{"id":1015,"date":"2016-03-20T12:14:29","date_gmt":"2016-03-20T16:14:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/?p=1015"},"modified":"2016-03-20T12:14:29","modified_gmt":"2016-03-20T16:14:29","slug":"sites-of-passage-citizen-artists-and-citizen-audiences-in-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/2016\/03\/sites-of-passage-citizen-artists-and-citizen-audiences-in-south-africa.html","title":{"rendered":"Sites of Passage: Citizen Artists and Citizen Audiences in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Capetown<\/a>I\u2019ve been away from this blog for several months now, engaged in a variety of the usual pursuits (teaching, lecturing, directing, producing, playwriting) but also traveling to South Africa on a research expedition. I\u2019m back to write about South Africa\u2014an eye-and-heart-opening adventure that took me from Cape Town to Johannesburg to interview an array of inspiring artists who use their skills to promote and advance social change in their communities.<\/p>\n

What does this have to do with audiences?<\/p>\n

Everything.<\/p>\n

The notion of a citizen artist\u2014one whose work is organized around the belief that personal aesthetic considerations can be aligned with the mission of social change\u2014is as old as Sophocles, as vital as Brecht and Boal, and as relevant as the thousands of contemporary artists from all disciplines who dedicate at least part of their practice to community building. As Steve Durland observes in the introduction to The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena<\/a><\/em>, over time many artists come to believe that the \u201carbitrary separation of art world and real world\u201d makes them less effective as artists, which causes them to \u201ccall into question their commitment to the public.\u201d Gradually awakening to a new sensibility, these artists don\u2019t \u201creject the art world, but rather [view] it as one of many contexts in which art could exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The artists I met and observed in Cape Town and Johannesburg don\u2019t bother with any arbitrary separation of the art world and the real world, and they certainly don\u2019t adhere to the artist-working-alone-in-splendid-isolation model that dominates Western culture. As I discovered over the course of my travels in South Africa, these artists do quite the opposite\u2014enacting their citizenship by sharing their artistic tools with various constituencies of audience-participants, from school-aged children to elders to post-matriculating teenagers looking for a path out of generational poverty.<\/p>\n

In today\u2019s post I want to introduce you to ArtUp<\/a>,\u00a0the organization that brought me to South Africa in order to participate in its Sites of Passage<\/a>\u00a0project. Over the next three posts, I\u2019ll take you on tours of the townships and inner city neighborhoods I visited in Cape Town and Johannesburg, introduce you to the citizen artists and the NGO\u2019s working in those communities, and, I hope, provide you with a window into this important work. The \u201caudience\u201d is all of us\u2014we fellow citizens who need art to help us make sense of our changing world.<\/p>\n

ArtUp and Sites of Passage<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

ArtUp is a multi-disciplinary collective of artists dedicated to \u201cbuilding a language of peace through the actions of art.\u201d Founded by Tavia La Follette<\/a>\u2014a director, curator and performance artist\u2014it began as a cooperative gallery and performance space in the heart of Pittsburgh\u2019s cultural district. Since 2010 the organization has been largely virtual, functioning, in the words of La Follette, as a \u201cboarder crossing space for artists and companies exploring Art as Action.\u201d Full disclosure: I am on the ArtUp board of directors and have had a relationship with the organization since its launch in 2005.<\/p>\n

Sites of Passage began as a research project for La Follette\u2019s doctoral dissertation (she holds a Ph.D. in Leadership & Change from Antioch University). In 2010 she arranged an exchange between 36 artists from Egypt and the United States, which resulted in a six-month exhibition (installations, a performance series, community outreach) at the Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh in the fall of 2011. The Egypt project served as the prototype for Sites of Passage by laying out both the principles and structure of the work: 1) to create a global network of experimental artists who communicate and work together through virtual performance and installation art labs; 2) to cross the borders of language, culture and political positions (a metaphorical \u201cdig\u201d between artists around the world); and 3) to promote the concept of a global citizen who uses the actions of art to work toward peaceful relationships.<\/p>\n

The first officially titled Sites of Passage, \u201cBorders, Walls & Citizenship,\u201d began in the summer of 2012 when La Follette traveled to Israel and Palestine with the Interfaith Peace Builders Network. She forged relationships with politically minded artists from Israel and Palestine interested in challenging the idea and ideal of borders, walls and citizenship. Over the course of next two years, artists from Palestine, Israel and Pittsburgh shared perspectives and ideas, both virtually and in person, to create a second Mattress Factory exhibit scheduled to open at the end of May, 2014. But just two days before the opening the Israeli artists withdrew from the show. ArtUp and the Mattress Factory issued the following statement in response to the show\u2019s cancellation: \u201cThe fact that ongoing political conditions do not allow Palestinian and Israeli artists to work together within cultural contexts without misinterpretation and recrimination is regrettable but understandable.\u201d Despite the failure to complete the \u201cdig\u201d between Israel and Palestine in the realization of a physical exhibition, La Follette considers the project to be a success: \u201cArtUp understands the Social Practice of this work: that these experiences took place; that work was build around relationships and issues that will impact each artist for the rest of their lives.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Sites of Passage South Africa<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cCivil Rights and Civil Wrongs\u201d is the next planned installment of Sites of Passage, scheduled to culminate in an exhibition\/performance series at the Mattress Factory in 2018. As with the previous projects in Egypt and Israel + Palestine, a goal of \u201cCivil Rights and Civil Wrongs\u201d is to connect artists working for social change in South Africa with U.S. based artists so that they can share their work and learn from one another. The artists I met during my visit to South Africa, some of who will participate in this next iteration of Sites of Passage, are all committed to working to forge a tangible function for art in the wider socio-political sphere.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be back soon to introduce you to Mbovu Malinga\u2014a Cape Town-based actor, dancer, director, technician, designer and social practice artist\u2014who took me on a tour of several NGO\u2019s using art for social change in some of the poorest townships surrounding central Cape Town.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been away from this blog for several months now, engaged in a variety of the usual pursuits (teaching, lecturing, directing, producing, playwriting) but also traveling to South Africa on a research expedition. I\u2019m back to write about South Africa\u2014an eye-and-heart-opening adventure that took me from Cape Town to Johannesburg to interview an array of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1017,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1015","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1015"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1022,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1015\/revisions\/1022"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/wetheaudience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}