Archives + Futures: Podcasting as Restitutive Resistance
Friday, February 14, 2020: 6:40 PM
Lake Huron (Hilton Chicago)
Archives + Futures is a podcast series currently in its first season. A+F is an archive of interviews and casual conversations for contemporary and future visual artists to connect to the personal practices and cultural histories, canons, heroes, and ancestors of our fellow Latinx and Indigenous artists.
White writers, curators, gallerists, art historians, and other gatekeepers are often unable (and, in some cases, unwilling) to educate themselves on cultural differences that animate our work, instead defaulting to centering whiteness as the primary lens for validation, interpretation, and critique. This whitewashing recalls Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Perhaps the problem is the institution, the society we live in, the educational system, and the many systemic blocks and hurdles we artists of color must overcome to be considered valid cultural producers.
A+F helps artists subvert that cycle by providing a platform for artists to create feedback and validation loops that bypass whiteness as a center. A secondary, but equally important mission, is the archiving impulse behind the project. Our histories are often kept out of official records and made invisible by systems that do not recognize our achievements. It is thus vital to create the foundations for our future successes to be built upon by shepherding our own archives and making them available and accessible for future generations of researchers, art historians, and makers. This presentation will spotlight Archives + Futures as an example of restitutive forms of resistance to our contemporary technological and postcolonial culture.