Under Our Skin | Mon-Sun | 24/7

Concept Outline:
“UNDER OUR SKIN | MON-SUN | 24/7”
By The Counter Narrative Society
(Mabel Negrete in Collaboration with Mary Ann Brooks, Joan Jones performance class and final response by John Hulsey)

The project investigates, through a series of heart to heart creative conversations (indecent acts ) [1], the manifestation of interconnected notions, such as white dominance [2], assimilation, inequality, mass-imprisonment [3] , into implicit and invisible forms of oppression. The project consists of a series of creative conversational pieces that will be completed in 5 parts.

PART 1 – is already happening. It involves talking to key faculty and friends who will be participating in the project. This has been the preliminary stage of deciding the overall concept and design of the project.

PART 2 – For the midterm, CNS' member Mabel Negrete, Chilean-Immigrant-American female, visual artist and researcher at MIT, will be doing an experimental performance for a maximum of 10 minutes. She will be exploring through monologue, conversations with the audience questions about what it means to "assimilate white dominance" at MIT.

PART 3 – CNS' collaborator Mary Ann Brooks, an African American queer female, movement conceptual artist and writer, will be traveling from San Francisco to join Negrete for the heart to heart conversations (as indecent acts). The conversations will be recorded at their leisure over the weekend of April 24th. As part of this collaboration they will be sharing ideas, practices and research.

PART 4 – The CNS will be making a final creative conversational piece with the material accumulated. The presentation will be on May 4th, 2010 at the MIT - Program in Art, Culture and Technology. Event information visit>> Glaciers _ Under Our Skin

PART 5 – The project will culminate in a section for a book the MIT - ACT Graduates Students are putting together. CNS' collaborator John Hulsey, a White American male, Harvard filmmaker and writer, will be joining the project to bring in a 3rd viewpoint on the conversation that Mary Ann and Mabel will be recording. John will be an evaluator and concept collaborator. In this role he will be looking at the work both artistically and critically. In addition, Mary Ann will also be contributing to the development of the book section.


Footnotes:

[1] The Counter Narrative Society. 2010. Indecent ACTS 1 & 2 - http://indecentacts.blogspot.com/2010/03/indecent-acts.html

[2] Zack, Noami. 1998. Thinking About Race.
White Dominance – In this project it refers to a series of race based concepts to explicitly identify the political, economical and cultural dominance known in political nomenclature as “White Race, White Culture”. Other relating concepts are internalized white supremacy, unconscious racism, institutional racism, and the whitening effect.

[3] Garland, David. 2001. Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences.
Mass Imprisonment – “What are the defining features of mass imprisonment? There are…two that are essential. One is sheer numbers. Mass imprisonment implies a rate of imprisonment and a size of prison population that is markedly above the historical and comparative norm for a society of this type. The US prison system clearly meets these criteria. The other feature is the social concentration of imprisonment’s effects. Imprisonment becomes mass imprisonment when it ceases to be the incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole groups of the population. In the case of the USA, the group concerned is, of course, young black males in large urban centers. For these sections of the population, imprisonment has become normalized. It has come to be a regular, predictable part of experience, rather than a rare and infrequent event.”


Selected Bibliography:

Bishop, Claire. 2006. Participation.
Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech.
Garland, David. 2001. Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences.
Hooks, Bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism | Overcoming White Supremacy, pg. 184-195.
Participation Art - http://participationart.blogspot.com/
Participation|Art - http://participationart.squarespace.com/
Phillips, Michael. 2006. White Metropolis.
SFMOMA – The Art Participation 1950-Now | http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/306
The Counter Narrative Society. 2010. Indecent | ACTS - http://indecentacts.blogspot.com
Western, Bruce. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America.
Zack, Noami. 1998. Thinking About Race.

Related References: