#maat lisbon

[tamurakafkaposts]

Electricity - light bulbs from 1928 to 1940 - M. A. A. T. Lisbon

[tamurakafkaposts]

Just playing with mirrors at MAAT😎🤓😜

[tamurakafkaposts]

M. A. A. T. - Art, Architecture & Technology - Lisbon

[tamurakafkaposts]

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Oscar Wilde

[difficultart-difficultwords]

**CRISIS AND CHANGE: financial crisis and activist re-writings [12 Short Songs (2009) by Jorge Macchi. Photo credit: me]  At the MAAT Lisbon, I had the chance to witness a large video survey featuring different artists’ takes on the 2008 financial crisis to now, called Tension & Conflict. 

Pedro Gadanho, the exhibition curator, notes that “video becomes much more challenging, because people are not used to the fact that, rather than just glimpsing at a work, they have to be there for five, six, seven, 10 minutes” in an interview with Sarah Rose Sharp about the exhibition (2018). The range of difficult subject matter, heavy content, war, and violence were engrossing, at times disturbing, and in other instances, inspiring change - curated in ways that offer “the terrible gift … the task of inheriting the troubling consequences of ‘the otherness of knowledge’(Simon, 2006)(Simon, p.435)”.

Within the exhibition, Mario Pfiefer’s #Blacktivist, 2015, [photo credit: me] is a dual-screened video installation, one featuring video interview and cell phone footage of black arms activists engaged in legal battles for releasing private files about firearm production to the public, displayed beside a music video for Flatbush ZOMBIES’s song, ‘blacktivist’.   The juxtaposition between the two highlights the ways in which hip hop and music creation serves as a tool for sharing and highlighting issues of political, structural, or state violence. 
The “The “otherness of knowledge” featured in this work, unlike the historical pieces set out and examined in Simon’s work, offers a reminder that the aforementioned knowledge missing from public discourse and dialogues about race and systemic historical violence is not only affective, but simultaneously a matter of civil / public rights to information exposed by activists working to disrupt national security narratives embedded with systemic racialized violence. The piece can be understood as a creation of culture, an example of flexible black creativity, a display of resistance in the form of a PSA, and a political movement & moment all at once.

(Flex, Conjure, Crack: Flexibility and the Uncertainty of Blackness, Treva C. Ellison, C magazine, 2017) Melanie Gilligan’s Crisis in the Credit System (2008) haunted me as I went through a 3-day improv-based professional development course at Second City training centre a few weeks after I saw the video installation  (a course priced at $2000! I was invited for free because they needed an even number). The 6-part series satire featured a number of wall-street executives getting together and using improv and scenario-based approaches to solving the mess of the crisis. As I sat through this training where we were offered office-management scenarios of our own, Gilligan’s work served as a reminder that under neoliberal capitalism, it is only the high-paid executives that can shell out $2000 for 3 days that will ever win (and have access to things like arts learning to help them make more money). What I do with this renewed sense of injustice at our urban social-enterprise focused arts-based complacency is yet to be established.