Category: Artists

MANIFESTo (2018)

Robin Lehleitner and Ann Whittaker met in 2013 in their final semester at the Middlebury College- University of Oxford Bread Loaf School of English, where they co-created and chaired a graduate conference called “‘Speak What We Feel, Not What We Ought to Say’: the Personal Impulse in the Critical Imperative.” Before coming to CGU in 2014 to work on a PhD in Philosophy of Religion, Robin spent 20 years helping at-risk teenagers and young adults in urban Massachusetts discover who they really were through writing. Ann is a documentary photographer and naturalist whose writing focuses on the environment, people, the west, feminism and deep ecology. She built and manages redrockstories.org. MANIFESTo is a “found poem” put together from the transcript of Ann’s January—2018 interview of Robin for the online journal CosmoMuse.

MANIFESTo

I had to make it what I wanted it to be
the best of all worlds
it’s no longer like I used to imagine
(that this could be for everybody)
I agreed to come to a place that was shedding its skin
semester after final semester
a new phase just because you are forced to move on
swim locker conversations
and then just dive in
a glass-encased beehive
like a Wunderkämmer

Theory is simply manifestation
redefined, therapeutic
a badass superintendent
who bends over backwards to get you in
sometimes winning awards is what you actually need
riding the crest of the tsunami
slippery, sharp as a knife
what everybody else assumes is tragically hard
is not actually hard for you

Doors swinging open
or closed, so closed
you could only dream about it
switching tracks is just about consciously forgetting
once upon a time I dreamt that I was in a library
then I dreamt it again and again
and again
the new thing that simply won’t allow you to ignore it
(it had never been about this before)
this boys-from-men knowledge
that everyone will think is crazy
“so what?”
becomes the substance
that holds your bodily existence together
a branch so brittle
there is no way you cannot fall
is what separates you from everyone else

Construction is simply about choice
knowing that there are a hundred different possibilities
and you get to keep choosing them
if you see the next step and are willing to take it
you don’t need imagination
our mothers were people
who believed they didn’t have the right
sometimes just one person
comfortable with authority
is all you need to remind you
that the way you do it will not be the way anyone else does it
that no one else will ever do it your way

Flood the heart and starve the mind
flood the mind and starve the heart
the best bodies are saturated with
the principle of androgyny
(just get out of my way)
there’s a reason for adhering to structure
otherwise knowledge is simply gnosis
there’s a reason for living in the body
yet another tiny, flexible, elderly woman
is the one who showed me this
there is a certain kind of freedom
in attaching yourself to whomever you like
in finding the sweet spot of argument
that protects no one but commits no murder
rhetoric is a voice with a shape

Pilot doctor in the sky
is the least risky job you can choose
anytime you’re flying through war
we live in an age of taking everything personally
there’s something wrong about the idea
that you’re only allowed to change the world
if you go through a narrow chute

(Found Poem from an Interview Between Robin Lehleitner and Ann Whittaker, Dec. 1, 2017)

Nothing/is/ok/party/party/people/make/do/radio/up/top/down/baby/boss/lady/friend/car/wash/brain/wash/cops/cops/cops/no/one/gets/out/no/more/free/stuff/no/more/freedom/no/more/party/people/no/more/people/power/no/more/nothing

Compass for Where the Rivers Join (2017), Pencil on Paper, 14 x 17 in.

El miedo es una brújula rota. Por eso preguntando caminamos. Como humildes artistas que andamos en territorios, a veces abrumados por su escala y complejidad, hacemos un trabajo archivístico mientras tratamos de estar activos y presentes en nuestro momento histórico y en nuestros contextos específicos procurando habitar las dimensiones micro y macro políticas que coexisten en ellos. Co-construimos espacios sociales en los que co-aprendemos junto a actores locales. Soñando, creando lenguaje, haciendo. No se trata de pensar la política, la memoria y la historia como “tópicos” ni representar a nadie sino de estar presentes junto a otros en la construcción cotidiana de la propia historia. Utilizando metodologías de brujería archivística y/o paraarchivismo liberamos y revelamos voces oscurecidas e imágenes borradas abriendo portales hacia otras formas de saber y ser, realizando trabajos de memoria colectiva y ejercicios de imaginación política para desestabilizar narrativas dominantes y opresivas.

—————

Fear is a broken compass. Therefore, questioning, we walk. As artists walking in territories, sometimes overwhelmed by their scale and complexity, humbly we carry out our archival work as we try to be active and present in our historical moment and in our specific contexts searching for ways to inhabit the micro and macro political dimensions that coexist in them. Dreaming, we create language in the doing. It is not a question of thinking of politics, memory and history as “topics” or of representing anyone, but rather to be present with others in the daily construction of history itself. Using methodologies of brujería archivística (archivist witchcraft) and/or paraarchivism we unlock and reveal obscured voices and erased images opening portals for other modes of knowing and being, realizing work of collective memory and exercises of political imagination to destabilize dominant and oppressive narratives.

this counts too: engineering at home (2017)

Printed text and images

36 x 14 3/4 in.

Ancestors and Dawn (2014), Oil on board, 20.5 x 20.5 in.

This tapestry from my matrilineal homeland, Bolivia, became illuminated one dawn. In the pink light they spoke, though I haven’t heard them since. Blue shapes shifted subtly in the early glow of my round tent-home; their whispers came through recent portals opened by an ancestor pole, by tending to their memory in word and ritual, by listening deeply through sage and gut. 

“Girls should walk alone in the streets! Girls shouldn’t be afraid at night! ”

A proposal for a manifesto on the hardships of being a growing young woman in Turkey. The 31-point manifesto takes its references from the Girls Manifesto section of the book Venus by the writer Şebnem İşigüzel. The manifesto in the book underlines basic human rights in a literary manner. The project reinterprets the manifesto using 31 painted graphic images that illustrate each point. The images are bound into a 31-page book. Venus has not yet been translated into English but by making drawings from it, the work interprets the manifesto as a visual language that can be understood by anyone. The graphic images that depict each point in the Manifesto are derived from the silhouettes of well-known comic characters by prominent Turkish female illustrators, including but not limited to Ramize Erer and Piyale Madra, or taken from comic books and magazines which comment on feminism, womanhood, femininity, the understanding of morality, and sensitivities in a conservative society.

Able To Fail (2017), Pencil on paper

Free will doesn’t exist in a vacuum, of course. It is inundated with forces of influence. These forces shape our priorities, choices, and life path. Too often, people who have been born or diagnosed with a disability are surrounded by forces that discourage risk to an unhealthy degree. Taking risks means having the liberty to succeed or fail accordingly.

My pieces in this show are included in larger bodies entitled Consumer Research (1980-1990) and/or Site Unseen: Incarceration (1999 – present). While I did these larger projects separately, I now realize that my concern about the implications of consuming (integral to capitalism) also includes the consumption of human beings that is implicit in the criminalization of them. The work Fear is our Gross National Product, made in the mid-1980s, was a response to the growth of the US military-industrial complex and escalation of US foreign military sales, pertinent today since the US continues to be the greatest seller of weapons to countries around the world. Both this work and the piece Human Eyes? Criminal Eyes? include double entendre, a device I often use for broader meaning. The work Made by Prisoners in a California Prison is the centerpiece of a work about the things made by prisoners in California prisons and the demographics of the people who are incarcerated in these prisons.

Southwark Notes- whose regeneration? (2017)
Typed documents
11 x 8 1/2 in. (Three documents)

SOUTHWARK NOTES WHO ARE WE

The texts are curated around the history of the open-source movement, creative commons, remix culture, and challenges to copyright in the digital era, engaging the public in a lively dialogue of ownership and public access. File sharing and copyright infringement—of media, entertainment, creative works, and intellectual property—are hot political and cultural topics in a world increasingly seeking to commodify the production and dissemination of ideas and information. Visitors are invited to pull tabs from a wall of flyers that advertise URLs to download their own copy of text, many of which have been illegally uploaded by anonymous file sharers around the world.