Coalitional and Communitarian Aesthetics

Coalition building for minoritarian communities remains a challenge. If some of the main obstacles to form alliances between these communities are asymmetries of power and conflicting experiences of oppression, aesthetic expressions from these communities have the potential to transcend these tensions, when mobilized critically. Our panel discusses communicational tactics that strive to garner solidarity for different causes: Rizzo examines how in 2012, a collective of mothers of the disappeared in Mexico use embroidery to advocate for their missing children by emphasizing their humanity and showing how they too “deserve” to be found. Yeboah’s play “20/20” seeks to activate community dialogue on the legacy of Seattle’s summer-long occupation and protest of George Floyd’s murder. In the process, Yeboah learns valuable lessons about the ethical complexities of representation and solidarity building in a fractured community. acierto’s archival work choreographs the process of looking at the history of the United States’s occupation of the Phillipines and allows viewers the capacity to understand its legacies with an emphasis on care towards those implicated and inheriting the histories the archive hosts. Lastly, Kulkarni advances a Black feminist revision of the practices of love, solidarity, and art making at the Sunday Tea Party, a weekly happening in Fort Greene, Brooklyn during the late 1990’s. All of these reflections present art-making as a platform for coalition building, one that challenges the past and present to reimagines minoritarian futures.

Exact time/day of panel presentation TBD. More soon!