ARkive post 8 — Monica Perez

Monica Perez – Transatlantic Totems wool and clay sculpture

Monica Perez, Transatlantic Totems. Hanging sculpture in wool, fabric and clay, evoking flayed hides and scorched landscapes shaped by the transatlantic wool trade.

“Transatlantic Totems” examines the relationship between England and South America during the British Empire’s expansion, focusing on colonies established to exploit resources and cheap labor.

In Uruguay, wool became a primary resource, contributing to the genocide of Indigenous people. For years, wool gained at the cost of life and liberty crossed the Atlantic into European soil, with consumers unaware of the accompanying crimes. This resonates with Dussel’s critique of Eurocentric narratives that often erase the agency and voices of those on the periphery.¹

The choice of wool, a material deeply intertwined with the transatlantic trade and colonial economies, is a reminder of the historical injustices embedded within global commodity chains. It serves as a reminder of the genocidal amnesia of the Charrúas by the Uruguayan government. At the same time, allied European powers allowed the Pampas, a vast, fertile grassland, to be cleared for grazing, erasing Indigenous identities.

1. Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures),” boundary 2, 20, no. 3 (1993): 65–76. Dussel argues that modernity is not solely a European phenomenon but was constituted in relation to a non-European alterity — a perspective that challenges traditional historical narratives.

2. Ibid. Dussel highlights how the “discovery” and subsequent exploitation of the Americas were central to the development of European modernity, a process deeply intertwined with the extraction of resources like wool and the establishment of colonial economies.

ARKive post 7 — Johnny Golding

Transcript:

On Mon, 24 Feb 2025 at 13:29, Laura Dzelzytė

<10049264@network.rca.ac.uk> wrote:

Dear Johnny,

I would like to explore whether there is an opportunity to begin organizing the first event for the “Philosophy Society”, which might also prompt us to reconsider its title. The central idea is to acknowledge and examine the contemporary contexts in which artists, who engage in post-structuralist or postmodernist theories and practice, are operating today.

As politics shift radically to the right – seemingly to counteract “cultural left”, can “thinking artists” who challenge the notion of an objective, universal truth and help amplify excluded voices, still offer a meaningful and effective alternative?

Laura

On Mon, 24 Feb 2025 at 17:07, Johnny Golding
<johnny.golding@rca.ac.uk> wrote:

Well, post-modern is 100% better than post-structuralism (the latter of which brings in a very unfortunate dialectical framework), so in that sense, it is not so much that post-structuralism is contentious – it is just that in a world that is linked with new forms of agency and powers brought on by the quantum/digital/AI world (with human-interspecies-machine co-evolution etc) – we need to focus more on discursive and entangled epistemology. (By entangled I do not mean “mixed up” – I mean that which creates an encounter, a “sticky cohesion” etc.)

I also think it is not all that helpful to suggest that we have to “get away from the theoretical” – theory, when it is done robustly and sensuously, is experimental and practice-led. When one talks of “theory” as stale or as a “model” – yes, getting away from this kind of version of theory is important as it cannot not help create environments for agency and, for that matter, for the creative collective rise of democratic imaginaries, storytelling etc.

When you ask can “thinking artists” counteract the shift to the radical right (or should we even try) – the short answer is: yes. The longer answer is also “yes”.

The real question is not whether artists (thinking or otherwise) can counteract the shift to the right, but how. The answer to the “how question” includes understanding how power operates, how myths circulate and become “material” or grist for the mill of making new ideas, how fascist and right-wing political movements erupt, get stronger, and circulate. This is precisely what the practice-led philosophy asks. It is precisely what Deleuze and Guattari in their 1000 Plateaus were teasing out; it is exactly what is the basis of our work in Tasting Philosophy and also that of the philosophy-poet-artists that are a critical part of research work going on at the RCA and worldwide.

I think it is quite wonderful that Antony Micallef sent Flowers painting to Art Basel Hong Kong. He may (or may not) have meant this as a political act – but it certainly can be a very political act (even if one is dealing with countries that are trying to suppress the political). It can be a form of “radical self care” (see Audre Lorde on this – where it is an act of self-preservation and political warfare) or it can be a send-up (see Piss Flowers by Helen Chadwick). Of course, flowers were the political sign of the peace movement (very political) etc.

