ACTIVIST ESTATES: A VIEW FROM WITHOUT
This interactive exhibition is an outcome of the collaboration between Libertad Guerra / The Clemente and the architect/ author Nandini Bagchee.
Information asymmetry has become one of the main factors determining the uncertain futures of low-income residents and driving the cultural erasure of entire New York City neighborhoods. The hyper fragmentation or lack of publicly available information, the aleatory gaps in official archives, evince some of the fundamental power imbalances that ultimately minimize and distort the cultural and historical contributions of communities of color to the fabric of our city. Rarely do we find attempts at cohesive storytelling unspoiled by class, social capital, ethnicity, or stylistic prejudices.
Activist Estates in an effort to foreground the multi-positional, space-based resistances of our neighborhood by illuminating the gears and pulleys in the backend of the production of space; an inquisitive exploration of the interdependent dynamics of meaning, activist movements, and landscape.
For close to three decades The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center has functioned as a standard-bearer to the abrupt closure of Charas/El Bohio, also housed on a previously abandoned B.J. Snyder majestic school building.
Activist Estates in an effort to foreground the multi-positional, space-based resistances of our neighborhood by illuminating the gears and pulleys in the backend of the production of space; an inquisitive exploration of the interdependent dynamics of meaning, activist movements, and landscape.
For close to three decades The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center has functioned as a standard-bearer to the abrupt closure of Charas/El Bohio, also housed on a previously abandoned B.J. Snyder majestic school building.
Founded in 1993, The Clemente has been instrumental in the advocacy for equity and access to the many histories of the Latinx resistance in New York, never in isolation of the wider im/migrant, activist, and cultural fabric of the city.
Our mission is to approach community not as a passive ahistorical grouping of stationary people, but rather as an action and a demand through which participants (re)create their surroundings, steward community assets, and prefigure intentional futures, even if virtually unseen by the center, community as a rehearsal of future societies.
Activist Estates reveals yet another facet of these stories by juxtaposing the parallel trajectories of different social movements and groups working in tense solidarity in the Lower East Side; it is an invitation to approach the history of social movements not as an itemization of quaint objects, or the facts of rarely-seen documents, but as usable history; the past as potential.
Libertad O. Guerra,
Executive Director, The Clemente.
Our mission is to approach community not as a passive ahistorical grouping of stationary people, but rather as an action and a demand through which participants (re)create their surroundings, steward community assets, and prefigure intentional futures, even if virtually unseen by the center, community as a rehearsal of future societies.
Activist Estates reveals yet another facet of these stories by juxtaposing the parallel trajectories of different social movements and groups working in tense solidarity in the Lower East Side; it is an invitation to approach the history of social movements not as an itemization of quaint objects, or the facts of rarely-seen documents, but as usable history; the past as potential.
Libertad O. Guerra,
Executive Director, The Clemente.
