Hello,

Let’s continue the conversation-discussion about aesthetics and art. I’m interested in your questions about performativity and in what contexts and framings a certain way of thinking politically can actually have effects and create involvement and in what cases it ends up on the level of something one is interested in. So I take your question: “is the idea of a politics of aesthetics in the sense of ranciere, sometimes ending up, keeping the political to the sphere of aesthetics, when it entails processes that go quite beyond the frames related to art?”

I know I have resisted in the past to this kind of discussion…I recently realized that (with no intention to justify it) that in fact I was resisting it because that was exactly what made me quit with the piece I was doing and place myself the margins of what I can possibly do with my background in other type of contexts which are not the performing arts or theater context. This happened in relation to the growing relevance the projects I’m engage with at the moment start to have in my life and practice…I resisted because I guess I was unsure yet of what I could offer really. Stepping into an unknowing terrain is not always easy…

I agree with you about the question upon the possible ways one can think what he/she does in political terms as to gain in affects and effects and degrees of engagements. But if someone wants to change something, must start working it out from its own practice (and the problems that it brings along with?)…be that social, artistic…pedagogical…I have the suspicion that it is impossible to approach something politically if one is not able to dispose him/her self differently…here is where for me lies the aesthetic experiment (if I may pop up the term!:) with oneself which later on can be enlarged and shared with others. What I mean is that I don’t think that what I do is going to change people’s minds, neither the world I suppose. Instead I do think that what I do relates to my own problematics, desires, hopes, taking them in, experimenting things eventfully and so as possibility or potentially. I think this way of approach- experiential as well as experimental- has to do with the ways we frame things whether in arts or other types of contexts.

Something I have observed, for instance is that I have been very inspired by the way LISA has done things in the past, but it is true that it frequently lacks other kind of publicness in order to make them relevant in a large context outside the arts (which doesn’t mean that in “political” terms we have had an impact in the way things were done in each of the projects with programmers, with producing…etc) On the other hand, I wouldn’t have known how to proceed outside the context I know, because if I know it I can be critically engage with it. What I mean with this is that it is more and more relevant to me, to always get information and really question the situation and the context I relate with as well as its public. It also means perhaps, that the questions about making this project locally sustainable, addressing and passing on the project-tool to others in order to open up spaces ( be that unprivileged, marginal…etc) as well as maybe even taking the project as a preventive, diplomatic tool-kit in totally unfitting contexts (in principle) i.e Hospitals…etc (as we mentioned shortly the other day) can become great opportunities to consider politics and aesthetics in and affective-effective ways and more relevant to make the effects of the project public “out of its usual public” ?!

I think it is very important that we keep on considering problems, constraints, reframing and requisitioning them, rather than be exclusive or discontented with the contexts we should go to or people we end being disappointed about…so to avoid legitimizing too much what its effect should be…

ok…I guess you are now in the beach…

have fun!

Kisses,