 Hi, hi everyone. My name is Isabel Galliera and I'm an art historian So I teach and I research about social-engaged art practice Delighted to be here. Thank you Simon for the kind invitation. So I'll get right to it I know we are very strict on time So socially engaged our practice and the institutions that support it have always been relevant And especially now in the era of the Anthropocene planetary environmental devastation starvation humiliation and Inequity a vivid image of the crisis of our time is the caravan currently en route From Honduras to the US border, which I'm sure that many of you have heard about in the news It began on October 13 and is currently around has currently around 5,000 people though it is really difficult to know the exact number and Includes women children traveling both by foot and also hitchhiking rides on trucks Depending on where you are getting your news people in the caravan are seen as fleeting poverty gang violence and persecution But on the other side the caravan is also seen as an invasion as President Trump called it according to a Washington Post article Trump also announced that the US would send around 5,000 troops to the border with Mexico to deal with the migrants whose arrival is rather difficult to estimate That caravan is outside the US, but there is currently one in the US Which is recently completing the 12-week tour around the US and it's a caravan of the TPS Initiative for justice that started in August this caravan Consisted consists over 50 TPS holders from countries such as El Salvador Honduras Haiti Nicaragua Sudan Nepal Somalia and It is an attempt to save the temporary protected status program that protects over 450,000 people from deportation Trump announced to terminate this program next year as part of his ongoing attacks against immigrant communities So while I was following these caravans in the news I was reminded of the work by Romanian artist Matei Bejanaro Hungarian artist Miklos Urhart Scottish artist Dominic Hyslop and Spanish artist Santiago Sierra I was reminded of all the pertinent social and political issues that have been and are at the core of socially engaged our practice the global Pension toward art as social practice has encompassed modes of art making theorized and discussed internationally since the early 90s as participatory relational collaborative dialogic community-based Social-political conscious forms of public art key writers include Suzanne Lacy Grandcaster clear Bishop Tom Finker pearl Nicholas Bouriot me on cone Shannon Jackson NATO Thompson and many others Certainly such practice that conceives art as catalyst for change is not new It has roots in early forms of avant-garde art such as Constructivism and the Bauhaus with their goal of marginal of merging art and life For example in Russia, especially during the peak years between 1917 and the early 1920s avant-garde artists were invited and supported by the newly installed Bolshevik political regime to take part in the transformation of a predominantly agrarian society Into an industrialized socialist economy led by the proletariat in the US socially engaged art is rooted in conceptualist Work by artists such as Alan Capro in the 1970s feminist initiatives that made use of performance and Paragogy as we see in the Holman house led by Miriam Shapiro and Judy Chicago in 1971 and then in the 1970s and 80s with the emergence of new genre public art in the work of Suzanne Lacy and Then the work of group material and Martha Rossler at the DR foundation which follows suit socially engaged art is also indebted to the confrontational approach practiced by institutional critique artists such as Andrea Frazier hunts Haka and Fred Wilson to name just a few So in my research and teaching I use the notion of socially engaged art as an umbrella term to include Self-organizing institutions site specific contemporary forms of art and exhibition making that unfold in public spaces Primarily urban but also rural over longer or shorter periods of time Some art forms are participatory meaning they can know they can ultimately be realized only through the physical involvement All by temporary of people other projects are collaborative meaning that they emerge from specific ways of working together among diverse individuals Others combine both participatory and collaborative strategies the participants and or collaborators in these artistic Practices vary from fellow artists curators and critics to audience members Anonymous passerby in public squares and members of specific marginalized communities such as immigrants Some projects aim to create harmonious collaborations Others aim to be antagonistic and confrontational Nevertheless these projects are the result of complex negotiation Dynamics unfolding among artists curators and funding institutions Despite their varied modes of critique and strategies of engagement They all share a desire to reclaim public life from current neoliberal ideologies in order to build inclusive public spheres as democratic forms within emerging or declining civil societies Such goals are especially vital under the pervasive influence of global neoliberalism Supported by increasingly Austo-cratic political regimes throughout the world to quote Historian Vitae Preshav the monsters have returned Revived by political leaders worldwide such as Trump Erdogan Orban Modi Madura our contemporary Conditions governed by the global neoliberalism emphasis on individual libertarianism Have continued to trigger increasing worldwide gaps between the rich and the poor environmental degradation communal and familiar separations the wild craze for profit accumulation through the regulation and outsourcing of Production to third world countries around the globe in order to exploit Load manufacturing costs are all sustained by the precarious conditions of the worker This implies for example short-term and or a part-time Part-time jobs health and pension insecurity long commutes and global migrations neoliberal forces there for control and organize life through various technologies of power Which Michael Foucault called bio power there are at the core of global migrations of people determined to Relocate and escape poverty gang violence environmental devastation So the migrants are the sacrifice for the failure and successes of neoliberalism Understood as both an ideological construction and an economical order Immigration has always been a controversial and despite decisive divisive political issue a number of contemporary socially engaged artists have approached it in various ways So I decided to highlight a few artists. It was a hard choice Or a difficult decision and their works because of their particular ways in which they closely work with situations and institutions to accomplish their project and Implicitly because of the