>[!INFO]+ Meta >Author:: Kevin Murray >Date:: 2007 >Reference:: Keynote address for Shock and Awe, a conference on curatorial practices organised by NETS Victoria, 29 June 2007 >Tags:: #text #south There's a story from Mayan times, about how the world was created. ## Walking we ask questions It happened, many stories ago, when the first gods were still circling through the night. There were two gods, Ikal and Votan, who were in fact one. Like two sides of a coin, one would appear only as the other disappeared. Ikal was a dark June night, cold as granite, and Votan was a bright January morning. Because these two were tied to each other, they could not move. Ikal and Votan despaired at their immobility. 'What shall we do?' they asked. 'Let's walk', said one who was two. 'How?' asked the other. 'Where?' asked the one. Lo and behold they had moved, just slightly. This was wonderful and quite encouraging. So they both tried to move, but at the same time, so were stuck. 'How should we do it then?' So they worked out a system. One went forward first, and then the other. So they moved again. And they realised that they could go forward if they took turns. So they agreed on their strategy. One moves first, then the other. It doesn't matter who is first. They are content just to move. The two gods who were one were deliriously happy to be finally moving. They began dancing together trying out all the different steps'tango, salsa, samba. They danced and danced, until they finally became tired. So what next? They had answered the first question, 'How can we move?' with 'Together but separately and in agreement.' But now the question was answered, it was no longer important. But as they were walking, another question arose. They came across two roads. Which road should they choose? One road was short and they could see clearly its end. The other road was long and disappeared over the horizon. They were eager to continue walking so they chose the long road. But as they started walking, another question arose, 'Where does the road lead?' After some thought, they realised that they could only find the answer by walking the road. So they started walking, one first and then the other. But they had never walked for so long before. It would take more than a day to walk this road. Ikal said that he had no idea how to walk during the day. And Votan said he was terrified of walking at night. They were frozen in uncertainty and remained fixed on the spot, trapped again in immobility. After considering various options, the two who were one worked out an agreement. Ikal could walk during the night, and Votan during the day. Ikal would walk for Votan at night and Votan would walk for Ikal by day. So the gods continue to walk with questions. They never arrive, and they never go away. ## Axis of Hope 'Walking we ask questions' is told by the spokesperson of the Zapatistas, Subcomandante Marcos. The Zapatistas maintain a struggle in the Mexican region of Chiapas to uphold the rights of indigenous peasants and counter the global market. Their ideology deviates from the historicist Marxist horizon, which tends to place a party elite in the position of revolutionary vanguard. Their progress is rhizomic - it responds to issues of the day. Zapatistas navigate through regular meetings where future plans are discussed. Walking, they ask questions. Our question at this point is''Do they walk as far as Australia?' Stories of the Zapatistas come to Australia via a romance of Latin American struggle. Most evident in the iconography of Che Guevara, the figure of the defiant Latin persists in what Tariq Ali calls the 'axis of hope', featuring Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Lula, Evo Morales and most recently Rafael Delgado. From the comfort of our post-ideological world, there something almost nostalgic in the image of bearded Latin revolutionaries. How might we extend the reach of this movement to a relaxed and comfortable country like Australia? In Latin America, 'walking we ask questions' has become a widespread guide to political action. When the peso collapsed in Argentina, people were forced to work together directly. Artists could no longer rely on an art market to sustain their practice; they had to barter their art with neighbours for bread and milk. New collectives emerged out of necessity as communities seized initiative. From this emerged an unstructured movement titled _horizontalism_ . The idea was for communities to conduct their struggle on a day by day basis, with meetings on street corners. It was revolution for the everyday. So what do we aspire to in the twenty-first century? Our common horizon seems to be the horizontal itself. From the flat world of globalisation to the creation of management clusters, the idea is to break down the 'silo mentality' and put our trust in the openness of communication. Everything is to be equal and interconnected. And what are we escaping from? Hierarchy is most literally represented on a vertical axis. Higher meanings transcend base motives. Upper classes rule