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about location or can you tell me where my country lies

map creators saw this land as in the south
as far away as possible from themselves
so they called it terra australis & then
australia the land to the south

as there is no outside in our drifting through the cosmos
then no objective reference can be made &
all objectivity becomes nothing else but blindness
then blindness commands the location of terra australis in the south

in fact the naming took place within “i”’s abstractions
this is why “i” calls all southerners boat people
& this is why australia is not in the south
& this is why “i” never left his location in the north

for abo-origin people this land is the dreaming

[Image is a window to the south of Chile, a place in Puyehue (9^th region) which means place of puyes (a fish in Mapudungun) due to its clear rivers; taken by Patricio Gonzalez]

The author:

Sergio Holas-Véliz was born in the port town of Valparaíso, Chile, and migrated to Australia in 1988. He holds a Teacher of Spanish Degree, a Master Degree in Hispanic Literatures, both by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, and a PhD in Philosophy by the University of New South Wales. His poetry as well as translations have been published in Babab (Spain), Letralia (Venezuela), Arena (Melbourne), Social Alternatives (Queensland), Australian Poetry Journal , The Capilano Review (Canada), Rabbit Poetry Journal (Melbourne) and El espíritu del valle (Chile). He has published three poetry books that deal with the precarious power of language and decolonization: Distancia cero (Zero Distance); 2004), Ciudad dividida (Divided City; 2006) and Paisajes en movimiento (Moving Landscapes; 2013).He has two completed poetry manuscripts in English, Adelaide. Ramblin’ in My Mind. Meditations Upon Emergent Occasions(2013) and Wrinckled Fire & Other Commodities (2014)waiting publication. He is co-translator of Poetry of the Earth: Mapuche Trilingual Anthology, a Mapudungun, Spanish and English Anthology of seven Mapuche poets from the region of La Frontera in the south of Chile, published by IT Press in December 2014. He has taught Spanish Language and Amerindian Literatures/Oralitures at various universities in Chile , New Zealand and Australia. He is currently Head of the Department of Spanish Studies at Adelaide University”.

Australia, Europe, Latin America

South Ways – art undercurrents across the South

Kevin Murray Leave a comment

Paper for South-South Axes of Global Art (Paris, 17-19 Jun 15)

Context

I present this paper as a curator, more concerned with opening up a space for new possibilities than analysing the past. My purpose is to present alternatives to the biennale model that are conducive to horizontal south-south exchange. Presenting these here, in the cultural capital of the North, affords a critical space to consider its limits and potential for further development.

Before I begin, I need to account for my voice as a citizen of Australia. Australia is an extractivist settler nation that has largely ignored its position in the South in favour of models inherited from Europe and North America. Until recently, the colonial imagination was fired by nationalist tropes like ‘Downunder’, the ‘Great Southern Land’ and ‘Southern Cross’, but these are mere clichés in a neoliberal state that is more concerned with the people it can exclude than the shared stories it can generate from within.

Charles de Gaulle was rumoured to have said of Brazil, that ‘it is a country of the future, and always will be’. So in Australia, our place in the world remains, paradoxically, a distant horizon. But as Paulin Hountondji remarked ‘culture is not only a heritage, it is a project’ (Sahlins 2005). The South is our project, to be more than a colonial outpost. Australia’s distance from the centre has potential to open a space for new possibilities.

Also before going further I should clarify my use of the term ‘south’. Though it seems uncomfortable in a globalised world to offer spatial limits, I do use ‘south’ as a political reality, more than a convenient trope. Jorge Luis Borges proposed that ‘universal history is the history of various intonations of a few metaphors’ (Borges 1973). Derrida proposed light was one of these key metaphors (Derrida 1978), evident since Plato in the symbol of knowledge as enlightenment. South could be considered among these key metaphors. The meaning of South is predicated on the concept of a vertical hierarchy, where value lies above. It is more than just a trope—an improvement on ‘Third World’, but not as incisive as ‘Majority World’. South cannot be readily transposed. South is a real fixed phenomenon, what Ricoeur calls the vestricktsein, ‘living imbrication’ (Ricoeur 1984, 75). By convention I fly up to Paris, despite that our experience of the world is as in the long run as an even plane. ‘Going south’ has become synonymous with failure. This is a phenomenological function embedded in how we see the world. We live in metaphors, which suits some better than others. Just as blackness is historically tainted with ignorance, so ‘southern’ is by default lowly.

The biennale dream

The story begins with the quest for civic identity. Sydney and Melbourne are Australia’s rival cities. Missing the nature-given attractions of Sydney, Melbourne identifies more with man-made elements, such as its architecture. Through its Major Events strategy, Melbourne also seeks to feature in the international circuit through programs like the Formulae One Grand Prix. But an important piece has been missing. Though originating many of the artistic movements in Australia, Melbourne lacks a place in the international visual arts calendar. Finally, in 1999, it acquired its first, and only, visual arts biennale. Mostly praised by local critics, the event proved a financial disaster. In the end, the Melbourne Biennial didn’t receive the same kind of international funding support that was already directed towards Sydney, one the oldest biennales. At a forum in RMIT Gallery, the godfather of biennales, Rene Block, explained cruelly that there was just ‘no room on the carousel’ for Melbourne. It was too similar to Sydney, which was already established, and did not have the exotic appeal of new members like Istanbul or Gwangju.

This led to many discussions about what it meant to have a biennale in Melbourne. Was there an alternative model? Brisbane had shown how it was possible to consolidate a place in the international calendar outside the carousel, in the Asia Pacific Triennial. Rather try to inveigle oneself into an existing circuit, the Art Gallery of Queensland had created a new set of exchanges framed by an east-west dialogue between Australia and the cultures of its region. At a public discussion at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 2000, the Brisbane model was explored and the question asked—what new international space could Melbourne help open up?

At that time, the democratic turn in many countries in the South were relatively fresh. Nelson Mandela had just stepped down as President of the new South Africa. In Latin America, countries like Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay had broken with the military dictatorships of the 1970s. The 20^th century story of the South as a region of tin-pot dictators and banana republics was no longer relevant. Boycott was no longer the most appropriate ethical engagement with the South. In this context, it seemed that a triennial style event in Melbourne could provide a new space for trying out exchanges with these reformed countries along southern latitudes.

South Project

In 2003, the South Project was initiated and heads of the city’s cultural institutions came together to endorse a future APT style event in Melbourne. In the meantime, however, most of the leading visual arts organisations like the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art reverted back to architecture as a forum of ambition. New buildings like Federation Square testified to Melbourne’s cultural value. It was left to a relatively marginal organisation, Craft Victoria, to carry the South baton. For a craft organisation, the South Project offered not only the potential to forge south-south alliances, it also provided a way to engage with craft practice in an otherwise highly conceptual visual arts scene. The rationale for this came from the relative importance of craft as a means of both livelihood and cultural identity in many countries of the South.[1]

Rather than see this developmentally as evidence of a cultural backwardness, the challenge was to integrate crafts into the platform. This was framed as a democratic issue. Craft helped ensure that this exchange was not simply reproducing the cultural elites that normally ride the carousel, but embraced also those in townships, slums and poblaciones.

The democratic framework was attempted in three ways. The first was to include where possible a local indigenous welcome alongside the inevitable meeting of dignitaries. While now a common feature of public events in Australia, it was still a relatively new component in other countries, particularly South America.

The second was to include practical workshops alongside the standard format of talks and exhibitions. Fibre crafts played a leading role, including Australian Aboriginal techniques in Johannesburg and Māori basket-making in Wellington. This offered craftspersons and artisans with a more direct benefit in attending, as well as opportunity for the university educated participants to engage in a dialogical space was did not privilege their cultural capital.

The third involved exchanges with children. The South Kids program featured the story of an emu that wanted to fly. A kit including the toy emu and camera circulated around schools in the South, enabling children to document their worlds. In Soweto, this was a pretext for praising the capacities of the ostrich, which though unable to fly has unique features such as physical beauty, useful eggs and impressive running speed. The story of the flightless bird was a predicament seen to typify the South, as a region lacking the capacity to share its unique features with each other.

In the end, the South Project did not achieve its grand ambition to establish a triennial in Melbourne. While this was partly the consequence of internal political factors, it was not helped by the relative lack of economic opportunities for Australia across the South compared to the Asia Pacific.

Nonetheless, the South Project left a residual network and a trail of unanswered questions. What does the South share in common, besides a shared opposition to the North? To what extent is the focus on the South reproducing a post-colonial dynamic where indigenous cultures are defined by their oppression, rather than in their own terms? What would be a space such as the South that didn’t need the North to define itself against? A kind of Hegelian dialectic had been initiated to discover an autonomous identity for the South.

