Mary Mattingly - Manifesto
This Manifesto proclaims that art and utopian thought can cultivate systemic social change. Art can transform people’s perceptions about value, and collective art forms can reframe predominant ideologies
1. A Violent Economic Order:From the supply chain to the waste chain, if our systems of production, trade, and consumption use the social and ecological space of others, it is a form of violence.
(Art and) A Nonviolent Economic Order:
Make all works of art without participating in economies of violence. Boycott so-called Free Trade, companies that participate in slave labor, or militia-managed extraction. Demand fair wages on behalf of silenced workers and build informal, cross-border supply chains within interdependent Art networks.
2. A Violent Education:The business of education and compartmentalized forms of learning best serves the people we work for, and those that they work for. With steady erosion of job security, it leaves us dependent while increasing their control.
(Art and) A Nonviolent Education:
Share underrepresented histories. Expand school curriculums and individual classes to include mutual education around nonviolence training towards active compassion. Flip the so-called script.
3. A Violent Ecological Order:As increased desertification, land degradation, and water privatization continue to fuel global wars through droughts, famine, and resulting forced migration, investors trade in weather derivatives and reinsurance, profiting from ecological disasters.
(Art and) A Nonviolent Ecological Order:
Work towards building with materials that are reused and already part of the waste chain or that are regenerative and work to heal ecosystems. Work towards worlds where humans serve as caretakers and stewards rather than private owners. Help to recognize the reciprocity of commons and indigenous rights to land, while protecting it from being sold off. Help to disempower the word “own”.
4. A Violent Social Order:Collective traumas are known to change our collective sense of what is possible.
(Art and) A Nonviolent Social Order:
Reset the dial of what is possible by working together on utopian projects. Be a transgressor and an empathic lover. Promote difference not indifference. Remember that we have bigger battles to fight than those we may want to fight against each other.
5. Working Towards a Nonviolent Art.How can we dedicate ourselves to living nonviolently, today? This is not an ambitious question - it’s an essential one. In art and life, create flexible and inclusive schemes for living that encompass respect, non-hierarchy, nonviolence, and tolerance. Art making is powerful; and a nonviolent art is a duty.
prguitarman
ellievsbear
amandla
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
discoholicmusic