Post-Conflict or Institutionalization of conflict
by Rubén Ojeda Guzmán
2023

Almost two months have passed since the CCC symposium, and it’s time to reflect on what happened and extract the corresponding narratives. I will focus on three topics that caught my attention during the symposium: institutionalized conflict, institutional porosity, and the battlefield. These themes are linked to my experience as an artist who is in a kind of self-imposed exile due to the violence and militarization of the war on drugs.

This situation has led me to repeatedly question the historical, philosophical, or social function of my artistic practice and the art system in general. Especially considering that the diaspora resulting from crises, extending across Europe, takes on a unique aspect when it comes to art. Undertaking a European tour adds a distinctive weight to the artist’s curriculum, which, when viewed from the place one departs, garners significant attention.

This nobiliary situation, for lack of a better term, of recognizing artistic careers through a center – involving stops in Madrid, Berlin, or London – aims to be institutionalized. However, rebellion, reaction to conflict, and the expression of crisis are distinct statements made by artists and curators from the so-called global South. How can one reconcile this contradictory impulse to embody the crisis with the desire for institutionalization in global centers?

I would like to believe that this struggle for institutionalization is, in addition to a possibly narcissistic aspiration, a dispute over the historical narrative of art. I believe this because the path to institutionalization is both bureaucratic and social, rewarding only a few, yet artistic, curatorial, and related work is overflowing. The center exerts a dual force: attraction and centrifugation, in which everything is drawn towards it so rapidly that the reaction is a centripetal force pushing everything outward, marginalizing it.

In this metaphor, the museum is a centrifugal machine that could be seen as a cultural vortex that draws artists, critics, curators, and other cultural agents into its core due to the promise of recognition, prestige, and visibility. However, once inside the vortex, one is trapped in a circular movement where the same structure that attracted them to the center also marginalizes or limits them in terms of access, recognition, and full participation.

Nevertheless, vortices often have some permeability at their edges, and the art institution is also porous: it allows the entry and exit of objects, subjects, and discourses. It permits a certain degree of entry and participation, even as it maintains a centralized and exclusive structure at its core. The machinery lets trends in and filters them. It instrumentalizes crises localized in conflict zones or racial and sexual minorities. Institutional porosity is in the service of a political agenda. The machinery is a political display and feeds on the critical nature of art.

But the museum must be seized. Although it will have to be contested again later. What needs to be ensured is the indeterminate nature of ‘the artistic’ and, therefore, of dissent. Since art is a concept lacking a definition, which institutions claim to provide, it must be contested. Art is a battlefield. Art is conflict.