Southern Theory

Meanwhile, there emerged a call in the academy to broaden the purview beyond the trans-Atlantic north. In 2007, the book by Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell was published, titled Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (2007). Connell addressed the degree to which the discipline of sociology was built on a set of interests that were particular to the northern metropolitan centres. She argued that the theories of Marx, Durkheim and Weber did not account for the experiences particular to the periphery, especially that of its subaltern majorities. Rather than the universal systems offered by those theorists, Connell advocated for a ‘dirty theory’ that takes into account the particularities:

The goal of dirty theory is not to subsume, but to clarify; not to classify from outside, but to illuminate a situation in its concreteness. And for that purpose — to change the metaphor — all is grist to the mill. Our interest as researchers is to maximise the wealth of materials that are drawn into the analysis and explanation. It is also our interest to multiply, rather than slim down, the theoretical idea that we have to work with. That includes multiplying the local sources of our thinking, as this book attempts to do. (Connell 2007, 207)

While concerned particularly with the institutional production of knowledge, Connell’s work paralleled others that have recently used the South within a framework of critical social theory. This includes Enrique Dussel’s work constructing a discipline of liberation philosophy (Dussel 1985), which evaluates ideas according to their impact on social justice. Such a philosophy takes geopolitical space seriously. As Dussel writes, ‘To be born at the North Pole or in Chiapas is not the same thing as to be born in New York City.’ (Dussel 1985). This drive has been continued by thinkers and activists such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos, whose epic ‘epistemologies of the South’ (Santos 2013) aims to deconstruct universalising gestures.

There is much diversity among the theorists framing their work in a Southern context (Rosa 2014). But they share the key principle of place as a valid framework for the production of knowledge. This means working in the South can be more than just a second best option, indicative of failure to succeed in the North.

Southern Theory and visual arts

How might Southern Theory apply to the visual arts? Within an ecological framework, ideas are evaluated not only for their internal consistency but also the greater world they make possible. We may thus look at anthropology not as the disinterested study of an exotic tribe for the production of academic knowledge elsewhere, but as an exchange involving solidarity with the aspirations of the community under scrutiny. While Southern Theory is predominantly a matter of reflecting social realities, in the case of creative practices it is more about constructing alternatives to the world as it is.

Walter Mignolo is one theorist who has extended the southern perspective to the practice of visual arts and design (Kalantidou and Fry 2014). From an academic base in Hong Kong, Mignolo has led a group of scholars to develop a ‘decolonial aestheSis’ (Mignolo and Vázquez 2013), which critiques Western aesthetic categories like beauty through practices of juxtaposition or parody. Mignolo highlights the Sharjah Biennial (Mignolo 2013) as an example of radical decentring. According to Mignolo, this event ‘turns its back on the intellectual Euro-American fashions that have dominated, until recently, the “biennial market place”’ (Mignolo 2013). For Mignolo, the value of Sharjah is a matter of its content; the countries and artists that participate represent an alternative ‘cultural cartography’. He notes that of the 100 artists, only 2 were from the USA and 20 from Europe. However, he refrains from mentioning any work in detail. The works are seen to illustrate a particular world view that is independent of the West. An example of one ‘illustrative work’ is:

Nevin Aladag, Turkey, Session (2013). This video triptych shot in Sharjah brings together the topography of the city and percussion music composed with Arabic, African and Indian percussion instruments. The video triptych invokes the spirit of re-emergence in that it works with musical instruments that elude the European renaissance. At the same time, that the instruments are played by and in the environment of Sharjah, cultures once disavowed by western hegemony ‘re-emerge’ with the force and the confidence of pluri-versal futures. (Mignolo 2013)

While its subject may seem non-Western, the format is readily assimilated into the dominant model. It is a ‘white cube’ work, detached from the work, where the visitor is an anonymous viewer. Apart from its geographic location, this work reproduces the biennial model of the world as spectacle.

The current Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor has brought the concerns of Sharjah to the centre. The majority of works offering a political critique of capitalist hegemony. But as noted (Cumming 2015), there is some irony in an event that is resourced and enjoyed by the very elites it attempts to critique. While some may argue that the carousel is opening up to the South (Gardner and Green 2013), there is no guarantee that it extends beyond the strata of cultural elites found in almost all countries. The challenge is to consider platforms for art making that go beyond reflecting the world as it is, and instead offer alternative pathways for creating a world that might be.

South Ways

It was with the aim to develop alternative platforms that a project was formed last year within the Southern Perspectives, a network of writers and artists that continued after the South Project. The aim of South Ways was to initiate development of platforms for art that act in the world. The process involved roundtables that brought together a variety of voices from those involved in creative practice. Four roundtables were held in different cities of Australia and New Zealand reflecting a diversity of perspectives. To provide a simple pragmatic frame, the seed for each roundtable was provided by a single verb that reflected a distinctive mode of engagement found in the South.[2]

I will provide a brief overview of these verbs and an example of their use.

To bestow

The first roundtable was held in Wellington New Zealand and included a mix of Māori and Pākeha participants. The verb to consider was ‘to bestow’ reflecting the traditional Māori practice of koha or gift giving in art practice and the emergence of Pākeha jewellery forms of engagement involving gift exchange. The main challenge concerned the vulnerability of such practices when exposed to consumer capitalism. Even in biennales, the freebie expectation means that gifts offered as part of the art world are rarely taken in the spirit of exchange. The task was to develop a platform that fostered trust and reciprocity between artists and their audiences.

The project Joyaviva was an exhibition where artists developed prototypes of modern amulets. This drew on the South American tradition of public shrines that receive ex-votive offerings. In the exhibition format, visitors were offered plastic flowers to adorn works and encouraged to reflect on the impact of these amulets on their lives. One of the participants, the Māori artist Areta Wilkinson, integrates koha into both her art work and academic research. For Joyaviva, she featured an initiative to support a Māori community devastated by the Christchurch earthquakes, which included a Matiriki brooch symbolising the Pleiades constellation that signals the New Year.

To open

Melbourne was the site of the second roundtable. Initially, the verb to open related to the work of artists like Nicholas Mangan who chose to expose sites of production in art galleries, such as guerrilla supply lines or factory assembly belts. Present were some of the artists who had chosen to boycott the Sydney Biennale because of its association with Transfield, the company commissioned to manage offshore detention centres. As befits the birthplace of Julian Assange, the Melbourne gathering advocated for a radical transparency, which would highlight the economic value that artists contribute for sponsors to major art events. The proposed WikiLeaks style of platform has yet to emerge.

But one initiative that does aspire to this is the Sangam Project. This platform emerged from the context of the practical workshops in the South Project, where North and South sometimes met in the process of product development, where designers and artisans sought to build creative partnerships. The program attempts to use the new e-commerce platforms as a means to give economic value to the information about the maker, otherwise unacknowledged. This aspires to platform that is alternative to the commodity circuits that occlude the means of production.

To swap

In Sydney, the verb ‘to swap’ was set up to reflect the phenomenon of reverse primitivism in which Southern artists turn the exotic gaze back on the North. In the end, the subject of contention again was the biennale. In this case, the issue was the way the carousel privileged the art of international relations, rather than local practices that draw on urban nature and community histories. The proposal was a distributed biennale which spread its program across local sites in different cities.

An existing example is the project Minga Sistemas de Trabajo Colectivo in Santiago, curated by Angela Cura Mendez and Felipe Cura (Donoso 2015). Minga is a precolombian term for collective labour. In the island of Chiloe, it often takes the form of a Tiradura de casa when the community gather to move someone’s house to a different location. Working with the community of artist-run art spaces in Chile, this exhibition involved gathering more the spaces themselves than work within them. Maria Gabler re-constructed the walls of Galería Tajamar, which exists in a public housing estate, within Galleria Gabriela Mistral in downtown Santiago. This Minga of contemporary art enables a concentration of work that still retains its locatedness within its home community.

To glean

The roundtable in Hobart was concerned the practice of recovering what is left over, ‘to glean‘. This reflected not only the arte Povera practices such as El Anatusi, granted the Golden Lion in Venice for sublime recycling, but also recovery of cultures lost during the process of colonisation, which was particularly dramatic in Tasmania. The discussion eventually led to the revival of the idea of a Museum of Southern Memory, initially proposed in the first South Project, reflecting the common experience of Apartheid, Stolen Generation and the Disappeared. This museum will not be a physical structure, but a network of individuals and groups that sustain a story or cultural practice through use.

