Difficulties will come, my friends. If you undertake this journey with me, whether you are ready or not, you will be triggered in your strong core beliefs, as happened to me along the path. What if the arts standards that you are supposed to honour and respect keep you from recognising the world as it really is, in its ethical issues and layered complexities? These words might provoke mixed feelings, when your intellect, as Frantz Fanon recalls, tries to rationalise this process of deconstruction. I will invite you to pay care and attention to things other than the way you’ve attached meanings to the art world so far. I will invite you to see yourself as different from yourself, which is prerequisite to really see the others. This will hopefully reshape who you are, impact your thinking, and redirect your actions. It will make you fortify or reconsider relationships. It will bring new forms of creativity and criticality into your life. If aware of its consequences you choose to take up this baton, inviting other people to excavate into themselves and go deeper into their psychological foundations as I will do with you, be prepared: you will be criticised, and some will seek to silence and dismiss you. They do not have to succeed.
When your horizon broadens as the result of stressing the impact of art, on how identity politics comes to mean in relation to its referents; when you voice your vision and push forward a soul work that is geared around human values, to activate a deeper understanding about the crisis of humanity; and when your first intention is not to please the audience with an entertaining proposal but to dig into the roots of things and embody these questions, you might be told that what you do is not art. Still, you courageously point out some of the discrepancies and contradictions of a world that is also yours, and work hard to reach others to reflect together — out loud — on the relationship between the formation of the self and the different processes of adaptation to the social milieu and to the status quo. You might be ignored by those who think that what you do does not have context within the art walls, or it does not have any direct socio-political efficacy. But only then, dear artists and curators, will you be sure that you are agitating the discursive, semantic and representational system, on which Western individuals rely as for knowledge and universal truth. Shame and guilt will respond to your claim of repositioning the human cause; and you will have to handle with care your own vulnerability. Remember Fanon’s warning: Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted… And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief. Stay focused and committed. Be ready to feel disappointed. Stay vigilant all along the path.
I am not saying that people are not welcome to express dissent from my own position regarding art and the curatorial in this delicate process of deconstruction, rather I am making clear that criticism and creative gestures should never come from a place of authority, surveillance and control. Don’t let the absence of meaning produced by such an alienating and capitalist society stop you from finding pockets of resistance for equity and a hopefully better humanity. From a curatorial perspective, the point is to activate critical awareness and ethical relationships across boundaries of difference. It is to pierce the gaze on the world complexity, which is all inside and around us. It is to take risks. It is to honestly ask ourselves who we are. It is to shift these questions from a radical examination on the reasons behind curators’ desire to create and curate. It is to push boundaries of the existent, to learn how to break free.
If you accept this call for radical change, please, do not give up. Give yourself time. Deep transformation requires the strongest commitment. Allow the process to indicate you the way and teach you how to create and curate from your ethical foundations. Do not expect to be rewarded or recognised for your efforts by the art system: rewards will not be what you expect and recognition might come from unexpected places. Do not be discouraged: you are needed. The world needs human beings that can re-imagine and embody different configurations of reality: marginal perspectives that emerge from outside boundaries of comfort, utilitarian practices and stereotypical languages, to transform out-dated structures of belief and control. Ours is a durational work — a lifelong marathon of restless endurance, passionate labour and rigorous responsibility, where immediate pleasure is not the main goal. Art for art’s sake, produced within modern absolutist paradigms, is precisely what my praxis seeks to critically respond to. Hierarchical structures are deeply spiritual, emotional, cultural and symbolic, and every era has the responsibility to imagine collective rituals to cope with such a painful and violent reality.
Danger will haunt your vision. Real risk will make you vulnerable. You will be exposed. You will feel insecure, not understood, sometimes crushed by the wheels of life. You might be identified by the system as a dangerous and powerful point of tension — you will take off their masks, threatening the inviolability of their core beliefs. You will speak the evidence of exclusion and exploitation, and they will reject whatever does not fit their perception of reality. There will be no applause. They might try to kill you, to mute you, to dismiss you, to shut down routes and doorways that will open to you. Sometimes you will want to give up. Please, protect yourself as much as you can: some of this is out of your hands. Do what you must do,and ask your beloveds to help you build your shield. I will be with you whenever you need me by your side, and I expect you to do the same. Now it is time to respond and resist. Ours is a soul community.
With trust,
Francesca Carol Rolla
March 2022