Artistic Practices as Gestures of Resistance and Repair

Abstract

Two artists and college dance professors, Carolina Caballero and Ana Milena Navarro, began quarantine as roommates in Barranquilla, Colombia on March 18, 2020. They decided to host a series of dance performances in their small apartment, to be broadcast on Facebook and Instagram. The premise was very simple. It began as a game: to perform and publish one dance a day until the 14th of the next month, when the isolation period for COVID 19 was supposed to end. They eventually undertook 21 performances. A spontaneous community of followers enjoyed, encouraged, and contributed to their initiative. At the start of the pandemic, some people raised the possibility that this unique event would detonate a change in social attitudes towards capitalism; but as soon as governments re-opened malls, people seemed to return to the dynamics of consumption with renewed zest. In Colombia, particularly, instead of widespread positive changes, the country’s endemic agonies intensified during confinement: mafias were strengthened, the killing of social leaders multiplied, the criminalization of social protest intensified, and the dynamics of political corruption adapted in order to continue business (Castro et al. 2020, Saldarriaga 2020). That does not mean nothing positive has happened. Consider the political potential of art to help repair solidarity between ordinary people and care for them. In this article we examine that potential in relation to three interconnected aspects: one, the emancipatory significance of people’s gestures in doing what they want; two, the ability of artistic practices to take care of oneself and establish a bond with others; and three, the political exemplariness of artistic practices as an ethos of openness to the joy of the body, care, and the creation of links with the community. In addition, we explore the potency of the creative idea of the two dancers, the process of repetition that facilitated an interpenetration between everyday life and their creative practices, and the multiple elements of the dance process: various genres, the relationships between contemporary dance and the popular dances of the Caribbean, the music, and the dancers’ bodies.