This year, the project of a Social Repair Kit involves re-modelling traditional forms of conflict resolution through blood money. The ‘sorry object’ is the subject of workshops in Bogotá, Santiago and Melbourne. The focus is the injury sustained by conflicts such as the Colombian civil war, coup against Allende and last year’s Sydney hostage siege and consequent islamophobia. Rather than reflect on these conflicts, the aim is to draw inspiration from traditional modes of conflict resolution, such as the Palabreros, in order to develop objects that can be introduced into the communities to facilitate apology and pardon.[3]

Conclusion

South Ways is a scattering of seeds, each with a kernel of action. Of course, we need to be realistic about the likelihood that these proposals will flourish, given the kind of soil in which they are planted. Stepping off the carousel means leaving behind the capital which it has proven effective in gathering. The success will depend on the strength of solidarity rather than self-interest of participants. But if South is to be more than a primitivist mirror to the North, it needs to be a space were we can test out other ways of being.

Notes

[1] See (Skinner 2014) for a more developed framework for the importance of craft in a settler colonial art history.

[2] The theoretical framework for this use of verbs is Actor Network Theory, which offers a flat explanatory structure that does refuses the mimesis and instead identifies the effects that accompany representation (Harman 2014). Accordingly, the dominant verb in visual arts is ‘to explore’ or ‘to examine’. This colonial mode entails a distance between the active world of the artist and unknowing object of knowledge. Viewed in this way, the challenge becomes identifying alternate actions in the world.

References

Borges, Jorge Luis. 1973. “Pascal’s Sphere.” In Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, 1st British ed. London: Souvenir Press.

Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity.

Cumming, Laura. 2015. “56th Venice Biennale Review – More of a Glum Trudge than an Exhilarating Adventure.” The Guardian. Accessed June 14. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/10/venice-biennale-2015-review-56th-sarah-lucas-xu-bing-chiharu-shiota.

Derrida, Jacques. 1978. “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas.” In Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Donoso, Diego Parra. 2015. “Cuidado: Zona de Autogestión Apuntes sobre Minga en Galería Gabriela Mistral.” Revista Punto de Fuga. http://www.revistapuntodefuga.com/?p=1774.

Dussel, Enrique. 1985. Philosophy of Liberation. Vol. 1. Maryknoll, N.Y. : Orbis Books, c1985.

Gardner, Anthony, and Charles Green. 2013. “Biennials of the South on the Edges of the Global.” Third Text 27 (4): 442–55. doi:10.1080/09528822.2013.810892.

Harman, Graham. 2014. Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political. Pluto Press.

Kalantidou, Eleni, and Tony Fry. 2014. Design in the Borderlands. 1 edition. New York, NY: Routledge.

Mignolo, Walter. 2013. “Re:Emerging, Decentring and Delinking.” Ibraaz. August 5. http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/59/.

Mignolo, Walter, and Rolando Vázquez. 2013. “The Decolonial AestheSis Dossier.” Social Text. July 15. http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/the-decolonial-aesthesis-dossier/.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative Vol.1. University of Chicago Press.

Rosa, Marcelo C. 2014. “Theories of the South: Limits and Perspectives of an Emergent Movement in Social Sciences.” Current Sociology, February, 0011392114522171. doi:10.1177/0011392114522171.

Sahlins, Marshall. 2005. “On the Anthropology of Modernity, Or, Some Triumphs of Culture over Despondency Theory.” In Culture and Sustainable Development in the Pacific, edited by Antony Hooper. Canberra: ANU Press.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2013. “Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South.” Africa Development 37 (1): 43–67.

Skinner, Damian. 2014. “Settler-Colonial Art History: A Proposition in Two Parts.” Journal of Canadian History 35 (1): 131–75.

[3] I should also mention a more dispersed project drawing from the Melanesian language of silence to develop a platform outside of discourse. Vakanomodi project is named after the Fijian practice of deep listening to the land.

Image is from the exhibition Mirador, de María Gabler, en Galería Tajamar, Santiago de Chile, 2015. Foto: Sebastián Mejía

Education

The Neoliberal Takeover in Australian Universities

Kevin Murray 1 Comment

Raewyn Connell’s introduction to the People’s Tribunal.

What is neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism is the name widely used for the corporate market ideology that in the last generation has gained a dominant position across most of the world. Originating as a business-led development strategy in the global South, and a business-led attack on the welfare state in the global North, neoliberalism has crystallized as a policy package for re-shaping economic and social life.

The package varies from country to country but has much in common. Typical policies are: selling off public assets to owners of capital (‘privatisation’); abolishing rules restraining what businesses can do (‘deregulation’); reducing public services, or charging fees for them (‘user pays’); weakening unions, removing legal protections for workers, and removing protections for local industries; and lowering taxes on high-earning individuals and companies.

At a deeper level, neoliberalism promotes broad cultural changes. The agenda seeks to expand the reach of markets and profit/loss calculation across social life (‘commodification’). It makes local economies depend on world markets and flows of capital (‘globalization’). It re-shapes public institutions and voluntary organizations on the model of competitive firms (‘public sector reform’). It expands the power of managers, displacing local decision-making and occupational expertise. It tries to re-shape culture to promote selfishness (‘individualism’), ruthlessness (‘entrepreneurship’) and dominance (‘leadership’).

Neoliberal policies have rarely been brought in by popular demand. They usually make the rich richer and the poor more insecure – which is usually unpopular. The agenda has, therefore, mainly been introduced top-down: sometimes by force or legal coercion; sometimes by economic coercion (e.g. the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs); sometimes as a surprise package after governments won power for other reasons (classic case being Peru); and sometimes in response to economic panic (e.g. the 1980s in Australia).

For organizations, neoliberal restructuring is typically decided at the top by senior management. It is then imposed through many small but non-negotiable changes in organizational life. This process is often planned with the assistance of management consultants, corporations that make a profitable business of re-organizing other peoples’ workplaces on neoliberal lines. Sudden re-shaping of organizations has occurred (e.g. the 1986 “Big Bang” deregulation of the London Stock Exchange), but this is now rare.

Universities: organizational change

Universities have been caught in neoliberal restructuring in multiple ways. In some countries (e.g. Chile, Brasil) there has been a mushroom growth of private for-profit colleges. In Australia the story centres on the internal transformation of a system of public universities and colleges. A dramatic shift, begun in 1987-88 under Labor Party education minister John Dawkins, has turned a broadly cooperative system into a divisive collection of competing firms. Simultaneously, university administrations began to mutate into corporate-style managerial elites, imbued with business ideology and paid like corporate managers. The top echelon of Australian university managers now get salary packages around a million dollars per year.

Rather than outright privatisation, there has been a steep decline in the proportion of public funding, replaced by fees charged to students. Australia now has one of the lowest levels of public investment in higher education among affluent countries. Fees were re-introduced in the Dawkins era at a low level but have risen ever since. The new corporate managers have latched on to this, and the most powerful of them have recently been supporting complete deregulation of fees, as a way of expanding their income.

In Australian universities, a key part of this strategy was charging higher fees to overseas students, most of whom come from Asia. In the 1990s and 2000s the university sector became, in economic terms, an export industry. To put it more plainly, a higher education system that formerly educated overseas students for free as a form of international aid, has now become a device for sucking money out of developing economies.

The neoliberal takeover produces a different approach to the workforce. A university as a public institution had an interest in keeping and educating its workforce, gaining the long-term benefits of organizational memory and shared know-how. A university as a corporation has an interest in cheap and flexible labour, bought on a market.

One device is to remove chunks of the workforce from the university payroll altogether, by outsourcing their work to other corporations. This is now done for university work ranging from computing, to printing, to security. Academic tenure is a serious constraint on flexibility; so tenure has gradually been eroded. All parts of the university workforce are now vulnerable to sudden restructurings, cuts and purges. These may impact a library at one time, a faculty at another, a professional service at yet another. Across the whole sector, around half of the undergraduate classes are now taken by teachers on fixed-term, casual or other insecure employment conditions.

Promoting selfishness, ruthlessness and dominance tends to break down social trust. It is clear that neoliberal managers in universities now have little trust in their workforce. An important consequence is a growing spiderweb of top-down controls over university staff. Many of these controls are now embedded in management-controlled Intranets.

Staff have therefore been spending increasing amounts of their time complying with online reporting requirements (for finance, marks, research output, etc. etc.), fitting courses into online templates, undergoing performance management, getting managerial permissions (for spending funds, starting a research project, travelling to a conference, etc. etc.). The space for professional judgment, for anyone in universities except managers, has been shrinking.

Cultural change

Equally important, though not so visible, are cultural changes in universities. Managerial prerogative has substantially displaced organizational democracy. ‘Consultations’ are frequently announced but are rarely more than window-dressing.

An ideology of competition – taking a toxic form in restructures where staff have to compete against each other to get back their own jobs – undermines the cooperation that actually makes a university work. Widening anxiety and distrust undermines the commitments that brought many people to work in universities in the first place: the hope of doing work in the public interest, love of teaching, the excitement of intellectual discovery.

