Ongoing
Art and culture has enormous potential to shift our imaginations, perhaps the most essential aspect of what is necessary to combat the forces currently at work and bring about change. So, with Mari Spirito and Protocinema, we have produced Protodispatch, a digital journal of artists’ contributions focusing on what is most urgent to them. We've imagined Protodispatch as a site for global publics that offers ideas for how we might survive and thrive in a world beset by precarity and violence. While our material circumstances might differ radically, we all face pandemic, late capitalism, and colonialism as powerful forces in daily life. If part of art’s potential is to help us imagine otherwise, Protodispatch is a platform that provides a place of connection, and even hope.
I am excited to present our initial round of commissions as they focus on a diversity of subjects in varied geographies. They are all brilliant in their own particular way and I hope you will find them provocative and energizing. Tiffany Sia (with Emilie Sin Yi Choi, Chan Tze-Woon) discuss the perils and opportunities of working in Hong Kong in the wake of shattered pro-democracy protests. Simone Leigh suggests that as Black Americans continue to be besieged by white supremacy, it may be time to once again go underground. Ximena Garrido/Ishmael Randal Weeks describe a process of building a structure communally out of materials brought by participants, revealing the strength of collective memory and its capacity to unveil corruption and lies in the context of Peru’s recent and deep pasts. Through a hyperlinked lyric essay, and a forthcoming month-long social media takeover, Kenya (Robinson) explores Black the relationship of people and water—both fresh and saltwater—as an essential part of the storytelling of US histories (the still above is from Kenya’s project). Jorge González, in an email exchange accompanied by a diary of images and texts, practices and reflects on the relearning of traditional crafts in Boriken (Puerto Rico) as a recuperative strategy for colonial erasure.