questions they raise on the role of art institutions in our times of crisis When a black man is Involved in a dirty deed the belief of the Italians is that every black man is involved in a dirty deed The police can come into the market and ask for your document or passport and you can be deported What year do you think this was in? 2002 in Italy and this is James an immigrant from Nigeria to Italy Describing in an interview with the artist Miklos Erhardt and Dominic Hislop His experiences with practices of racial profiling that associate race with criminality Performed by the Turin police who considered the open market in Porta Palazzo One of the most difficult zones in the city from a security standpoint particularly In the Italian context markers of differential ordering of immigrant groups Had been based on a person's national affiliation Physical appearance or popular stereotypical notions produced and reproduced in the media or in discussions among Italians As a result Bangladesh immigrants are seen as street vendors African groups sell handbags Romanian and Albanian men are viewed as untrustworthy and part of mafia Writing in 2008 Flavia Stanley argued that the differential treatment of immigrant groups by Italian citizens Was motivated by a desire to protect their own European status from and against non-EU citizens Such informal patterns of everyday interactions have been regulated by Italy's institutionalized restrictive national legislation on immigration most vividly presented then by the 2002 bossifini law Italy's most highly restrictive reform since the fascist period such Exclusionary measures as those in Italy clearly support the notion of fortress Europe a term Chris shore used to indicate a tightening of EU borders against immigrants in the early 2000s and he was this fortress Europe that Erhardt and Hislop wanted to challenge and subvert in their socially engaged work called reroute It was created as part of their participation in the bank to Reno international Biennale of young artists It presented the engagement of the artist with 28 recent immigrants in the city of Turin He developed through a collaborative process that included several meetings and extended over a period of several months Only in part funded by the Biennale organizing institutions. So a bit about the process the how First the artist identified Participants by contacting a number of local organizations then beginning in December of 2001 They met with participants who were invited to trace their own version of the city a mental map based on their routes and effective Responses to specific urban places the artist gave each participant a blank sheet of white paper with only a dot in the center The symbolized Torino's Porta Nova train station the main entry point in the city for all immigrants an Interview based on their hand-drawn mental maps immediately followed and the artist gave each participant a camera in order for them to photograph and Illustrate the map with photos of the places the artist entered in contact with 20 organizations in Turin Serving the needs of the homeless and the immigrants once in Turin the Biennale office connected the artist with a public school Where immigrants learned Italian following this initial contact in a rather organic way the artist continued to establish Contacts with local social workers teachers political activists Culture organizations and support groups for immigrants that were willing to recommend artists to potential participants Engaging in a self-reflexive production of space Rear out became a platform for articulating an inclusive form of citizenship based on complex relational processes What temporal and spatial differences were continually in the gift negotiated between individuals? Through the collection of individual views where each of the self-narrated oral histories became part of the community of singular voices The artist disrupted the exclusionary and essentialist approach to immigrant populations Similar to Urhar then his loop but employing a different collaborative strategy Matei Beginato created work that participate in the social political debate on immigration that unfolded at the EU level In the first decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 His two projects my arcs to buy in 2007 and travel guide conceived in 2005 Illustrated the effects of what writer subratta Bobby Barnagy called the power of necro Capitalism which describes the ways in which neoliberalism Exercises its power of control by not only allowing and determining people's way of living but also their modes of dying in his video marks to buy Beginato narrates the 1996 tragic death of three Romanian immigrants thrown off board of a Taiwanese Transportation ship at one level the negro Necro capital is localized in the cumulative Circumstances encountered in their country that provoke the three young Romanians to attempt to cross the Atlantic over to Canada By embarking illegally on board the ship and hiding in air sealed shipping containers at another level Necropolitical emerges In the unhesitant decision of the ship captain to get rid of the bodies out of fear of losing his job upon public Revelation of that illegal immigrant bodies on his ship It is the very condition of legality of living as a marginalized Citizen as an impoverished European post-communist nation Restricted by a complex web of legal requirements to travel or work in other countries Which contributes to an alienation of life and an acceleration of actual death In 2000 Etienne Bali Barr spoke of a European apartheid that exists Simultaneously with the notion of European citizenship it implies that immigrant population on the EU territory Coming most often from African countries and also Eastern Europe Are constituted it as inferior in rights and dignity Subject to violent forms of security control and forced to live on the border neither absolutely inside nor totally outside Beginaros travel guide was conceived in 2005 before Romania joined the EU when its citizens were not able to travel to UK without visa and because of that sound I'm gonna skip over the Spanish artist and I'm gonna Relate my conclusion so even from these projects Social engage artists seek to endanger dialogue on pertinent social and political issues and to try to foster resilient communities They focus on difference division inequality in society They raise questions on the relation between ethics and aesthetics on the role of art the art institution and art organization in our time They are process Site and time-based and often by the very process of interaction and negotiation with particular community This is what becomes the art medium and by its very nature such art forms are hybrid cross-disciplinary and in their aims They aim to bring forward the uncomfortable and neglected issues of our society