Imagination by Ruha Benjamin

Author:Ruha Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2024-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Source: Ronald Rael, Teeter-Totter Wall.

I want us to consider, What are the risks of calling the teeter-totter a spectacle, or, to use another term often applied to such artistic gestures, “performative?” Could seeing the border differently denaturalize our collective commonsense and ignite more people to think, feel, and act? As a guest on the podcast Rebel Steps, educator Mariame Kaba noted,

I’m actually super bored with the concept of performativity. . . . I believe in co-strugglers and I believe in coworkers and I believe in solidarity. And I believe we need more people all the time in all of our work, in all of our movements, in all of our struggles. And I think the question is, how do we get folks to struggle alongside us and with us. . . . I’m an incredibly curious person, and I feel like that’s a huge help in finding yourself connected to struggles, is be super curious, come with what you know, be willing to learn, and be willing to be transformed in the service of the work.

The point is that writing off artistic interventions as mere spectacle or performative dismisses how creative works can spark counter-imaginaries that have the potential to dream bigger and materialize into concrete changes. Angela Y. Davis addressed this issue when asked about the relationship between art and politics:

I think that art is able to reach people in a way that didactic conversations often don’t.

As a graduate student, I studied extensively the philosophical relationship between aesthetics and politics. . . . And of course, art involves the imagination. And if we believe that revolutions are possible, then we have to be able to imagine different modes of being, different ways of existing in society, different social relations. In this sense art is crucial. Art is at the forefront of social change. Art often allows us to grasp what we cannot yet understand.

Perhaps, then, images of children playing across arbitrary and violent political borders is less spectacle and more an invitation to reflect deeper on humanity’s interdependence.

The fact remains, Rael’s visualizations stand in stark contrast to the eugenic imagination that is codified in U.S. and European immigration policies and the technical systems those nations deploy, at least when it comes to poor and nonwhite migrants. As writer Ayesha A. Siddiqi succinctly tweeted, “every border implies the violence of its maintenance.”

Like Rael, San Diego–based artist and professor Ricardo Dominguez has spent the last few decades denaturalizing and disrupting borders. In 1997, he cofounded Electronic Disturbance Theater 1.0, a group that developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. More recently, his team designed the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), a GPS cell phone safety-net for crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. The project started with a basic question: “What ubiquitous technology would allow us to create an inexpensive tool to support the locating of water caches left in the Southern California desert by NGOs?”

They decided on inexpensive Motorola phones as the tool for disseminating this information to migrants.

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