Glad we’re talking!
Best
Johnny

Prof Johnny Golding
Professor Philosophy & Fine Art
Head, proto-centre for Radical Matter: Art, Philosophy, Wild Science

Email exchange with philosopher Johnny Golding – Ark Parrhesia magazine spread

ARKive post 6 — Khrystyna Oryshchak & Maria Savoskula

Image created using charcoal and sound waveforms from field recordings of a Shahed-131/136 drone in Kyiv on 8 March 2025

With ballistics, the warning comes just seconds before impact. Drones take longer. Ballistics are over in an instant – what they leave behind is often catastrophic. You spend the rest of the day reading tragic headlines: deaths, destroyed places you knew. That aftermath, for me, is more traumatic than the explosions themselves. People are still living in Ukraine – those who didn’t leave and, for various reasons, have accepted life under this constant danger.

The alerts usually come late at night or early in the morning. Going out to a cold shelter – like a tube station or underground car park – at that hour disrupts your entire rhythm of life. Sacrificing rest, routine, and a sense of normality feels like giving up a part of life itself.

I stay home.

It’s scary when an explosion happens nearby. At first, the threat feels distant – just news, warnings. Even when they say drones are coming your way, it doesn’t feel real. But when they arrive and you hear the defences firing, hear the buzzing overhead, it becomes immediate.

You hear the war. And in that moment, you’re reminded: this is real. We’re not on the frontline, but the war reaches us through sound.

Before bed, you read alerts: “Critical number of drones in the air,” or “Two missile carriers deployed with a volley of Kalibrs.” You think: I need to sleep now, before it starts. Because if it’s a large or combined attack, sleep will be impossible.

These attacks come in waves. First the drones – too many to stop. Then, when defences are stretched, the missiles follow. If the timing overlaps, the sounds become chaotic: buzzing, blasts, impacts, layered and endless.

You realise –

Tonight, there won’t be any sleep.

ARKive post 5— Xiangyin Gu

I Cannot Breathe.

I was first invited into the family albums by a sense of allure. The word album in Chinese (影集) means the assembly of shadows. I immerse myself within them.

Literally, I was surrounded by boxes of things owned previously by my maternal grandfather. There are ten thousand images that create within them an oceanic feeling that devours me.

Rather than any elite, my grandfather was just a normal university student during the cultural revolution. People would hold the little red book, as everybody else. One is lured to take these gestures as a token that stands for his political stance.

As a red guard, a medical student, or a son of peasants, who is my grandfather?

Yet perhaps, a liberal, an avant-garde, a father to come, who is he?

The political thread within them appears explicit. Yet what underlies is a level of secrets that escape language.

Ones that will remain asemic.

History, through the lens of familial archives, remains elusive and slippery.

ARKive post 4 — Kamini Vellodi

It is thrilling to see this relaunch of ARK, with the new name of Parrhesia. Could there be a more fitting title for our turbulent times?

Parrhesia (from pan (everything), rhema (that which is said)) is speaking frankly, fearlessly, saying everything without hiding – the speaking of the truth. It is when individuals speak out, even at risk to themselves. Parrhesia takes courage, because something is said that is different to what the majority thinks. It is necessarily difficult.

Michel Foucault tells us:
“Parrhesia is the courage of truth in the person who speaks and who, regardless of everything, takes the risk of telling the whole truth that he thinks, but it is also the interlocutor’s courage in agreeing to accept the hurtful truth that he hears.”

In that sense the value of parrhesia is not only in the telling of truth to power. It is in the receiving of this truth, and the transformation of the self/other through listening. In other words, its value lies as an experience of alterity.

Parrhesia can of course be misused. When Foucault studied parrhesia in the context of the crisis of democratic institutions in 4th Century Greece, he called attention to how everyone saying everything they wanted to, without qualification, even ignorant and immoral things, could lead to stupidity and tyranny.

From our vantage point today, this insight seems uncannily prophetic. Today – with the complicity of social media – the forums that appear to enable everyone, including those in power, to say everything and anything “without qualification”, with the tyrannies shaking the world – “Truth Social” – what counts as critique is seriously threatened. Our current global crises are marked by the polarisations and divisions, the identity politics that separate and draw ever harsher borders, fuelling extremisms, authoritarianisms, vengeful nationalisms and fanaticisms. As we struggle to make sense of what defies sense, amidst the unhinging of western liberalism and its institutions, the rise of the far right and the politics of ignorance and hatred driving resurgent injustices, systemic violence, erasures, and abuses, alongside intensifying censorships, the urgency of an ethics of alterity that refuses to be silenced presses upon us.

