Itinerant working group Extension or Communication (Grimaldi Baez, Rana Fayez,Tania Marrero Rios and Ricky Yanas) will host a seminar focusing on how we negotiate language in our organizations, institutions and cultural spaces.
Judith Butler states, “If we are formed in language, then that formative power precedes and conditions any decision we might make about it…” How we encounter the world and each other is mediated through the words we use to describe those encounters. Within the realm of public/political discourse the word “issue” is more often employed to evoke what are actually PROBLEMS. As writer, Carina Chocano puts it, “To call something an issue can suggest not just that it’s a niche concern but that there’s a lack of agreement over whether it’s even a concern at all.” This places the matrix of action outside the common space of objectives and concrete actions and into the subjective field of the personal, the abstract, intangible. In other ways we see the problem of language arise, whether it be in the constant fight for legal recognition of personhood by the trans community, translation services within cultural institutions, or the desire to safely communicate within one's first language in public space.
We ask:
How are we negotiating language as a community or within our communities?
What is failing? What is working? What are the blind-spots?
How do rhetoric, politics, and scale play a role in how role in the development of our collective language?
What tools are being developed to help us manifest more effective open language & living structures?
Through a collective, dialogical process of identifying, deconstructing, and reconstructing problem words/ stagnant concepts, this seminar aims to develop concrete solutions to our pertinent language problems.
“To call something an issue can suggest not just that it’s a niche concern but that there’s a lack of agreement over whether it’s even a concern at all.” -Carina Chocano
"An unauthentic word, one which is unable to transform reality, results when dichotomy is imposed upon its constitutive elements. When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating "blah." It becomes an empty word, one which cannot denounce the world, for denunciation is impossible without a commitment to transform, and there is no transformation without action." -Paolo Freire
Grimaldi Baez is a Puerto Rico born and bound, multidisciplinary artist, educator, organizer with formal studies in printmaking, drawing, and sculpture currently living in Philadelphia, PA. He received his MA from Tyler College of Art, 2015. In his work, he deploys a variety of collaborative, relational, and pedagogical strategies in order to explore relationships between the body, tools and the systems of power they produce.
Rana Fayez is the director and founder of YallaPunk, an organization that is redefining the narrative for SWANA individuals in Philadelphia through the arts. She is currently an adjunct professor at Drexel University in addition to playing synth in dark surf rock band, Great Shape.
Tania-María Ríos Marrero is a community organizer for a North Philadelphia public library, interested in the complex issues associated with access, information and creation. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she embraces Latinx communities of the diaspora and of her ancestral home Puerto Rico.
Ricky Yanas is a Texas born artist, educator and curator living in Philadelphia, PA. Working within a pragmatic tradition of problem finding, Yanas aims to create intersectional spaces of inquiry and mutual engagement through art making and art thinking. Recent projects in include Extension or Communication: Puerto Rico at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery Philadelphia and Taller Puertorroqueno and The Green Sun, a collaboration with artist Kristen Neville Taylor. In 2016 Yanas founded Ulises Books with Nerissa Cooney, Lauren Downing, Joel Evey, Kayla Romberger and Gee Wesley.