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Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative an Event Accompanying Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative An event accompanying Under the Same Sun “Tania Bruguera and Saskia Sassen in Conversation” London School of Economics August 18, 2016 JOHN BINGHAM-HALL I’m John Bingham-Hall, and I’d like to welcome you all to the LSE on behalf of Theatrum Mundi, which I’m very lucky to have a role in, doing research and creating programs like this, and also on behalf of the South London Gallery, who we’ve worked in partnership with to bring together this exciting, and I also think quite critically timed conversation between urban sociologist Saskia Sassen and artist Tania Bruguera. Both women, whether through research or artistic practice, are facing up to the new global reality of mass migration, and the crisis in the rights of migrants to visibility and audibility in the cities they find themselves in. For Theatrum Mundi, which is a project based in LSE cities which aims to create a platform for debate about the qualities and values of urban culture, tonight’s conversation is particularly exciting, as it engenders a lot of what we’re trying to do in our project. It brings together urbanism, thinking about how and why cities take shape, and the conditions for life they create, with art that imagines how things might be other than they currently are. It demonstrates how art and urbanism could learn from one another in addressing political challenges facing cities. And in doing so it shows that within art we can find not only reflections on the conditions of urban life, but also propositions for new kinds of social relationships, and also public moments of expression—particularly, in this case, where expression has been suppressed. This speaks very much to the aims of our multi-year project Designing Politics, which takes the shape of a series of design challenges in cities around the world, asking artists, urbanists, activists, and so on, to answer questions such as, how can urban design stimulate our use of the right to free speech? Can we design the conditions for the emergence of a new urban commons? And what would spaces designed to create a situation of respect look like in a starkly divided city like Rio, where our current challenge is open and receiving submissions. I don’t think that Saskia Sassen needs much introduction for many of you, but just to say very briefly that she’s one of the leading thinkers drawing attention to the social and economic conditions that are creating this reality of expulsions and global migration that I’m talking about. And I’ll hand over in one second to Pablo León de la Barra, who’s going to say a little more about Tania Bruguera’s presence here. Finally, I just want to say a huge thank you to the South London Gallery. I think it’s very exciting to see a partnership like this between the academy and an arts institution in stimulating public debate about some of our most urgent issues, especially given how poor the quality of that debate currently appears in the public realm. So, we’re very grateful to have been able to work with the South London Gallery, who have really made this happen, and I hand over to Pablo León de la Barra for a brief moment. PABLO LEON DE LA BARRA Thank you everyone for being here. I am Pablo León de la Barra, and I am the Guggenheim UBS MAP Latin America curator. In the name of the Guggenheim and the South London Gallery, our partner for the exhibition Under the Same Sun at South London Gallery, I welcome you all here, Transcript © 2016 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. page 1 of 20 and I thank Saskia and Tania for joining us tonight. I’m going to tell you just a little bit about Tania before handing it to them. I wanted to find her bio on the Internet, and I Googled “Tania Bruguera bio,” and her page was hacked, which is kind a normal thing to happen to Tania, after her activism in Cuba [laughter]. Tania was born sometime in the late ’60s in Cuba. Since she was young, she started making art, moving to performance and body actions. She slowly started to shift from performative actions in which she herself was the subject of these actions, to a critique of the Cuban revolution, specifically the failures of the revolution, the promises of the revolution, and Fidel himself. More recently, she has been doing a kind of performance that involves the social body, which involves a critique of urban situations. Many of you might have seen recently, at Tate Modern, the reactivation of her 2008 performance Tatlin’s Whisper #5, in which two policemen riding horses start to move and herd people inside the Turbine Hall, really reactivating, or acting as people manifesting in the streets are treated sometimes by police forces. In 2009, during the Havana Biennial, she did Tatlin’s Whisper #6, in which she had a platform, a podium, similar to this one, with a mustard curtain behind it, and a microphone, which allowed people in Cuba, in Havana, to say whatever they wanted for a minute, something that’s normally not allowed in Cuba. This was done within the biennial, but of course it proves how Tania’s work moves beyond the gallery, and activates society. The work that was very problematic for her, even within the art context, was attempted to be reactivated a year and a half ago on December 31, 2014, shortly after it was announced that the USA and Cuba were reestablishing relations. At that time, she attempted to reactivate the work not at an art space, but at what was called José Martí Square before the revolution, and now is called Revolution Square. Tania was detained for attempting to do this, and was placed under intense surveillance because of attempting to do this. She says about her work, and the relationship between art, activism, and politics in her work, that she seeks to transform audiences into active citizens. So really this kind of moving away from the contemplation of the art object into really transforming us as the public into political, active citizens. As part of her recent social practice, she ran Arte de Conducta, which was an art and activism school in Havana, which laid the ground for the new generation of Cuban artists working today. More recently, she has been developing the project Arte Útil, which happened at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and at MIMA [Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art] in Middlesbrough. It really uses and takes further this idea that she’s been developing of “useful art,” art that is useful politically and socially, and which makes us part of the action. More recently, in Cuba, she’s been trying to open the Hannah Arendt School of Activism, which has caused her lots of problems [Tania laughs]. But, knowing her, she won’t stop until that school is open. Finally, for the past five years, she’s been working in Queens, initially supported by the Queens Museum, developing the project Immigrant Movement International, which is really using the budget of art in order to create a space, a center, where immigrants in Queens—especially Mexican and Bolivian—could reclaim the rights and have access to a community space in which they could challenge their situation. It was because of this project that, together with South London Gallery, we invited Tania to do a residency at the South London Gallery as part of the exhibition Under the Same Sun. She has been here almost a month. A lot of what she’s been doing has been talking to different immigrant leaders and immigrant thinkers. Part of this is the Transcript © 2016 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. page 2 of 20 conversation with Saskia, so we’ll hear a little bit more about Tania’s project and Saskia’s thinking about current situation of the immigrant, which of course has become super relevant, in the current situation in England, something that we didn’t plan when we thought about having Tania coming here. Tania’s residencies, Tania’s project, and Tania’s talk are all part of the bigger public program that we’ve been doing with the South London Gallery as part of the exhibition Under the Same Sun. And really, there’s this idea of pushing the limits of the gallery beyond the South London Gallery, beyond Peckham, and really activating it with different activities and programs within London and outside. Maybe some of you saw a few weeks ago the activation by Alfredo Jaar, at Piccadilly Circus, of A Logo for America. And I think with this, I’ll finish, and really thank Saskia for being here, Tania for being here, and all of you. Thank you. TANIA BRUGUERA Thank you Pablo, for the information. Thank you so much for this project, and for bringing it to different places, and seeing how it relates to different places. Thank you so much to the South London Gallery, they have been amazing. I just want to say a little thing, that their program Art Assassins is one of the best in the world I’ve seen. So I invite you to collaborate with them, or to work with them on that. And also I want to thank John, for bringing us here. And of course, Saskia, who I met a few years ago. Saskia and I talked a little bit, and we decided to focus on immigration.
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