What do I see as the most radical potential at the intersection of Utopia, Art and Politics? For the Art Utopia Politics sessions held at BAK in July 2024, I was asked to create an artistic provocation addressing this question. Attempting to do so in writing, or as I set out to do, with a new artwork, turned out to be a provocation in and of itself. In the weeks leading up to the event I found myself oscillate between feeling very inspired and utterly intimidated.
What could I possibly put forward that would exemplify the most radical potential of art in the face of all this suffering, the unfathomable violence, injustice, the self-affirming othering and dehumanising destruction? We are with so many who want nothing less than to be able to rise up and stop this all together, to bundle our powers into a calm, big, halting NO, not this, not any longer, not in our names. Anything less is hard to bear.
There is a longing (artistic-utopian-political) to be able to add up all these voices who will call out injustice and insist another way is possible. To open up ways for concrete collective action. I want to explore how my artistic practice can contribute to this type of collective activism and resistance. I have intuited a future version of myself doing precisely this, but I also know I’m not there yet, my work is not there yet. For a moment, anything else seems futile.
I remind myself: why should I look for the radical potential of artistic practice in some ideal activist collaboration on a massive scale, when my practice has also been teaching me otherwise?
When I took a deep dive some years ago to rebuild my artistic practice, one of the striking things was that it opened me up to have stronger intuitions of the near future, sometimes accurately foreboding what comes next. This was deeply unsettling at first, troubling my belief in an open future, the sense that we are participating in the creative unfolding of the yet to come. But over time it also gave rise to a renewed sense of what it might mean to belong to time and to creative becoming. What follows is an attempt to share some of the speculative insights I find my practice has been teaching. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s evocative use of Virgina Woolf’s Think We Must! I go on to do the same.
Think we must! Artistic Practice teaches a different way of relating to the given and the otherwise.
Think we must! Artistic practice teaches about surrendering to what is other, to what wants to speak through you, to what is not yet known. Paradoxically it teaches how trust and patience allow the future to set in unexpectedly.
Think we must! Artistic practice as an antidote to thoughtlessness. As a way to see ourselves as creative beings in a complex, interconnected doing-with and becoming-with.
Think we must! Artistic agency as something that resides in all of us, outside and beyond us.
Think we must! Artistic practice as a way to provoke, disrupt and unsettle, while at the same time opening us up to what is intimately known yet wildly unknowable.
Think we must! Artistic practice as inherently relational and alter-political.
Think we must! Artistic practice as a gentle yet radically form of resistance.
Dance we must! So we may find the cracks and strengthen resonating voices of difference.
Dance we must! The radical potential of artistic practice lies in its ability to dance with the trouble and invite the future in: a future-past-present that is otherwise left unattended.