over the lower orders. Wealth will trickle down to the poor. It seems self-evident that the superior values look down on the inferior. Dismantling the vertical apparatus of hierarchy is a key to flattening the relations between people. But as we know, the world is not flat. And particularly, it has a top and a bottom. At some stage, someone decided that north was up and south was down. This is a phenomenological issue, based on the natural alignment of reality with our bodies. The universe does not have an up or a down, at least by nature. While subsequent history plays a role, it's hard not to believe that this original vertical orientation of the world sets up a situation where those at the top colonise those at the bottom. It is as though there was some historical gravity at play in assisting invading empires to make their downward journey. And while the act of colonisation has been done, the implied verticalism makes it difficult to overcome its effects. We look up. We naturally accept that whoever is able to go north, permanently or temporarily, is successful. Those of us who stay are potential failures. All that is worthy disappears through our talent sink into our brain drain. Around us are banana republics, failed states, circled by an arc of instability. What are we to do with a world that is separate but one? While in the visual arts, all roads seem to lead upwards'to Venice, if not Rome'the South Project emerged as an attempt to develop a lateral path. It began with a gathering of artists and writers from fifteen different countries of the south in 2004. They asked the question, how can we talk to each other? ## How can we talk to each other? South 1 brought together very different people'different in colour, religion, and history. Despite these differences, or maybe even because of them, there was a strong sense of common destiny in the south as a distant horizon. So Claudia Fonte from the Argentinean collective Trama commented, 'I couldn't stop thinking of the privilege I had gone through by sharing those days with all the guests, sometimes even trying to keep my tears in.' So we learn to talk to each other with the common horizon of the south before us. So what were the questions that would move us towards that horizon? On leaving **Melbourne** , the journey started an easterly direction. Thus began South 2, a series of gatherings in the different regions of the south. In October 2005, the South Project gathered at Te Papa in **Wellington** . After the pleasure of talking together, there was a yearning for something more tangible. We asked the question, how can we work together? ## How can we work together? The Wellington meeting witnessed the emergence of artist collectives as a force across the south. Like a Mexican wave, the group energies mustered by relational artists provide a point of contact for gathering participants. In Wellington, one of the collectives was named Cuckoo, reflecting their practice of inhabiting other spaces in a parasitical relationship. They are based on a goodwill economy, with no money changing hands. Their workshops begin with the modest craft exercise of making decorated eggs, which are distributed as gifts. 'How to make an omelette without breaking eggs' provided an active means of bringing people together. In such gatherings there was little formal difference between artist and audience. The gathering then moved to Latin America. In Santiago, October 2006, the question was asked, how do we link the past with the future? ## How do we link the past with the future? Like many countries of the south, a whole generation of artists from Chile went into exile during the late twentieth-century. Now, as they return to where they were born, doubts emerge. Does the returning exile bring an outmoded ideology, based on struggles that have now been won? Were those that remained necessarily collaborators with forces of repression? Allowing the voices to speak, exile and native, in the same space but at different times, provides the basis for dialogue. The **Santiago** gathering was supported by two exhibitions from Australia and New Zealand. _Make the Common Precious_ connected the Australian 'poor craft' movement to the communist aesthetics of poet Pablo Neruda. _Transversa_ , curated by Zara Stanhope and Danae Mosmon, brought artists rather than works to Santiago. Tom Nicholson developed a work that invoked the history of national boundaries created during the 20 th century and had it channelled it through community networks. With assistance of local activist groups, this list was translated into Spanish and broadcast around a squatter camp called La Victoria on local television station, Señal 3. Nicholson linked the past to the present by exercising today's instruments of liberation with the memory of previous struggles. Another major division across the south is the difference between the traditional and modern worlds, particularly as it is aligned with the divisions of rural-urban, indigenous-settler and craft-visual art. As a country committed to the