The Pace of Change
These past few weeks I’ve been thinking about the pace of change.
In part I was inspired by my conversation with activist Cleopatra Kambugu who I interviewed for the podcast, This Beautiful Shot is Not an Accident. In part I was inspired by my work re-engaging with Park Project Global. And in part I was inspired by a short documentary film about the Guerrilla Girls.
Back in the 1980s the Guerrilla Girls asked themselves, how do we make people care? Inspiring change requires getting people to care. And that question, of how to make people care, is relevant today.
Naming and Numbers
In 1985 a group of female artists took to the streets wearing guerrilla masks, they called themselves the Guerrilla Girls. They were advocating for representation in an art world which was closed to women, not by policy but by practice. Nobody believed their statement. So they came up with a formula to bring visibility to their call for change, which was “Writing a killer headline, using killer statistics and crazy visuals,” as the artist who goes by the pseudonym Käthie Kollwitz told The Guardian.
Their message was and continues to be based on statistics of the number of women and people of color whose work is shown in galleries, museums and purchased by collectors. Through interventions and posters the Guerrilla Girls both call out institutions and show proof of the overwhelming bias in favor of men and white men in particular.
“When you tell people the system isn’t fair they don’t believe you. But when you show people the numbers there’s nothing they can say to counteract that,” one Guerrilla Girl shared in the Tate Short film on YouTube.
In 1987 they counted the number of one-women shows in the four biggest art institutions. Their poster named the Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Modern Art Museum and Whitney. That year there was only one one-woman exhibition at the Modern Art Museum.
By 2015 there were a total of five one-women exhibitions, two at the Modern and one each at the other institutions.
guerrillagirls.com
That progress may seem slim but the work of the Guerrilla Girls and groups like Decolonize This Place have started to move institutions to remove board members with links to drug and weapons industries. There are more spaces for artists of color and women outside of the system and cultural institutions across the globe are rethinking the way of defining and exhibiting works of art.
Changing the Lens
In 2018 I visited an exhibition at the Bode Museum in Berlin, Beyond Compare: Art from Africa in the Bode-Museum. The exhibition questioned how African art was viewed as ethnographic objects rather than art in the 1900s. The exhibition juxtaposed work from Africa with work from Europe from similar time periods. That same year the Hamburger Bahnhof also had the exhibition, Hello World which reexamined their collection with a decolonial lens.
Museums and cultural institutions in Europe are starting to question whose lens are we using and why.
Step-by-step changes are happening.
“A large part of seeing depends on habit and convention,” John Berger, author of Ways of Seeing. We need to get out of our habitual way of seeing and start asking more questions of the items and ideas that surround us in our various public spaces.
How can we change our lens so we can see possibilities for changing our systems? We can’t change the lens if we don’t hear the stories of those whose voices have been marginalized.
The Pace of Change
Change often seems slow when we are in it. It can sometimes seem like we are going backwards.
In 2013 Cleopatra Kambugu was living her life in Uganda with her partner, family, friends. The government implemented the Anti-Homosexuality Act which led to vigilantes for people who did not practice heterosexual normalized sex. Cleopatra and her partner were forced to go into hiding and then leave the country because she was living her life as what she saw herself to be, female, while in a male body.
At the time her life was being documented by Swiss filmmaker, Jonny von Wallström, whose award-winning documentary film, The Pearl of Africa, documented Cleopatra’s life during this time, her exit from Uganda and then her medical transition.
I spoke to Cleopatra about her story, the impact of storytelling on cultural narratives and her resilience and the joy she exuded in the film and during our discussion.
This is what she said about the pace of change. Change is a marathon not a sprint. And while we are planting seeds of change, it is important to find joy in the parts of life that are going right. She advocates for “living positively in a world that will take its time to appreciate you.”
Telling our stories doesn’t guarantee that change will happen. But if we don’t tell our stories change will never happen.
How Are You Living Positively in These Times
I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the change I wish to see in the world and by how small or invisible my impact seems.
I’ve been revisiting my art project, Park Project Berlin - Global and editing videos from my visit to Mexico City and Oaxaca in 2019. Each story is a lens into my way of viewing the histories and power dynamics hidden in our public spaces.
In Oaxaca I filmed statues without plaques and that brought to mind the fight to take down confederate statues in the US and statues of colonizers in the UK and Europe.
In CDMX, Mexico City, I filmed greenways between the streets in the outskirts of town that had been dirt where a few brave souls were exercising on my previous visit in 2013 and in 2019 had parks. In my mind I connected this to the urban movements in Bogotá, Columbia that helped change the city through interventions in public space which helped reduce crime.
My small “museum placards” name what I see. They put my vision in context will be a drop in the bucket of these profound discussions on our use of public space but I am one voice among many.
Change Requires the Story Behind the Story
Change is built on a series of revelations, a series of small shifts in our way of seeing, a series of information that comes to light by people willing to share their stories, their ways of seeing and their points of view.
One way of doing this is through naming. Another way of doing this is through sharing the numbers. These are two tools in our story toolkit that help people see the story behind the story.
I’m currently offering Complimentary Curiosity Coaching Sessions, where I help you remove creative obstacles and identity your next step toward sharing your work.
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