translated from Spanish: The Athenaess: artivism (and literality?)

Mr. Director:
Needless to say, it is important to the arts and humanities in these quarantine times: it has been evident how crucial they are to our well-being as a society, but also (and this must be said) to develop our critical and intellected thinking. For this reason, it is important to say how necessary it is to disclose concepts, content and research in the field of visual arts (we are in the right, let’s acknowledge it). Specifically, I mean the art of action and the performance art. Knowing is, by those of us who investigate it, and we generate works of this caliber, that the works do not point to literality in any case. And that, even if it were, in the case of LasTesis and his work “A Rapist on the Road” (2019) as well as the most recent of them, carried out in May 2020 are not the creators of the substantive demand, but base their stage and artistic work, on previous research; therefore, its field of creation is in the staging, movement and circulation. As a researcher in the area, I can tell you that there is a semantic field that alludes to the symbolic and is strongly presented in both proposals. So, isn’t it time to point back to the need to reform the institution of carabinieri, just as it has applied for citizenship in many ways and has been collected in demand widely read on the walls and heard in marches and protests? (You may or may not agree with it, but not deny that they exist and that you witness these backgrounds in fact, even without seeking them.)
The word “author” comes from auctor, which increases. With what, in this case, The TheTesis as authors do just that: they increase and amplify research by feminist theothers, as well as thoughts and reflections (or demands) present in society, otherwise demonstrated in research. At the moment, the struggle for meanings remains intense and the arts cannot be separated from the political (or politics). Without going any further, artist Sigmar Polke once called for explosives to be pinned to the canvases. I’m glad the citizens and the police understood what he meant! It was evidently a call to action from the arts, to be mobilizers of action and not to go to buy explosives to dynamit paintings and works. Can you imagine what would have happened if Polke’s call had a literal answer? We wouldn’t have museums or art galleries!
 
Marla Freire Smith
Dr. in History and Art Theory
Academic and researcher in art and culture

Original source in Spanish