility.
It unveils an interesting conception of freedom as well, one that is closely related to artistic practice.
A freedom that is based on coexistence and mutual respect.
Capitalist freedom is not always compatible with this idea, for it seeks to run over the freedom of others to impose the will of those in power.
Can we resist this tendency prevailing on our contemporary world?
How can art and media act in this dire scenario?
Such understanding of freedom as commitment resonates with some of the ideas that filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the most influential artists of the XXth Century, proclaimed in the conclusion of his famous book on filmmaking, Sculpting Time.
He had a profound spiritual conception of artistic practice.
For him, art prepares us to resist the perils that threat to devour our soul.
Art, he claims, has shaped our ideals throughout history.
It is the terrain where those possible worlds we imagine come to being, literally: they take form through art.
For me, form is the combination of content and continent — of depth and figure — of technique and narrative (technique and narrative also require a high sense of commitment — composer Johannes Brahms said with much precision: Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind).
Art’s autonomy is related, according to Tarkovsky, to this aspiration: setting the direction of our collective will.
Perhaps that is why power elites have sought to absorb art and media into their own structures; we saw it with the church and the state, we see it with brands today.
This resonates with what I’ve tried to share today, such as Richter’s proposition of art as the highest form of hope.
Art is the highest form of hope, then, not only because it deposits the dream of transformation in an apparently useless activity;
it is so because, at the same time, it deposits in artists and the community that our work convokes, a freedom to change all those ill-directed tendencies of our current situation, whichever this may be.
Freedom, under this lens, entails a profound sense of responsibility.
Freedom, for people like Tarkovsky, also supposes a high degree of sacrifice.
I dream of a world where sacrifice for the common good can be performed as a joyful collective practice.
Nearly reaching the end of this talk and trying to meet this idea of freedom with the notion of a poetics of care, I think of bell hook’s invitation to exercise love as the practice of freedom.
“The moment we choose to love”, says hooks, “we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom”.
I underline: we choose to love.
I dream of a world where we foster love in every domain of our lives.
A poetics of care is, most definitely, a poetics of love.
This approach to poetics of love moves us to recognize that creative acts render us vulnerable.
Vulnerability is a way of opening our hearts to the world, regardless of how afraid this makes us.
I want to invite you to take the risk of opening your heart, soul, mind in the direction of love and care.
Not to aspire to be a professional, and here I am paraphrasing US experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, but instead of a professional, be an amateur: he-she-they who loves his work.
Based on what I’ve shared today, we can say that art is, above all, the practice of love.
And love is the collective practice of freedom.
Opening ourselves to love and vulnerability, is also opening the gate to fear.
Yet as I quoted at the beginning of this talk, fear is a healthy sign in a dreamer.
I am afraid about many things, but not about dreaming of a better world.
Let us dream together.
And act accordingly.
Thank you very much.