The shift to market logic and the search for advantage over other university-firms underlie another important cultural shift: managers now rely on corporate techniques of publicity. Austtralian universities have all acquired public-relations units, and now put resources into corporate image, ‘branding’ and boasting. Mindless slogans proliferate: one university adopted the slogan “Never Stand Still”, another dubbed itself “Australia’s Innovative University”, a third has taken to plastering gems of corporate philosophy like “Leadership is a Culture” across the campus.

The irony here runs deep. An institution whose rationale, both in teaching and research, is the difficult search for truth, increasingly presents itself through dumbed-down advertising that is manipulative, selective, and sometimes outright deceptive.

Australian neoliberalism has produced a culture focussed on short-term profit, and an economy dependent on the short-term benefit of mining minerals. In services such as education, neoliberalism works by mining existing institutions. Organizations that were set up to serve a public interest are restructured to find potential profits. Google calls it “monetising”.

And now…?

The neoliberal takeover of Australian higher education is well advanced. But the process is uneven and definitely not complete. Indeed it is hard to see how it could become complete without destroying the distinctive cultural authority of universities – exactly the resource that the neoliberal agenda is mining. Already there is a disturbing whiff of favouritism and corruption around parts of the Australian university system, and few things could be more damaging.

University managers have taken to calling themselves “The University”, and the Australian Vice-Chancellors’ Committee, in a characteristic move, re-named themselves “Universities Australia”. But it is actually the staff and students who make a university work. Enough remains of commitment to public education, cooperation among the workforce, and concern with truth, to make the universities still function as a public service. That is an important fact.

There is explicit resistance to the neoliberal agenda. Opposition from students and staff to the deregulation of fees (which would mean steep fee rises in the more privileged universities and increasing inequality in the system) found support in Parliament in 2014-15. Industrial action by university staff has become more widespread – which is unusual in the Australian industrial system where unions have been weakened under neoliberalism.

What we still need is a way of changing the institutions in a democratic direction – a long-term vision for public universities, and a practical agenda for the near future.

I think the discussion has to deal with three sets of problems. First, what will a more democratic university look like as an organization? – as a good place to work for all types of workers, as a place of shared rather than top-down decision-making. What are the teaching and learning practices we need for a more satisfying and relevant higher education?

Second, considering the university as a knowledge institution, what kinds of knowledge will be created and taught? What are the research agendas that universities need to pursue, as Australia moves from a colonial past into a turbulent and dangerous future? What will curricula of the future be, if our universities are to be more than retail offices for globalized MOOC vendors?

Third, what are better ways of linking Australian universities to the wider society? Who will be the new participants in university life, a generation down the track? Can we have social justice in higher education, and if so, how? How can universities develop a cultural identity more authentic and credible than the current boasting and brand-mongering?

That’s a large agenda. But the discussion is beginning.

Photo Credit: fa11ing_away via Compfight cc

Notice

People’s Tribunal on 11 April 2015

Kevin Murray 2 Comments

If you’re in Melbourne on 11 April, please come along to this important public event. You don’t have to be an employee of University of Melbourne to have an interest in the impact of neo-liberalism on our public institutions.

A popular tribunal including Aboriginal elders will hear evidence and testimonies about the employment practices used to reform professional positions at the University of Melbourne. Over 500 professional staff have lost their positions, and many more suffer mental stress, due to the loss of job stability.

Location: Brunswick Uniting Church, 212/214 Sydney Road

Date: 10.00am-4.00pm, Saturday, 11 April 2015

See https://www.facebook.com/thepeoplestribunal

Book

Architecture for Indigenous Cultures: Australia and Beyond

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McGaw, Janet, and Anoma Pieris. 2014. Assembling the Centre: Architecture for Indigenous Cultures: Australia and Beyond. 1 edition. New York: Routledge.

Series: Routledge Research in Architecture

A new book looks at issues around the architecture of Indigenous cultural centres. It confronts the challenge of de-colonising architecture through a methodology of mutual engagement. This includes discussion of the possum-skin cloak, which has been used by members of the Kulin nation in south-east Australia as a way of representing the gathering of communities. This form of mapping is related to the Deluezian concept of striated representation of space.

Below is the opening of the chapter ‘Skin’ (pp. 152-3) which discusses this form of representation:

Over the past century the expressive potential of the material and tectonic qualities of architecture has in many ways been superseded by the repre – sentational opportunities of the surface (Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi 2002, p. 8). The development of the free façade with the Monadnock Building in Chicago 1891 liberated the surface from its structure, but subsequent structural innovations with tensile fabrics, pre-stressed concrete shells and, more recently, the integration of generative digital software with industrial production, have allowed architects to dispense with orthogonal order as well. The emergence of complexity theories in mathematics and increasingly sophisticated computer intelligence have been critical enablers of this archi – tectural turn since the late the twentieth century. Digital design tools have become generative rather than simply representational, enabling a com – plexity previously associated with craft to be reproduced at a grand scale. Many but not all of these innovations have been aesthetically motivated.

At the same time, a parallel architectural discourse influenced by post – structural literary and feminist theory (by scholars such as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous), has called into question other aspects of the surface. Architectural theorists and philos ophers Elizabeth Diller, Jennifer Bloomer, Elizabeth Grosz and others, have challenged architecture to consider the inscriptive practices perpetuated by a male-dominated profession on the gendered body. Their work drew out similarities between architectural and urban surfaces and bodily skins. The third wave of feminist discourse, through the work of bell hooks, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Trinh T. Minh-ha has extended the critique to include other ‘minored’ bodies. Relatively few Indigenous cultural centre designs have been informed by these critiques, and yet Indigenous place-making practices have a long-standing relationship with surfaces – both ancient and modern.
We chose the term ‘skin’ – a term commonly substituted with ‘surface’ in architectural discourse – to frame our discussion for its more immediate bodily connotations. Interestingly, skins are at once material and expressive surfaces, a site of inscription and marking. As a vehicle for assembling and

stabilising social identity, the skin has a significant history. In this chapter, we explore the importance of skin as a site of place-making through three historic periods. The connections between inscriptive practices and Storyplaces in pre-colonial Indigenous culture are addressed first. We argue that painting, etching, and other kinds of surface markings in pre-colonial culture were not purely decorative; they had particular symbolic content that some scholars have likened to text. However, we prefer the term ‘(s)crypts’ coined by Jennifer Bloomer, as it alludes to writing (script) that has both spatial (crypt-like) and enigmatic (encrypted) qualities, about Stories that are often sacred (scriptural) (Bloomer 1993).

During the colonial period, new motifs were introduced. The rock art of this period – an early graffiti written over Story-places – reveals the social upheaval that took place as a result of colonisation. The moment of colon – isation signals a process of de-territorialisation enacted through a range of bodily inscriptions by settlers and instituted by the colonial authorities. Thus, the social and physical bodies of Indigenous people were transformed: tradi tional possum skin cloaks were replaced with Western clothes and woollen blankets; initiation ceremonies involving scarification were abruptly ceased; the protective surfaces of ethno-architecture were replaced with institutional buildings. Western garb and architecture became new ‘skins’ that de-territorialised Indigenous social identity. Contemporary Indigenous artists’ responses to these inscriptions include new expressions on the surfaces of the city and the body. They range from the overt, such as stencil, street and body art, to the covert, such as enigmatic inscriptions that retain secret knowledges. Alongside Indigenous voices in this chapter, we include images of surfaces, (sc)rypts and other inscriptions by Indigenous artists. We ask how knowledge of these contemporary practices of re-territorialising Indigenous identity through surface markings might inform a new practice of making Indigenous cultural centres. In particular, we consider how attending to the specificities of Indigenous surface inscriptions might lead Indigenous cultural centre design to eschew aesthetics in favour of politics.

This chapter considers two case studies that do display an overt interest in the surface. The first is international: the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, designed by Jean Nouvel, incorporates a vertical garden on its exterior skin, thus melding living and constructed environments into the fabric of an architecture that explores material innovation in cladding design. However, the Musée du Quai Branly has also been widely critiqued for its application of Indigenous artwork to its interior surfaces as a decorative tool, without reference to the artworks’ cultural contexts or the practices of inscription from which they arise. The second case study is Australian. The National Museum of Australia, Canberra, designed by ARM is a building that engages productively with formal and inscriptive possibilities of the surface to critically challenge political orthodoxies. However, it has also been critiqued as ‘populist’.