There is an urgency to emphasise that truth-telling is less about telling (and then defending) “my truth” or “your truth”, but the relational act, the spaces of connection, where truth becomes a site not of absolutism but of negotiation, exchange, dialogue, translation, listening. Of making spaces for difference, human and non-human. Of inhabiting the between-spaces, living in the interstices, forging the interstitial sites of a planetary community.

Our educational spaces are vital sites for this affirmation. And today they must be fiercely defended. As we witness the threat to universities racking the United States and the United Kingdom, parrhesia as a pedagogical value has never been more urgent. It is incumbent upon us to affirm our educational spaces as sites of dialogue, of learning in relation to others, of self-interrogation as a collective act; the necessity of posing difficult questions, of dissensus.

As artists and educators in an art school we have the opportunity to continually affirm art’s distinctive relation to parrhesia. Art opens the spaces for the interrogation of received truths and facts; it invites us to look closer, see what is ordinarily unseen, think again, feel differently. Art may invite us to dissent, to risk, to resist, to bear witness, to pay attention, to inject the unexpected into the normative, intervene in the sensible; to embrace multiplicity, otherness and interstitiality, and to remind us of what we share, our being-in-common. Art may be the vehicle of conveying the memories of the present, and the invitation to imagine things otherwise, imagine futures.

These are not academic questions, but experiential and lived conditions. Neither are they unfamiliar, as the global histories of art, and not only its 20th-century avant-garde moments, insistently remind us. Here at the RCA, we are so fortunate to be an extraordinary plural, transnational community of multiple voices. Listening to each other, being open to changing ourselves in relation to the work others make, collaborating across borders, we can keep striving to instil a practice of relationality grounded in an ethics of alterity. ARK always stood for experiment, radicalism, creative freedom, and a spirit of collaboration. Launching with an aim to “cut through the noise”, this first issue of the revamped ARK couldn’t be more timely.

ARKive post 3 — Anoushka Kandwala

Anoushka Kandwala

Do We Need A New Way of Talking About Diversity?

In the last decade or so, the word diversity has infiltrated the creative industries. While diversity as a concept has significantly increased in popularity, the word’s lack of specificity means that it can be wielded in any which way. Does this term still serve the creative industries or do we need more clearly defined approaches?

To investigate this question, I sought out Reeta Loi, Founder and CEO of Tiger Iron, a culturally-rooted agency employing people from diverse backgrounds to take a decolonial approach to creative campaigns. Diversity helps construct accurate representations Within what Loi calls ‘agency-land’, there is a huge disparity between the identities of the audiences that creative teams are trying to reach, and the makeup of the teams themselves, who tend to skew white, male, cis-gendered and straight. The people who are shaping culture influence how populations see themselves. Loi sees a lot of advertising as problematic because without adequate representation “these concepts are created by people who are othering [audiences]. They’re feeding into stereotypes and prejudices all the time... and then we believe that that is what we are.”

Accurate representation of audiences is often one of the reasons most cited for why we need diversity in the creative industries, but Loi thinks that hiring practices aren’t enough—people need to feel safe enough in the workplace to share their ideas. “When we’re going into traditional agencies, we’re having to assimilate, often code-switching because we’ve learned to do that for our survival.” Code-switching refers to a change in behaviour in order to fit in with the dominant culture in your environment.“As soon as you start assimilating, you start losing everything about you that makes you unique and wonderful as a creative. So how can you bring a culturally-rooted, authentic experience into the work that you’re doing if you don’t feel safe to do that?” Loi founded Tiger Iron for this reason—to provide diverse creatives with a space where they can be themselves and make work that lets them thrive, rather than just survive.

I speak to Elizabeth Guffey, an editor and educator whose work focuses on the intersection of design, visual culture and disability studies. She explains that often, disability is left out of conversations about diversity—perhaps this is why the disability justice movement has been making waves in the last few years, because of its specificity. Guffey makes the compelling argument that design shapes what we see as ‘normal’, and thus defines what disability is. “Vision impairment used to be one of the most significant disabilities there was”, explains Guffey, “but since we’ve normalised glasses-wearing... people don’t even think about it.” Glasses are in fact assistive devices that have been designed to correct what is in fact a disability, but it’s unlikely that every glasses-wearing person would identify as disabled. It’s striking to consider the creative industry’s ability to sculpt what normalcy is, and how an increase in representation of disabled creatives in the workforce could change the way disability is represented in our culture.

Diversity is the first step towards equity Julian Thompson is the founder of Rooted by Design, a change & futures studio which centres the realities of Black communities. Thompson sees diversity as the first step in the journey towards change, but explains that “some of that agenda isn’t even driven by Black people or people of colour. The industry might have good intention, but at the same time have their own agendas as to what this means for the survival of their organisation. There is a commercial reason sometimes that people want diversity.”