vertical goal of 'upliftment', **South Africa** is committed to justice for the previously disadvantaged, which involves opportunities for those who have been on the margins. So the gathering that will be in Johannesburg October this year will face the question of, how do we join the traditional and the modern world? ## How do we join the traditional and the modern world? This question directly confronts the primitivist tendency to make the indigenous exotic through practices of anthropology and museology aimed at preserving culture. The aim is to find ways for the traditional to share an equal voice with the modern'to enjoy the opportunities of the modern without losing its cultural roots. While a model nation of reconciliation, it is possible to see that remnants of apartheid exist in South Africa today, even in the liberal arts. This is starkly evident when entering an institution such as the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Near the entrance is a glassed in area that sells craft by mostly black rural women, such as the vibrant telephone wire baskets. Outside this area in the main galleries is contemporary visual art, including video and photography, produced by a mixture of mostly urban tertiary-educated artists. How can these two worlds meet? Last year, Craft Victoria experimented with a program of collaborations between artisans from across the south and local artists. Nine guests came from southern countries for _Common Goods_ , part of the Commonwealth Games cultural program. They spent three weeks in a host residency working with a local artist, exchanging their skills for knowledge of the local art scene. Hlengiwe Dube is a telephone wire weaver from Durban who was hosted by local artist Lucy Irvine, sculpture who works with cable ties. Hlengiwe was inspired by a visit to the local botanical gardens in Geelong where she found the button plant. She worked with Lucy to develop a hybrid form from wire and cable ties. As a lingua franca, craft technique provides a way for traditional and modern to speak to each other, spanning utility and expression. The journey of the South Project will eventually return home. As we arrive where we began, we ask ourselves what there is in our own culture that can be found on the horizon of the south? ## Where do we find ourselves in the south? I'd like to return to the strangeness of revolutionary struggle in a 'relaxed and comfortable' Australian context. One of the lose weft threads spanning the south is a fraught history of Australian utopianism. In 1893, a group of idealists fled class-ridden Australia to found a socialist colony in Paraguay. It failed, but there are surprising echoes of this enterprise today. Like most cultures of the south, there are attempts in Paraguay to bring together indigenous and settler stories. From Jean-Hubert Martin's controversial exhibition, _Magiciens de la Terre_ , there has been an interest in questioning the divide between the ethnographic and modernist approaches, assuming that innovation can emerge out of villages as well as studios. Paraguay is arguably home to the first indigenous art movement to emerge from the south, the Hispanic Guarani Baroque that developed in the utopian Jesuit Missions of the 16th and 17th century, as Guaraní applied their ornate carved designs to Christian subjects. Echoes of this movement can be heard today in the Museo del Barro (Museum of Clay), which was established in 1980 to show the breadth of the country's visual culture. What's remarkable is the way the museum brings together the passionate carvings from the Hispanic-Guarani Baroque, with Guarani traditional craft, contemporary political art and popular religious art. The strength of the Guarani culture today is partly due to the work of a man called Leon Cardogan, who in 1949 was made the first Protector of Indians and saved many tribes from extinction. Guaraní were being hunted like animals and only granted the legal status human beings in 1957. Cardogan was fascinated by Guarani mythology and collected many stories of their cosmology, which he translated into Spanish and are published in books popular in Paraguay, but very hard to find outside. Cardogan's work continues today in the Leon Cardogan Foundation, led by his son, Rogerio. Leon was the son of the Australian utopians who had sought a refuge in Paraguay from the class hierarchies that seemed to dissect Australia. This loose thread of Australian involvement across the latitude is just one of many that await an appropriate shuttle to start weaving together a rich story of south-south dialogue. How can we start to build a sustainable network across the south? Walking we ask questions. ## Note The South Project is initiated and managed by Craft Victoria. Magdalena Moreno is Interim Director of the South Project. More information about the project can be obtained from [www.southproject.org](http://www.southproject.org/) . This paper was originally presented at Shock and Awe, a conference on curatorial practices organised by NETS Victoria, 29 June 2007.