Artistic autonomy in non-autonomous contexts: reframing collective agency and insurgence from Caribbean artist-managed spaces

Carlos Garrido Castellano

doi:10.1080/13504630.2017.1303370

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article engages the debates on collective agency, autonomy, institutional practices and socially engaged art by comparatively analyzing the activity of two Caribbean artist-managed spaces which emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century: BetaLocal in Puerto Rico and L’Artocarpe in Guadeloupe. Based on fieldwork research and interviews with artists and art audiences, the examination of both projects will be driven by three main objectives: the first has to do with assessing in which ways both initiatives are shaped by their emergence in territories still attached to political and economic bonds. Secondly, I attempt to measure how both collective artistic organizations can approach the material conditions of cultural (re)production and autonomy, confronting the restrictions of Puerto Rican and Guadeloupean cultural and economic policies. Finally, I intend to locate my case study within a global panorama of socially engaged and collaborative artistic practice. From this perspective, I assert that collaborative practices emerging in still dependent contexts constitute a privileged viewpoint in order to examine issues of collective agency, empowerment and alternative futures.

Highlights

This article engages the debates on collective agency, autonomy, institutional practices and socially engaged art by comparatively analyzing the activity of two Caribbean artist-managed spaces which emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century: BetaLocal in Puerto Rico and L’Artocarpe in Guadeloupe
In order to do so, I will comparatively examine the activity of BetaLocal, a Puerto Rican artist-managed space, and L’Artocarpe, the first collaborative initiative arising in the Francophone archipelago of Guadeloupe
Shifting from museums to artist-managed spaces, this paper aims to reframe questions such as these

Summary

Introduction

This article engages the debates on collective agency, autonomy, institutional practices and socially engaged art by comparatively analyzing the activity of two Caribbean artist-managed spaces which emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century: BetaLocal in Puerto Rico and L’Artocarpe in Guadeloupe. Created in the 2000s, both projects share many elements: they rely on horizontal and flexible organizational structures; they go beyond representational and individual conceptualizations of artistic practice; they agglutinate heterogeneous, ‘unusual’ audiences; they carry out extra-artistic functions; they, operate locally while countering a dependency toward metropolitan territories Those elements constitute, I will argue, an interesting cultural model for two particular reasons: first, they challenge the image of the Caribbean as provider of ‘creative raw material’, of individual discourses and artworks that need a foreign hand to be articulated under more complex curatorial or institutional agendas; second, they attempt to subvert the dependency of both Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe by generating critical cultural dynamics. I will introduce briefly the history of infrastructural and collective artistic creativity in the Caribbean in which my two projects are inserted

Objectives

Conclusion