Magie Ramírez, PhC, University of Washington
Through my engagement with art collectives based in Oakland, California and Oaxaca, México, my project seeks to understand the ways that political art can shift public perceptions of race, class, gender, and indigeniety. I argue that the Chican@/mestiz@ artist-activists (or artivistas) create spaces of decolonial potential through the creation and sharing of their art. The artivistas utilize a differential consciousness to provoke political change and activism. Their political art struggles for an end to the detention and deportation of migrants, for the de-militarization of the border, and to disassemble racialized stereotypes of brown migrants. The political change the activists provoke also exists as a potentiality, as something imagined through dialogue and through art; the process of envisioning a more just world. The collectives’ art and activism are multifaceted, raising awareness and building solidarities with other groups, across racial, class and national lines. I question how the artivistas utilize their mestiz@ identities to construct spaces of decoloniality, and how their art-activism sparks trans-border, interracial, and interclass solidarities. How might the artivistas’ collaborations create ‘spaces of encounter’ that challenge dominant discourses and build solidarities between communities of different racial, class, or cultural identities. The process of making and sharing their art creates a space for voicing and overcoming historical and present-day traumas, to raise awareness of the injustices their communities have lived, and a space to imagine and struggle for a more just world.
Contact: mmrez@uw.edu
Image Source: Dignidad Rebelde
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