Book

Launch of Thinking the Antipodes by Peter Beilharz

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Thinking the Antipodes: Australian Essays

By Peter Beilharz

To be launched by Nikos Papastergiadis at 7pm on 9 March, 2015

Greek Centre, 168 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, Mezzanine level

Please RSVP to Monash University Publishing at publishing@monash.edu by 4 March Co-sponsored by The Greek Centre, Melbourne, and the Thesis Eleven Centre, La Trobe University

In 1956 Bernard smith wrote that we in Australia were migratory birds. This was to become a leading motif of his own thinking, and a significant inspiration for sociologist peter Beilharz. Beilharz came to argue that the idea of the antipodes made sense less in its geographical than its cultural form, viewed as a relation rather than a place. Australians had one foot here and one there, whichever ‘there’ this was. This way of thinking with and after Bernard smith makes up one current of Beilharz’s best Australian essays.

Two other streams contribute to the collection. The second recovers and publicises antipodean intellectuals, from Childe to Evatt to Stretton to Jean Martin, who have often been overshadowed here by the reception given to metropolitan celebrity thinkers; and examines others, like Hughes and Carey, who have been celebrated as writers more than as interpreters of the antipodean condition.

The third stream engages with mainstream views of Australian writing, and with the limits of these views. if we think in terms of cultural traffic, then the stories we tell about Australia will also be global and regional in a broader sense. Australia is the result of cultural traffic, local and global.

Latin America

Photographic call for solidarity with victims of Iguala

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Vivos ©Marcelo Brodsky, Buenos Aires, 2014

Tlachinollan, Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña the Latinstock Foundation and Human Rights Organizations organizations in Latin America call for an international visual action in solidarity with the victims of kidnapping and murder that happened last September in Iguala, Estado de Guerrero, Mexico.

The visual campaign seeks photographers and groups of students who will pose for a picture with a sign reading in order to express world wide sympathy and support_for the missing students and their parents in their stuggle to pursue justice and truth for this brutal and unimaginable act of violence against unarmed young students. The sign reading will send a message for Truth and Justice to prevail in Mexico. The production of the sign should be made by the students so this becomes an educational experience in the production of images for a social and solidarity purpose.

The students and social organizations of Mexico will receive these images and distribute them around the country, in the social networks and in contact with the Mexican Human Rights Organizations such as Tlachinollan, that represents the families of the victims and other Photography and Human Rights organizations in Mexico. For them, this support is essential to strengthen their fight for justice and the respect for Human Rights, a struggle that will gain for them the support of sensible people around the world

The brutality against a group of 43 rural students of the Teachers Rural School Isidro Burgos of Ayotzinapa conducted by the Mexican state of Guerrero and its police in collusion with drug lords of that state , mark an elevated level of violence and horror exerted on Mexican people. This requires an immediate action in Mexico and around the world so that the truth is known and Mexicans can move ahead in the implementation of real justice in this case. World wide support as manifested in this campaign will give moral, public, and powerful support to the seekers of justice and truth in this case.

For more information, go to www.facebook.com/visualaction or to www.visualaction.org.

Apoyo/Support

Andhes Asociacion de abogados de Tucuman http://andhes.org.ar/
Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires/Universidad de Buenos Aires http://www.cnba.uba.ar/
Centre de la Photographie, Genève, Suiza www.centrephotogeneve.ch
Fotofest, Houston, USA www.fotofest.org/
Estudio Madalena, Sao Paulo, Brasil estudiomadalena.com.br/
Autograph, London, UK www. autograph-abp.co.uk
Drik Picture Agency, Dhaka, Bangladesh www.drik.net
Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago de Chile www.museodelamemoria.cl/
Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires, Argentina www.parquedelamemoria.org.ar
Photograhic Museum of Humanity www.phmuseum.com
Museo de la Memoria de Rosario, Argentina www.museodelamemoria.gob.ar
Familiares de Desaparecidos y Detenidos por razones Politicas, Argentina www.desaparecidos.org/familiares/
FAC Fundaciòn de Arte Contemporáneo, Montevideo, Uruguay facmvd.blogspot.com/
Fundacion Infoto, Tucumàn, Argentina www.fundacion.infoto.com.ar
EMAHO Magazine, India www.emahomagazine.com
ECCHR European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Berlin, Alemania www.ecchr.eu ,
Lugar a dudas, Cali, Colombia www.lugaradudas.org

The images can be sent in low resolution to:

tlachinollan.difusion@gmail.com
almoca@prodigy.net.mx
fundacion@latinstock.com

And in High Resolution, for possible exhibition in Mexico when the campaign is completed to: fundacion@latinstock.com

If your organization wants to join this initiative, please send an email and your URL to fundacion@latinstock.com

Latin America, Texts

Alfonsina Barrionuevo interview

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Alfonsina Barrionuevo

Alfonsina Barrionuevo is a Peruvian writer whose work seeks to recuperate the indigenous knowledge lost to colonisation. Her scholarly research of Machu Picchu is a great contribution to our understanding of Inca culture. She keeps a rich set of texts online at perumundodeleyendas.blogspot.com.

A continuación, explica las ideas que hay detrás de su trabajo:

En su trabajo, usted parece tener un compromiso con la recuperación de la cultura prehispánica. ¿Por qué es esto importante para usted personalmente?

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Porque si el Perú hubiera sido un conjunto de grupos aldeanos, sin desarrollo cultural, no habría para qué buscar las raíces. Aquí se habla del orgullo de ser peruanos, pero orgullo de qué. La gente se queda en el aire. No es así. El país que tenemos fue extraordinario. Tiene ocho regiones y 84 pisos ecológicos. Tenemos 69 culturas que tuvieron un extraordinario desarrollo tecnológico, científico y cultural. Lo demuestran las construcciones de ciudades, sistemas de irrigación, cultivo y cosecha de lluvias, textilería, orfebrería, cerámica, escritura, tradiciones, música, danza, etc. Hace diez mil años comienzan con la domesticación de 450 especies alimenticias más o menos que se dan al mundo a partir del siglo XVI. Su religión fue ecológica y carismática, no tuvimos dioses, conocieron tanto la naturaleza y las fuerzas cósmica<s y terrígenas que las consideraron familia. Hay que recuperar la memoria de lo que tuvimos y de lo que queda en las comunidades nativas para tener una base firme, para crecer ordenadamente, para sentir un compromiso para seguir adelante . Los políticos corruptos no tienen idea de la obligación que contraen con sus representados, la indolencia de muchos es fruto de su ignorancia, el no encontrar sentido a la vida ni respeto por la vida de los demás es consecuencia de todo esto en parte. En mi país sigue existiendo gente maravillosa honrada, trabajadora, inteligente y eso me reconcilia con las cosas negativas que pasan cada día.

Como intelectual peruana muy activa, puedes decir lo que las revistas o asociaciones locales eran importantes para usted en el sostenimiento de su trabajo?

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Yo soy periodista. Siempre he trabajado en diarios y revistas. De qué otra forma hubiera podido sostenerme y sostener a mi familia. Yo no tenía herencias, no venía de una familia acomodada. Mi padre era periodista y mi madre una mujer de talento pero económicamente de clase media. Hoy no tengo trabajo en periódicos ni revistas porque prefieren gente que trabaja a destajo. Alguna vez vendía fotografías para mis artículos y me dijeron que preferían el regalo que les hacían los mochileros a quienes les bastaba una mención de su nombre o una propina. También son de su preferencia jóvenes periodistas que no tienen grandes obligaciones.

¿Hubo influencias intelectuales de fuera de Perú que eran importantes para usted?

He leído mucho a autores españoles, franceses, ingleses, desde los cuatro años de edad. Siempre estaba enferma y la única forma de mantenerme en la cama para mi padre fue enseñarme a leer y comprarme después libros, las revistas las leía en minutos.

¿Cree que es posible recuperar las formas de pensar que pertenecieron a las culturas pre-coloniales? ¿Qué importancia pueden tener ellos ahora?

No creo. En tantos siglos pasados la vida ha cambiado, los sueños, las pesadillas, las tecnologías, las necesidades. Si pudiera hacer retroceder el tiempo sólo iría a ver cómo era su vida, los centros poblados, el paisaje. Debe haber sido fascinante. Hay valores que persisten en las comunidades andinas. Ahora que tenemos tanta inseguridad, asaltos, robos, etc. es casi un milagro sentir que en las comunidades se puede dejar equipos, provisiones, dinero y saber que no tocarán nada. Muchas veces he compartido en mis viajes su fiambre ofrecido con generosidad. He dejado mis pertenencias en sus estancias o chozas que no tienen puertas ni llaves con tranquilidad. Son gentes excelentes, con un sentido solidario qu4e no se encuentra en las ciudades. Los españoles inventaron una especie de máximas que muchos operuanos creen que son de Pachakuti Inka Yupanki. Ama Suwa, Ama Qella, Ama Llulla. Es decir “no robes” (lo que en realidad era no le robes al patrón porque todo es suyo); “no seas ocioso” (trabaja para el patrón sin descansar porque es tu obligación y los hacían trabajar desde las 5 a.m. hasta las 5 a.m.) ; “no mientas” (cuéntale todo al patrón porque es tu dueño y debes hacerlo sin ocultar nada) Eso no funciona para ellos.

