Part of what makes restrictive societal norms so insidious is that our unconscious observation of them makes them practically invisible. This often maddeningly makes the answer to questions about inequality, racism, and sexism That’s the way things always have been or That’s reality. Of course, that is only one of many realities. Society is constructed, not obeyed. Before…
The 400 Pueblos Movement, Veracruz Indigenous Farmers, 2014 –
“Usar el cuerpo para pedir la tierra” Literal seas of naked bodies storm the streets of Mexico City dancing and shouting, desecrating that year’s corrupt politicians. After surviving the Mexican colonial project and it’s legacies, what is left with to fight but your own flesh? Dispossession of land, resources, and infrastructure is often obscured by…
Adrian Piper, Catalysis Series, 1969
What is “proper” public behavior? Why don’t we fart, stare at people, or talk to ourselves out loud in public? If people fail to abide by societal norms, there’s a good chance they’ll be ridiculed or ostracized. They follow the rules so that they can fit in, be respected, and climb the ladder of success….
“Normal Life is a Full-Time Job”
By appropriating the language and imagery of corporate culture, Kateřina Šedá calls attention to the serious effects it has had on cities overburdened by tourism. Šedá created a fictional company, UNES-CO, which partners with cities on the UNESCO World Heritage List whose tourist economies have rendered them void of “normal life.” Český Krumlov is a…
Staging a Reenactment
By staging a reenactment of his own event, Francis Alÿs demonstrates how fiction can be used as a tool to subvert systems of power. After legally purchasing a handgun in Mexico City, he was filmed walking through the streets with the exposed weapon in hand. Alÿs wandered the streets for eleven minutes before being arrested…
Taking Back the Streets
When a group of young women in Mumbai decided that they were fed up with feeling unsafe to walk the city streets at night, they staged an occupation that actively disrupted the normal flow of life in the city. At night, Mumbai’s public spaces become occupied almost entirely by male bodies, forcing women to retreat…
Living out a Fiction
By collectively committing to living out a fiction, a local residents’ association in Hamburg, Germany, in collaboration with artist Christoph Schäfer, staged a unique form of occupation. After getting wind of the city’s plan to sell a vacant lot in their low-income neighborhood to high-rise developers, residents rallied together to fight against the privatization of…
“There is Nothing There”
By organizing a radical demonstration of collectivity, Kateřina Šedá returned sensation to the everyday lives of the inhabitants of a small Czech village who had given up on themselves. After spending a year conducting fieldwork in Ponetovice, Šedá observed that its 350 residents held the common belief that their village was entirely insignificant–a place where…
The Long Friday—Iceland’s Women’s Strike
Strikes are implemented by labour organizations to demand higher wages for certain professional groups, but we do not have to accept this limited view of labour. Women’s labour has, for centuries, been undervalued and ignored. In the office and the factory, their wages stay lower than male coworkers; in the home, years of domestic labour…
Project Row Houses
The home style commonly referred to as a row house was first popularized in West Africa and was then brought via the slave trade to the US. Beginning in 1993, seven African-American artists and activists founded Project Row Houses; in order to counter the stereotype of these homes being spaces of poverty and destitution, they…