Rooted focuses instead on equity. Thompson explains that their mission is to centre voices that have historically been on the margins, from hiring solely Black designers and strategists to taking on projects which centre Black audiences. “This is about recognising that because of inequity, things are broken.” He is adamant that Rooted can never be a DEI initiative—rather than fixing agencies’ diversity issues and metrics , Thompson wants to “fix health outcomes that are disproportionately impacting Black people.” Rooted’s methodology recognises that those who have experienced inequity have consistently experienced a “historical deficit”, which comes from a lack of investment, care and visibility. To counter this, “we need to create experiences that allow people to experience something other than inequity... that make people feel powerful, strong, valued, seen and heard.”

This text origilllary appeared in the Creative Review

ARKive Post 2 — Mai Maraguchi

Mai Maraguchi

イーストロンドンのグラフィティから人々の痕跡を感じ、
詩を砂で地面に記しました。
歩行者により文字が消え、足跡が重なる様子が移民史を示します。
壁には詩の文字を分解して貼り、新たな言語の誕生を表現しました。

English translation:

Sensing the traces of people in the graffiti of East London, I inscribed a poem in sand on the ground.
As pedestrians walked over it and erased the letters, their overlapping footprints suggested a history of migration.
On the wall, I broke the poem’s characters apart and pasted them up, expressing the birth of a new language.

ARKive post 1 — Chantal Faust

Chantal Faust

Dear Sylvia Plath,
Dear Hannah Höch,
Dear Wangechi Mutu,
Dear Yoko Ono,
Dear Kara Walker,
Dear Laurie Anderson,

Dear Those-Who-Cut-Through,

The noise is heavier now.
Not louder, just more. More screens, more scrolls, more same.
We are offered endless tools for expression,
a prescription of echoes.

You taught us to slice, to collage, to carve voices from interference.
You taught us to look at the visible.
To speak sideways. To speak anyway.

Now we gather in fragments.
Unbound pages, mixed voices, rough edges.
We are not compiling a whole. We are not making sense.
We are cutting our way through.

This is a letter to those who still cut.
Who still say what shouldn’t be said.
Who know that to speak freely is to risk being unrecognised, unread, undone.

This is not a publication.
This is a happening. A refusal. A signal.

Dear Those Who Cut Through the Noise,
Keep going.

Editor’s letter

Dear Reader,

After months of preparations, we decided to present ARK|Parrhesia publication as a happening at the Hockney Gallery on the last Tuesday in May. In the face of digital and AI overload, we wanted it to be deliberately “analog”. The Annotated Reader by Ryan Gander, who has agreed to collaborate with us on our journal (much like Lucio Fontana in 1958), served as the inspiration.

Conscious of ARK’s significance as a cultural artefact, we are including a text by the young and esteemed writer Boris Bergmann on his obsession with collecting the journal. Our aim, however, is not to venerate but to devolve ownership of ARK’s legacy. We invite current RCA students to contribute, curate, and then assemble their own versions of the cult magazine in a live performance–exhibition– as–publication format. The goal is to capture a moment in time at the Royal College of Art in 2025.

Parrhesia is a pompous word - but a necessary concept. It is dissent par excellence, associated with speaking truth to power and a willingness to accept criticism. As the world descends into chaos and retreats from globalisation, there is less space for diverse voices - but as Audre Lorde said, “silence will not protect us.”

This limited-edition, print - only publication of Emilija’s award-winning design contains submissions on marginalised issues such as gender, power, conflict, migration, colonialism, addiction, disability, generational trauma, AI and others. Current international students and staff at the RCA explore these topics in various languages and diverse forms. For some, these ideas are unspeakable-if not punishable-at home.

We also include philosopher Mark Hanin’s impressions of David Hockney’s exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Fondation in Paris, along with poignant responses by current painting students Ise and Andres. Hockney - a radical student and editor of this publication in the 1960s - is now official art. A sixty - year trajectory that seems unlikely in this day and age.

This issue was created by two painters and a printmaker. It is rough and ready, immediate and unbound. We do not provide translations for texts in foreign languages, nor explanation of works.

The rawness is part of the offer. It is our way of responding to the dangerous volatility of now.

Yours,
Laura Dzelzytė

ARK|Parrhesia would not have happened without the advice, support, and enthusiasm of three

people: Chantal Faust, Kamini Vellodi, and Johnny Golding.

Ise, Emilija and Laura