Marco Baravalle in conversation with MTL* Collective Episode #4 of the podcast series No Land Ahoy! Drifting Conversations on Radical Art within the framework of The School of Mutation
Marco Baravalle talks to artists, curators and activists. From the phantom archive of activist art to the museo situado, from Afrofutirism to decolonisation of neoliberal museums, these constellations of radical art may help us trace possible routes through the drift of the present.
EPISODE #4 with MTL+ Collective
How to act in the face of a scenario in which the major US art institutions function as artwashers of a colonial, patriarchal and extractivist capitalism? MTL+ tells of concrete actions such as Decolonize this Place and Strike MOMA, of the need to escape institutional co-optation and the urgency of creating new infrastructures of solidarity. The museum is an object to be de-fetishised, not a temple of memory (whose memory?), just another battlefield.
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Decolonize This Place (DTP) is an action-oriented, decolonial formation and a call to action. Facilitated by MTL+ Collective (Nitasha Dhillon, Amin Husain, Marz Saffore, Amy Weng), DTP resists and unsettles settler colonial structures in our cities as it builds movement infrastructure of care and solidarity on the path of collective freedom and liberation. Organizing, research, aesthetics, and action are rooted in interconnected struggles that are anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist. The university, museum, and city are sites of struggles and organizing. They are sites of refusal, sabotage, infrastructure, sanctuary, play, exit. Let them be sites of training in the practice of freedom. When we breathe we breathe together.