En los Andes sin que los obliguen trabajan cuanto pueden y si se rebelan es contra la explotación (recuerdo haber visto mujeres que iban por los chakiñan, caminos de pie hilando, sus manos nunca estaban ociosas); no necesitan robar porque la producción de sus tierras les basta, además tienen algún ganado, alpakas, vacas, ovejas, kuyes, etc); no tienen para qué mentir. Esto es impracticable en las ciudades. No sólo en el Perú sino en medio mundo. Es cierto que son recelosos pero se debe a que siempre los han engañado y se aprovechan de ellos, pero cuando advierten que estamos en el mismo camino, que creemos en lo que ellos creen, se abren y hablar de historias muy hermosas, costumbres muy antiguos interesantes, tradiciones que asombran, artes (textilería principalmente, teñido), ciencias (conocen todos los huesos del cuerpo humano y son unos quiroprácticos excelentes, igualmente las virtudes de hierbas medicinales), técnicas agrícolas (sus antepasados domesticaron 427 o más especies alimentarias y medicinales que hoy usan los países del mundo, saben sembrar y cosechar las lluvias, auscultar en el cielo y a través de indicadores animales y vegetales si el año será bueno para el campo); tienen música para nacer, morir, curar, comer, meditar, comunicarse, etc., ya alegre, ya triste, ya bélica), danzas ( por lo menos unas cuatrocientas de las mil doscientas que tenemos son ctreaciones de ellos, los pulis registran en sus danzas el crecimiento de la kinua o kihura, etc,)

No hubiera escrito revelaciones en mi libro si ellos no me hubieran contado los relatos que se hicieron de padres a hijos por cientos de años. La gente de ciudad incluyéndo los antropólogos afirman que no saben nada sin haber hablado con ellos.

Kukuli Velarde ‘Mater Admirabilis’ (2010)

A portrait of Alfonsina Barrionuevo by her daughter Kukuli Velarde

Bibliography

28 libros y ensayos acerca de instituciones prehispánicas y contemporáneas, novela y cuentos para niños, entrevistas con especialistas e investigaciones en la Biblioteca Nacional de Lima y Archivos Históricos de las capitales de provincia.

*2013. “TEMPLOS SAGRADOS DE MACHUPIQCHU”. Acerca de la religión carismática y ecológica de los Inkas. Ubicación de 17 wakas, sitios o templos sagrados en el santuario. Jesús.Bellido Ediciones.

*2005 ·HABLANDO CON LOS APUS”. Ed. Ediciones Bellido.

Un encuentro fascinante con los Apus y las Pachamamas de Qosqo a través del altomisayoq Mario Cama. Ellos me contaron experiencias increíbles de cosa sucedidas. No son seres humanos sino fuentes de energía terrígena que sienten y aconsejan.

*2003-2006. Nuevos Cuentos Peruanos: “AVENTURAS DEL NIÑO DIOS EN LA TIERRA DE LOS INKAS” y “PERSONAJES MÁGICOS DEL ANDE Y ANDES MAGICOS”. Gráfica Bellido. Lima.

*2000. “PODER EN LOS ANDES: LA FUERZA DE LOS CERROS”. Religión andina. Gráfica Bellido. Lima

*1998. “EL PONCHITO DEL PIRGUSH”. Mitos y leyendas para Educación Inicial. Ed. BRASA. Cuento infantil a base de un pajarito, el pirgush, un hombre ocioso que fue convertido en ave,

*1997. “EL PICAFLOR DE MACHUPIQCHU”. Mitos y leyendas para Educación Inicial. Ed. BRASA. Un picaflor fue encargado por los Apus de Urubamba para entregar a un sacerdote inka dos plantas maravillosas, una que ayuda a multiplicar la fuerza humana y otra que convierte la piedra en barro.

*1990. “SAQESQA: LA NOVIA DEL SANTO”. Novela corta. Ed. SAGSA. La costumbre del saqey “abandono” simbólico de una criatura que nace de manera prematura en un altar religioso católico para que el santo o virgen se lo lleve como angelito o lo ayude a vivir.

*1989. “HUCHUYSITO, EL PEQUEÑITO”. Mitos y leyendas para niños. Ed. SAGSA. Huchuysito un pajarito quie recorre el Perú cuenta historias extraordinarias a umn niño que vive solo en la puna hasta que muere.

*1989. “LOS EXTRATERRESTRES ¿CONSTRUYERON SAQSAYWAMAN?”. Un recorrido por el Valle Sagrado de los Inkas. Ed. SAGSA.

*1988. “AYACUCHO: LA COMARCA DEL PUTKA AMARU”. Mitos, leyendas, historia, tradiciones, etc. Ed. SAGSA.

*1986. “QORIMANKA, CULINARIA EN OLLA DE ORO”. Mitos, leyendas, e historia sobre los alimentos. Recetas. Ed. SAGSA.

*1986. KINDERGESCHICHTEN AUS PERU. “PINTADITA, LA VIKUÑA -CAPITAN PELICANO”. Alemania. Ehrentraut Plasse.

*1981. “CARTAS DE LIMA”. Lima virreinal. Ed. UNIVERSO. Leyendas de iglesias y casonas.

*1981. “LIMA: EL VALLE DEL DIOS QUE HABLABA”- Historia prehispánica de Lima. Ed. ARICA. Recorrido por puieblos que conservan rituales y costumbres prehispánicas.

*1980. “CUSCO MAGICO”. 2da. Edición. Ed. Universo. Lima.

*1979. “EL NIÑO DIOS EN EL PERU”. . Ensayo. Banco de Crédito.

*1978. “ARTISTAS POPULARES DEL PERU”. Estudio sobre artistas populares de diferentes lugares del país, Ed. SAGSA.

*1978. “HABLA MICAELA”. Ensayo sobre Micaela Bastidas, Jefe de Estado Mayor de Tupaq Amaru. Ed. Talleres Gráficos IBERIA. “Autobiografía subjetiva” sobre lo que fue pensando Micaela Bastidas a medida que trascurría la revolución de Tupaq Amaru hasta su muerte. Es una de las obras más bellas MÁS BELLAS QUE HE ESCRITO que he escrito con mi sentir de mujer andina, pensando en qechwa y escribiendo en español.

*1978. “KUKULI”.. Una niña cuenta cómo empezó a pintar a los 3 años de edad . Editorial DESA.

*1976. “LA CHICA DE LA CRUZ”. Novela para niños en castellano. Una niña de ciudad atemorizafda por las espeluznantes historias de tipo religioso logra superar su situación psicológica con la ayuda de una niña andina que le muestra su mundo maravilloso donde los elementos de la naturaleza son familia. Ed. SAGSA. Lima. Traducido al alemán y publicado por Ed. J.G. Blaschke Verlag.Printed in Austria.

*1974. “MACHUPIQCHU Y SUS LEYENDAS”. Edición en inglés y castellano. Ed. STUDIUM.

*1974. “CAPITAN PELICANO”. Libro para niños en defensa del pelícano. Ed. ARICA.

*1973. “SIRVINAKUY, EL MATRIMONIO DE PRUEBA”. Ensayo sobre el matrimonio andino. Ed. SAGSA.

*1972. “PINTADITA, LA VIKUÑA”. Libro para niños en defensa de la vikuña, traducido al alemán. Ed. ARICA. Campaña nacional con 50,000 ejemplares.

*1971. “EL VARAYOQ: EQUILIBRADOR ENTRE DOS MUNDOS”. Ensayo sobre el alcalde andino.Ed. SAGSA.

*1971. “EL MUKI Y OTROS PERSONAJES FABULOSOS”. Ensayo sobre 18 personajes fabulosos en inglés y castellano. Ed. SAGSA.

*1971. “LOS DIOSES DE LA LLUVIA”. Puno. Ed. ARICA.

*1970. “CUSCO MAGICO”. En castellano y en inglés. Ed. UNIVERSO. Traducido también al rumano.

Book

Borderlands – design goes south

Kevin Murray Leave a comment

download

How can southern thinking be applied in everyday life? A new publication points towards a new kind of design that might be practiced in the South.

Tony Fry has pioneered a philosophical approach to design, with reference particularly ontological questions of being. With Anne Marie Willis he edited Design Philosophy Papers, which provided a forum for questions of sustainability that went beyond better light bulbs. Fry’s books including the trilogy Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and New Practice (2009), Design as Politics (2011) and Becoming Human by Design (2012) offer profound insights into the nature of what it is to design in the world. They articulate the practice of ‘sustainment’ as a means of ‘futuring’ a world. Practical extension of this include reductive design, which seeks to eliminate the affordances for consumption that capitalist design has accumulated.

