Staging Protest as Art and Pedagogy

Abstract

Staging Protest as Art and Pedagogy Dipti Desai (bio) It was a sunny autumn day on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A small group of residents marched on the sidewalks, holding signs about climate justice, carrying brooms, and chanting catchy slogans. With them in solidarity were members of an activist organization Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) and students from New York University. Through an interdisciplinary studio class based on a partnership with GOLES, the students had designed this artistic intervention to inform and motivate people in the community about the upcoming citywide People's Climate March, in September 2014. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Street performance by NYU students in connection to the Mini Climate March, Lower East Side New York (2004). Photograph by Maria Leon. [End Page 423] The mini-protest they had envisioned and designed would end with a street performance about global warming and climate change, followed by marchers distributing flyers to passersby. The protest had a specific political and pedagogical mission. According to the GOLES activist working in their community, the Lower East Side residents who lived in low-income housing (predominantly people of color) did not understand how the People's Climate March connected to their lives, even though their homes and neighborhood had been devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. This dress rehearsal for the People's Climate March, then, became embodied popular education: a lesson on the power of collective voice, on the disproportional impact of climate change on people of color in the United States, and on working together to initiate change. This activist art pedagogy had been organized across networks of solidarity with the long-term goal of building a sustainable movement. As Mariam Ghani has noted, "for art to be an important form of protest, artists have to consider what it might mean to be artists working within movements—to make and circulate work not from positions of autonomy, but from a network of positions in solidarity."1 Pedagogy is central to creating networks of solidarity as it involves learning to work across social differences, and to engage with contradictory ideas, beliefs, and values that rub against each other. For disenfranchised people of color on the Lower East Side, to be present at the mini-march and the mass climate change demonstration with GOLES was in itself a "creative act."2 It was an expression of a "liberated voice" as the community moved from silence to speech.3 As Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us, to speak as marginalized people is an act of resistance: "by sending our voices, visuals, and visions outward into the world, we alter the walls and make them a framework [End Page 424] for new windows and doors."4 By being physically present, the Lower East Side residents produced a "space of appearance," to use Judith Butler's words, that "seize[d] upon an already established space permeated by existing power, seeking to sever the relation between the public space, the public square, and the existing regime."5 Joining thousands of marchers from different organizations who were demanding that those making decisions in regimes of power listen to the ways climate change was affecting their communities was in itself a lesson on democratic participation and resistance. Most importantly, it empowered the Lower East Side residents to work with GOLES to demand that the local government agencies address their unhealthy living conditions resulting from Hurricane Sandy. Artists can play a critical role in amplifying local stories and making visible the histories and current living conditions of disenfranchised communities, both to local communities as well as to the general public, through forms of resistance and protest within art institutions and in public spaces. Artists such as Catherine Opie in In Protest to Sex Offenders (2005) have documented past and current protests, while others—such as Sharon Hayes in her work, In a Different Time (2015), and Mark Tribe in Port Huron Project (2006–2008)—have staged reenactments of past protests by holding up protest signs or reenacting protest speeches from a different era. Such artists keep history alive and show its power as resistance. Since the Occupy Movement in 2011, artists are...