RE: Trama’s last paragraphs

“What is it that separates the left from the right?... Fundamentally, it is nothing but a processual calling, a processual passion.”
Felix Guattari

It would seem as if in the globalised art system, some cultural institutions, both public and private, were in charge of organizing the forms of discourse and of providing various cultural practices with visibility and legitimisation channels. We wonder: which mechanisms do these institutions resort to in order to detect and legitimise new cultural practices? Which values are these practices expected to support so that they can aspire to recognition? What is the connection between the said values and the survival strategies implemented by these institutions? Who are responsible for the decisions made? And, what is even more important, are those who are responsible for the decisions prepared to preserve the ideological autonomy of the institutions they represent on the face of official or corporative economic and political policies that guarantee their sustainability?
From their respective economic and organisational structures, global art institutions cast a solid sense of responsibility over shared knowledge. They seem to take upon themselves the roles of trustees, guardians, accumulators, and distributors of this knowledge. However, when these institutions fail to bear in mind collective strategies towards the emergence of this shared knowledge –when they rather just assume its discovery and management- this sense of responsibility reveals itself as the well-known practice of colonization and appropriation encroaching upon a common good. As a result, they even appear to be the producers of this knowledge. However, the question of who are the true actors in the production of cultural knowledge remains.
In my experience as an artist who has decided to establish a platform favouring autonomous artistic co-operation , knowledge is a form of social capital, an exchange currency generated by the social interaction among individuals who agree to acknowledge the existence of a common need and a shared wish. Understood as social energy rather than just as heritage, knowledge stirs imagination towards more fluid and organic organisational structures that relate, in a genuine and direct guise, to the basic needs of the communities comprised in these structures.
The kind of knowledge resulting from fluid organisations is always temporary and difficult to define, since it is unmediated knowledge stemming collectively from individuals and is not subject to estrangement gimmicks. It is the knowledge of what is identified as urgent and necessary. Those of us who assume collective responsibilities from our practice as artists, curators, organisers, or interlocutors, are well aware that art is inherently necessary and urgent in its own right, and that the processes and queries that accompany its practice are potential tools to devise inclusive modes of collective construction. Only by assuming the political responsibility of creating collectivity shall we earn the opportunity to think of ourselves as free.

Claudia Fontes
Brighton
March 2006

1 - F. Guattari, “The Left as a Processual Passion”, in G. Genosko, ed., The Guattari Reader (London: Blackwell, 1996), p. 260.
2 - Artist Claudia Fontes founded Trama in 2000. She directed the programme from its beginning in 2000 until its finalization in 2005.