Until recently, Fry has headed the Masters of Design Futures at Griffith University. With colleague Eleni Kalantidou, he has just published a collection of essays Design in the Borderlands that extend the question of design into a southern context. A key concept is Walter Mignolo’s ‘border thinking’. As they define it, ‘By implication, border thinking breaks out of disciplinary boundaries; it crosses borders, is nomadic, as such it is: a thinking along, within and about borders rather than a thinking of them.’ Within this framework, the volume includes a refreshingly cosmopolitan approach to design.

Chapters consider what design means in different cultural contexts. Perera and Gillet seek to go beyond the colonial school of Lusotropicalism in African design to consider local practices, such as Luanda’s taxi system. Fry’s own chapter on East Timor champions the embedded knowledge in traditional crafts otherwise eclipsed by the technologies brought in by Western specialists.

From the Middle East, Samer Akkach considers the various ways that design can be understood in an Arabic context. He elaborates the concept of ‘sana’ associated with craftsmanship and its eventual replacement by ‘tasmin’ which associates design with an elite skill influenced by Western models.

To extend this approach to political action, Paul James presents a manifesto of urban design from an ontological perspective. This includes principles of action such as ‘Urban settlements should come to terms with the uncomfortable intersections of identity and difference:’

Design in the Borderlines is an essential link between southern theory and design. It offers the conceptual architecture necessary to connect pluralist epistemology with the practice of design across the South.

Can it be applied in the South? This presents a significant challenge. Its publication reminds us how much more there is to be done. There are many more steps necessary before we can get beyond design philosophy to the practical business of design in the ground, including the concrete ethics of relations between designers and their world.

Echoing Raewynn Connell’s call in Southern Theory for a ‘dirty theory’, we need to hit the road to work out how a new design approach might intersect with daily life. Design in the Borderlines is resolutely anti-development in its crude capitalist sense. Yet there may be situations where local communities might resist a call to return to their craft roots. There needs to be dialogue between the practical aspirations of communities in the South and the political values common in southern thinking. The issue of neo-extractivism in Bolivia is an example of this kind of debate. While Design in the Borderlands is an excellent platform, a dialogical approach seems important to reflect the multilateral nature of the South.

Kalantidou, E & Fry, T 2014, Design in the Borderlands 1 edition., Routledge, New York, NY.

Texts

Pensar al Sur

Juan Obarrio Leave a comment

The essay circulates among colleagues and centers of the newly created Latin American network of critical southern thinking, in order to discuss the territorial, political and epistemological status of the “global South”

Sur El objetivo de estas breves notas es proponer una discusión acerca del estatus epistemológico y político del Sur. Se trata de pensar al Sur en el doble sentido de la producción de conocimiento social situado en regiones “periféricas” de la globalización, y de una reflexión sobre el espacio que -habiendo sido denominado antes como tercer mundo, países sub-desarrollados o en vias de desarrollo, postcolonia- hoy es definido como “Sur Global”. Si en cuanto a lo territorial la definicion del “Sur” es sumamente imprecisa, puede pensarse en definirlo en torno a la materialidad de la experiencia y de un pensamiento autoctono sobre esta? La cuestión epistemológica va de la mano de la discusión geopolítica y económica: dónde esta situado y que regiones incluye el Sur Global?

Mientras Latinoamérica y Africa parecen no presentar dudas acerca su pertenencia, cómo debe considerarse a India, país de grandes proporciones económicas y poblacionales, o de que manera evlauar el dilma que presenta China, nueva super potencia mundial, segunda economía del planeta, y que constituye un eje central ineludible de todo debate sobre el significado y extension del Sur global. Cuál es el lugar y rol del Este, de Asia, en el Sur, entendido como categoria política-económica? Cuál es el rol de las nuevas potencias emergentes, o BRICS, como es el caso de Brasil, dentro de la condición latinoamericana? Constituyen los BRICS un nuevo actor central dentro de los bloques de dominacion globales? o son mas bien la vanguardia del Sur, en tanto potencias políticas y económicas que marcan el rumbo en sus respectivas regiones y actúan de modo articulado en foros globales de relaciones internacionales o con relación a organismos multilaterales de fnanciamiento?

De modo similar, es preciso debatir el estatus político de Rusia en tanto perteneciente al Sur, lo cual abriría un debate sobre la condición “Sur” de Europa del Este. La situación contemporánea del ex bloque soviético propone un debate acerca de si la “globalización” es una categoría militar, a la vez que política-económica, ya que solo fue posible comenzar a hablar de un mundo global hacia el fin de la Guerra Fría, en el principio de la década de los noventa cuando un bloque sometió militar y económicamente al bloque enemigo. Fue precisamente en los campos de guerra “calientes” del Sur global, campos de invasión, control y contrainsurgencia, donde se peleó en concreto la abstracción diplomática de la Guerra Fría. Esta condición necesariamente marcó a fuego las transiciones democráticas de los noventa en el Sur, doblegadas por la herencia politica del totalitarismo y la crisis de la deuda externa. En verdad se puede considerar a la globalización también una categoria financiera, a partir de la hegemonia creciente del capital financiero que acompañó a esa victoria militar planetaria. De manera paralela al nuevo pensamiento de escala mundial, el Sur, o Sur Global, se consolidaron como categorías de análisis a partir de aquel comienzo del debate sobre un mundo globalizado.

La cuestión de pensar al Sur abre un debate acerca de la distribución política de espacios dentro de los hemisferios: en primer lugar, ironicamente, gran parte del “Sur” global se halla situado en el hemisferio norte; en segundo lugar, la categoría de “Sur” atraviesa distinciones anteriores entre oriente y occidente. La situación de Latinoamérica dentro del debate sobre el Sur también pone en cuestión la categoría misma de “Occidente”, en la cual actores políticos de distinto signo habían clásicamente colocado a la región. De qué manera un sub continente cultural, religiosa y politicamente “occidental”, puede agruparse dentro una misma categoría que engloba a Africa y Asia? De este modo, el debate abre la categoria de “Sur global” a distintas perspectivas. Evidentemente, este nombre realiza algún trabajo epistémico y político que ha tornado necesaria su aparición y consolidación. Pero se trata de una distinción epistemológica, geopolítica, espacial, tecnológica o económica? Se puede considerar una hipótesis que consiste en pensar al Sur a la vez como un territorio geográfico (el mundo “periférico” por fuera de los países centrales de EEUU y Europa occidental), así como también un espacio de relaciones económicas determinado por el endeudamiento, el desarrollo desigual y un modelo de acumulación fuertemente determinado por la inequidad y dominación establecida por el sistema capitalista mundial desde 1945.

El “Sur” constituye, más allá de espacios geográficos concretos, un haz de relaciones socio-económicas: el Sur como relación. Se trata de dinámicas que reproducen estrategias de poder global y que poseen nodos tanto en el “Norte” como en el “Sur”. Es preciso no pensar al Sur a nivel territorial, de espacio o escala, sino como forma-de-vida. Hay que explorar como la cuestión de las mediaciones entre campos que la modernidad ha presentado como disímiles o separados, se hallan entremezcladas de modo diferente, produciendo formas institucionales, de vida cotidiana y de subjetividad propias y singulares. El Sur puede ser conceptualizado como una serie de historias paralelas, comparables. Si se trata de un tipo de espacio, es un territorio sin fronteras definidas donde la Historia ha “tenido lugar” de modos similares, en cuanto a formaciones de poder, capital y subjetivación. El Sur presenta trayectorias intrconectadas de imperialismos políticos y económicos, colonialismos externos e internos, conformación e interrupción del estado-nación y despliegue de proyectos de lo nacional-popular.

De manera fundamental el Sur también ha sido moldeado por procesos de violencia política colonial y neo-colonial, de represión, partición territorial y conflicto interno que en gran medida han obedecido a esquemas trans-nacionales que han conectado a diversas regiones del mundo. El estudio de las transiciones democraticas en Latinoamerica en los ochenta ilumina procesos similares ocurridos luego en Africa. Las definiciones estatales de raza, etnicidad e indigeneidad derivadas del colonialismo y heredadas por los estados poscoloniales africanos y asiaticos son terreno fertil para repensar de manera diferente las estructuras sociales imperantes en America Latina. En la actualidad, el Sur se halla articulado como el territorio de la subsunción real por el capital; el espacio geográfico y económico que es objeto de una nueva ronda de acumulación primitiva del capital, que se lleva a cabo bajo el signo de la absolutización del capital extractivo y el capital financiero.

