State of Emergence

In regard of State of Trial, research-creation project

Maria Fernanda Ariza

The irruption of the subject on national political imaginaries, through performative initiatives (in most of the times) regarding the word and the role played by the academy itself in those politically-meant processes, is a phenomenon of great current, but of limited scope, and even with difficultness into its own comprehension, generated precisely by the tension between the thinking-making processes of art and the field of action of the state educational project itself.

How de we approach to the question?

From the beginning, the group constituted in order to develop this initiative emerges from a lack, which rapidly became a need for reflection focused in the development of a project conformed by eight research processes; the relationship between these projects has their reason in the setting were they were conceived, the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá – Colombia, and the chain of direct action-participation of some of their members in the transformation of what for a long time, was a general campaign of unconformity and passive resistance.

Now, the idea of penetrating and somehow infect this space in a symbolic way, displaces a constant renewal of questions about the practical exercise into the academic ritual.

The political action, which in these projects is transformed, talks about a specific context, about an experience crossed by a determined time and space, and about a conscious political commitment in each of the successive forms of being in community. This forms which are updated in the public space, without corporality, are the social body which dances without a break the parody of what is commonly known as the contemporary “social” and which refers on how these social beings identify themselves in the level of everyday life.

This approach allows us to wonder about the institutional dynamics, whether individual or collective, which have historically sustained the idea of a nation, making visible the cluster cultural effects conforming our social state of law. In this symbolic debate, but not less important, what is to be broken, is the cultural unanimism in which every national presupposition circulates, including education; it is therefore a matter of understanding walking as a way to intervening, as a mechanism for participation less visible, but more conscious, and which somehow responds to a very intuitive familiarity about the disciplined to-to, to-say.

The reflection is then located in social spaces of great impact, each of the projects reveals its existence among a context through different rhetoric tactics, images, discourses, actions, metaphors which are materialized in the very fact of its reflection and the act of its spatial location. This implies an urgent need of resignifying the structures and social commitments present in advance, and thus, re write each one of the excerpts that sustain our particular form of seeing history pass.

Such an exercise forces suspicion, for it produces an antagonistic other simultaneously, that, in the principles of inclusion-exclusion, reproduces the sphere of the traditionalist-rigged public under the nation-state. What becomes public in these processes is the widely considered relation of the term, the space of dialogue, as an open field for debate where citizens deliberate about common interest issues (Jürgen habermas), and even more showing an appropriation of immersion processes, which support the contents of this practice from inside the institution, the students, also citizens, take part in art discourse in their own way, and it’s this constant confrontation between what is necessary for the continuity of the education system, and what emerges precisely for its transformation, which proves once again the possibility of turning private enterprise in a mean of political action, in the conscious sense of the term.

State of trial is more like a state of emergence on discussion, responding to the phenomena that manifests in the consciousness of everyday life, “expressive form that updates in public space, responsible for dramatizing social relations and identities, of questioning practices or symbols that structure community life, and revealing the possibilities of agency of the subjects in constituting the social world” (Vich and Zabala, 2004). In this regard, it’s about enhancing and simultaneously questioning knowledge through other knowledge forms which are different, transmutable, which can be unequal or not, and which are present in the explanations that they reconstruct on experience.