Raphael Vella, Professor of Art Education at the University of Malta, and musical composer Michael Quinton talk to social anthropologist and performer Caroline Gatt.
Imagining a brighter future in an age branded as the geological era of the Anthropocene is clearly challenging. The global pandemic, quickly followed by violent conflicts and an upheaval in the so-called world order, has left many people gasping for hope that appears to be slipping away in several contemporary democracies.
‘Opus They’ is a research project that revolves around the idea that the predicaments we face today are partly caused by an anthropocentric viewpoint that has led to unsustainable exponential growth. Initiated by visual artist Raphael Vella, architect Chris Briffa and sound designer Michael Quinton, and supported by project manager Marcon Borg Caruana, ‘Opus They’ researches ways of reconceiving contemporary crises as opportunities for creative transformation. The team makes use of an interdisciplinary methodology that aims to develop a collective and decolonising imaginary through the arts.
As part of their research, the team’s members have met with other artists, academics and stakeholders. One of the academics ‘Opus They’ met is social anthropologist and performer Dr Caroline Gatt, a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at Karl-Franzens-University of Graz who has carried out research on musical improvisation and global environmentalism among other areas. This is an extract from her interview.
Raphael Vella: Caroline, I’d like to get started with a general question. From your background as a performer and anthropologist, what are your thoughts on recent political and ecological developments? Which conditions or situations do you find most concerning?
Caroline Gatt: The current crises are not disconnected. There are environmental catastrophes together with human ones caused by political situations, and they are all linked. For example, the fires in California and Canada, or the floods we had here in Austria, where people ended up homeless. There’s the genocide that is happening in Palestine, and the erosion of democracy in the US under Trump.
We can approach these challenges from the perspective of the South American political and scholarly movement called the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality (MCD) project. Researchers in this project look at the colonialism of the Spanish and the Portuguese in South America. The urge for expansion was a search for riches because Europe at the time was so poor. Colonists brought ideas, people, plant materials, other riches to Europe, and the MCD scholars argue that it was this influx that enabled modernity to develop at all. But then Euro-centric histories discuss modernity as emerging only from European creativity. It’s basically an extraction of knowledge, materials, people, wealth, which enabled Europe to become as powerful and rich as it did. And so when you think about the catastrophes that we have today, most of them arise due to that same form of extractivism, where all the wealth gets sucked into Europe and North America, thereby impoverishing the other parts of the world.
Raphael Vella: In view of this exploitative use of material and human resources, what kind of change is possible? What are the practical challenges of integrating these changes in everyday life, not to mention policy?
Caroline Gatt: I think there are two things. The first is that we need to allow ourselves to imagine radical futures. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said that Hollywood can easily imagine post-apocalyptic realities but not post-capitalist realities. How many films do we see with post-capitalist harmonious societies? So, being able to imagine alternatives, even magical ones, is already the beginning of bringing about change. The second thing I learned from working with Friends of the Earth, especially South American activists, was that there is a lot to be said for living a good life yourself, the principle of ‘buen vivir’. For example, choosing ways of living which actually bring you joy without harming others. In South America, ‘buen vivir’ is a form of resistance. Then the question becomes how would people in positions of privilege take work with this idea without being extractive.
Michael Quinton: In the West, we tend to ignore the vitality in all things that exist, we tend to just use things as objects because they’re dead matter. There’s no consciousness in them, and because of that, we have no respect towards them. So do you think that some kind of educational shift is required?
Caroline Gatt: I tend to be careful about things like New Age, where Indigenous or Native American knowledge gets appropriated, or used without the acknowledgement that knowledge is being taken but no one’s giving back any usurped land. It can still become a capitalist extractive relationship if we use ideas without developing reciprocal relationships. What is needed really is very simple, a realisation that we are co-dependent on each other, and so we should care for each other, human or others. Even the micro-organisms in compost care for us by transforming food waste into compost in which we can grow more food.
Raphael Vella: Where do you see the potential of the arts in this process of ‘buen vivir’? How can artists help others to speculate about possible futures, even if this might seem somewhat unrealistic at this stage?
Caroline Gatt: While I think that there is a lot of value in the way that artists currently engage with the world, I think that we need to be very careful about thinking about art as a sort of a solution to a problem, because it’s actually part of the same way of separating art from skill, work, farming, and so on. In many parts of the world, art is not separated from other spheres of life. For example, I know the work of the Baniwa master craftsman Francisco Fontes from the Rio Negro in the north of Brazil, in the Amazon. The materials he uses to make baskets are understood to be his people’s actual ancestors. So by making things, he’s not only making something beautiful, he’s actually weaving together the living with their ancestral relatives. In this case art-making is part of keeping the community and its history alive. In ‘Western’ contexts, these things get split apart, especially the idea that creativity has to be something which is original, a break with tradition. And that is an extractivist understanding of the world, because it cuts off relations with the rest of the world.
Yet, the artists I’ve worked with themselves critique this situation. In the arts, you’re actually encouraged to be critical. You’re encouraged to work with your body, emotion, as well as intellect. So I think art does have potential for bringing all sorts of possibilities into being.
Raphael Vella and Michael Quinton
This project is supported by Arts Council Malta.