Efectivamente, las diversas regiones del Sur global pueden ser conectadas en un plano político y epistemológico comparativo que ilumina dinámicas locales a través de su reflejo en procesos similares. Se trata de analizar procesos de colonización de signo semejante y contemporáneos: por caso, no sólo las herencias del colonialismo español en América Latina, sino también el colonialismo británico semi-formal que rigió en la región desde mediados del siglo diecinueve, y que la coloca en estrecha relación historica y política con los estados postcoloniales de India y Africa, que también emergieron del mismo sistema de dominación y violencia, y asimismo con regiones como el medio oriente, donde la influencia política y diplomática británica fue rampante, hasta el caso de la formación del estado de Israel y el quiebre de Palestina. Hoy, el Sur global presenta herencias de estos proyectos en el sentido de que se puede englobar a estas regiones dentro de la categoría de espacios surgidos de procesos post-totalitarios.

El Sur esta conformado por regiones de experiencia post-Stalinista, como en la Europa del Este; regiones postcoloniales que han sido fuertemente marcadas por la violencia política de la dominación colonial europea, como en Africa y el Sur Asiático, regiones post-dictadura, como el Cono Sur latinoamericano y su experiencia de colonialismo semi formal diplomático y miltar estadounidense, que también se refleja en la condición de post-conflicto armado e intervención extranjera, como en la región Andina. Mecanismos neo-coloniales de alcance global, tales como los planes de ajuste estructural y el modelo de endeudamiento externo, así como las técnicas de contrainsurgencia de desaparición forzadas de personas, articulan diversas historias políticas, temporalidades económicas y espacios trans-regionales. En la actualidad, la dinámica del capitalismo de extracción, con sus métodos, agentes y efectos, que se repiten a través de regiones y sub-continentes, abre nuevos espacios para el trabajo epistemológico comparativo sur-sur.

Pensamiento Si el Sur es un conjunto de formas de vida singulares, en los últimos tiempos este espacio y esta vida ha ido generando un pensamiento propio sobre esas formas y texturas. En este sentido, resulta más preciso hablar de un pensar “al” Sur, y no “desde” el Sur. La frase “pensar al” implica a la vez el lugar de producción del teorizar y su objeto. La fórmula “desde el Sur” parace seguir respondiendo al motivo de un pensamiento que es generado para una audiencia privilegiada situada en otro sitio: en el “Norte”. En intersección con estos parámetros económicos y geopolíticos, se puede proponer pensar al “Sur” como un imaginario, una perspectiva epistémica engarzada en relaciones socio-económicas (entre regiones y también al interior de los estados-nación) y un modelo de desarrollo que generan una perspectiva diferencial en cuanto al pensamiento de lo social. Esta condición no es anecdótica o circunstancial: puede decirse que desde hace tiempo la teorización más avanzada acerca de lo social y sus crisis recientes ha sido generada en el “Sur”, ante el estancamiento evidente de gran parte del pensamiento generado en el Norte. La producción del conocimiento social generada en el sur posee diversas características, entre ellas una impronta muy particular, relacionada a su contexto socio-económico, y que la diferencia de lo producido en el Norte: la teorización social producida en el Sur es generada por académicos, intelectuales públicos y movimientos sociales y políticos, en estrecha relación con demandas de la esfera pública, lo político, y los medios de comunicación de distinto signo.

Este contexto de producción de saber, permeable a las fronteras difusas entre campos y géneros, y fuertemente sesgado por transformaciones políticas y económicas, coloca al pensamiento generado en el sur en un plano muy diferente de las teorizaciones producidas desde lo que resta de las aisladas torres de marfil de la academia del norte, o del saber experto de los centros de investigación privados. Pensando al Sur, examinando la producción reciente de conocimiento social a distintos niveles, puede plantearse que así como lo local produce inflexiones y tensiones que median y refractan lo global, modificándolo, de la misma manera el pensamiento al Sur produce una inflexión en lo que es el pensar en sí mismo. Esto significa ver al pensamiento al Sur como una perspectiva, un modo de enfocar el mundo de lo social, y expresado mas allá de nativismos o chauvinismos o el intento fútil de recobrar supuestas prístinas cosmogonías o pensamientos ancestrales. Otra característica crucial de la producción del conocimiento al Sur con respecto al Norte es que la misma no tiene lugar solo en ámbitos académicos, sino que los movimientos sociales de base actualmente teorizan sus propias prácticas de organización y acción, asi como también condiciones socio-económicas en sus regiones y el impacto sobre ellas de flujos globales de capital, tecnología e información.

El pensamiento al Sur se genera en un contexto social de producción que implica la mencionada práctica de los movimientos sociales; intelectuales públicos independientes de fuentes internacionales de financiamiento, relacionados a sectores políticos o sociales o mediáticos; y una estructura universitaria que aún, con fuertes condicionamientos e influencias externas (sobre todo hoy del modelo estadounidense) posee formas de organización y estructuración que son particulares y propias, y que generan, en contacto con la demanda de lo social, formas trans-disciplinarias de trabajo intelectual. En este contexto, el pensamiento al sur genera sus propios marcos conceptuales. Se trata de descentrar dicotomías clásicas entre lo universal y lo particular, según las cuales, los parámetros de pensamiento generados en el norte o centro (antes Europa, hoy también Estados Unidos) constituían una guía general que luego se adapataba a “casos” regionales cuasi etnográficos y a historias locales. Es preciso, para sopesar la dimensión y la relevancia de las teorías producidas en el Sur, debatir el contexto actual institucional y de financiamiento de la producción de conocimiento social en el Sur.

Cuáles son los flujos de capital que posibilitan directa o indirectamente la teorización de lo social? Cómo es el campo de estrategias y luchas en torno a las decisiones de privilegiar determinadas áreas y objetos de investigación y pensamiento? Lejos de meramente adoptar y reproducir conceptos y categorías generadas en el norte, actualmente la producción social del conocimiento al sur retoma esas formas e ideas reelaborándolas absolutamente, traduciéndolas en versiones que las modifican, adaptadas a las cambiantes condiciones socio-económicas regionales. La globalización económica y del saber, con sus sucesivas crisis profundas, no ha generado una uniformización del conocimiento sino que ha puesto al alcance de productores locales y regionales de saber toda una serie de conocimientos y conceptos que antes no circulaban, y este proceso ha relativizado su hegemonía absoluta, posbilitado un bricolage que transfroma y mezcla conceptos, así como también abriendo el campo intelectual de una inmensa producción local y regional de teoria social, política y estética.

Este ordenamiento material e institucional donde disciplinas y programas se aticulan, genera el espacio para la emergencia de epistemologías y metodologías propias del Sur, no solamente articuladas en torno a las “memorias del subdesarrollo” (por citar el título de un film modernista cubano) es decir, mediatizadas por la falta de recursos financieros e infraestructurales, sino también generadas en respuesta a problemas regionales y locales singulares, diferentes a los hallados en los países “centrales” y que necesariamente requieren de conceptualizaciones y métodos e investigación y pensamiento diferentes. Este paisaje de conceptualizacion epistémica y metodológica innovadora, se contrasta con el resto de producción de conocimiento social en el Sur, de tinte tecnocrático, mayormente determinada por las presiones y demandas de financiamiento y orientación ideológica de las agencias multilarales, de la industria del desarrollo y de la gobernabilidad, así como por el modelo del paper, el informe y la consultoría. Estas estructuras a través de su poderío político-económico intentan condicionar la producción de pensamiento en el Sur, determinando el espacio de lo que es posible pensar, lo cual en general es acotado a la escala la solución de problemas técnicos, reduciendo lo político al cálculo utilitario y a la “buena gobernabilidad”.

La producción innovadora y creativa de teoría, que de modo singular emerge en el sur, abre el espacio para un debate sobre la economía política del conocimiento. Cuál es el valor agregado que provee la teoría producida en el sur a los mercados del capitalism cognitivo contemporáneo y de la actual sociedad de la información en donde el saber es la principal fuerza de producción? Quién teoriza al Sur? Quién tiene acceso a conceptos e informaciones importados del exterior, que luego pueden ser modificadas, o pueden dar lugar a la generación de conceptos propios? Qué élites de conocimiento, sociales y políticas, son las generadoras de pensamiento? Cómo se han generado y consolidado estas élites? Están abiertas a modificaciones y transformaciones, pueden co-existir con el surgimiento de nuevos actores epistémicos que generen teoría? La exploracion de respuestas a estas y otras preguntas similares sobre el significado y condicion del Sur global abriría el campo a una discusión acerca de la colaboración y el intercambio intelectual y politico entre regiones del Sur.

Juan Obarrio teaches at the anthropology department at Johns Hopkins university. His research focuses on Africa, state, indigeneity, law, violence. He is the author of The Spirit of the Laws in Mozambique (Chicago Press, 2014) and is in the Programa de Estudios Sur Global, Universidad de San Martin, Buenos Aires, Argentina.