Arte Útil roughly translates into English as ‘useful art’ but it goes further suggesting art as a tool or device. The concept draws on artistic thinking to imagine, create and implement tactics that change how we act in society.
Arte Útil was initiated by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. Tania is a politically motivated performance artist that explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change through works that examine the social effects of political and economic power.
Tania explains that “Yes all art is useful, but the type of utility that we are talking about is that of direct immersion in society with all its resources… it is a practice that has managed to become a natural path for those artists who deal with political and social art… Arte Útil is a way of working with aesthetic experiences that focus on the implementation of art in society, where the function of art is no longer a space to point out problems but a place from which proposals are created and possible solutions are implemented.”
Tania’s work has included setting up alternative art schools in Cuba and performances that invite and promote freedom of speech. More recently, in October 2017, Tania announced that she would be running for President of Cuba, when the current President Raul Castro (brother of Fidel Castro) steps down. She has stated that the satirical performance is an act to expose the fact of Cuba being a one party state that is not elected by the people. Her hope was to enact change with bringing to light this reality, removing the culture of fear. In December 2018, she was arrested in advance of a planned protest against a Cuban law, Decree 349 – under this law artists, including collectives, musicians and performers, are prohibited from operating in public or private spaces without prior approval by the Ministry of Culture in Cuba.
Arte Útil Project Criteria
The criteria that must be met for projects to be included into the archive has been formulated by Tania Bruguera and curators at the Queens Museum, New York, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Grizedale Arts, Coniston.
1) Propose new uses for art within society
2) Use artistic thinking to challenge the field within which it operates
3) Respond to current urgencies
4) Operate on a 1:1 scale
5) Replace authors with initiators and spectators with users
6) Have practical, beneficial outcomes for its users
7) Pursue sustainability
8) Re-establish aesthetics as a system of transformation
A Selection of Projects in Latin America
The numbers in brackets refer to the project archive number and link through to the Arte Útil project file.
El Sistema (The System), Venezuela [044]
El Sistema is a pedagogical, artistic and social model to systematise the musical education in Venezuela (and beyond). It has been operating since 1975 as the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras and Choirs of Venezuela (Sistema Nacional de Orquestas y Coros juveniles e infantiles de Venezuela) recently renamed to Fundación Musical Simón Bolívar. El Sistema gives free access to classical music education, symphonic orchestras and instruments to children and youth at risk of social exclusion. It offers individual intellectual development through music education. It aims to break the elitism and recover art as a social right.
The framework of the project is based on a network of music centers called nucleos that work together with local communities to organise the instruction, the collective and individual practice of music among children and youth through symphonic orchestras and choirs, as instruments of social organisation and human development. The program began with 11 participants in a garage in Caracas. According to their website, the current figures stand at 1,012,077 people that have directly benefited from the program, there have been 1722 orchestral groupings and 443 nucleos.
More information
Access to the Denied, Cuba [025]
Access to the Denied was a project that provided internet access to Cuban citizens. At the time of conception the Cuban telecommunications company only offered internet access to foreigners. The payment for the service was based on a barter system; in exchange for access to the internet, people offered the artist information on how foreigners can understand the Cuban system. From this project strategies and perceptions about Cuba were developed. The aim was to change the power relations established by the Cuban State regarding the use of free information through the internet.
More information
Palas por Pistolas (shovels for guns), Mexico [071]
Palas por Pistolas was a project initiated in the city of Culiacán, a city in western Mexico with a high rate of deaths by gunshot. Artist Pedro Reyes, invited citizens to publicly destroy weapons using a steamroller in a military base. Subsequently, the metal was then reused to create shovels, which served to plant trees. The handle of each shovel blade states how the weapon has become a peaceful instrument.
The project was supported by a local TV station, which invited citizens to give up weapons in exchange for coupons that could be reimbursed in a local store for domestic appliances and electronics. In total 1527 weapons were collected; 40 percent of them were high power automatic weapons of exclusively intended for military use. This shovels were distributed to a number of art institutions and schools where adults and children planted 1527 trees.
More information
Transborder Immigrant Tool, Mexico [048]
The aim of this initiative is to guide immigrants to water safety sites and to increase safety during border crossing. Researchers, new media artists, and co-founders of the Electronic Disturbance Theater / b.a.n.g. lab, Ricardo Dominguez and Brett Stalbaum, together with a wider team of poets and professors, devised the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) to improve the odds of a safe crossing of the Mexico–U.S. border. Thousands of people have died in their journey, mostly due to its deserted geography. The TBT consists of a GPS system (in this case, standing for Geo Poetic System) with 24 hours of experimental poetry aimed at providing not only inspiration for survival, but also information on food and water caches, security activities, and directions to potentially safer routes. Its interface is designed as an easy hack for low-cost cell phones.
More information
A Selection of Worldwide Projects
Crowd Sourced Intelligence Agency, online [563]
The Crowd Sourced Intelligence Agency (CSIA) is an online application that replicates and displays some of the known techniques used by intelligence agencies to collect and process open source information. The app uses technical manuals, research reports, academic papers, leaked documents, and Freedom of Information Act files to construct an Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) system that’s accessible to the public. OSINT is gathered from publicly available sources like social media, academic articles, and public data. The goal of the CSIA is to expose potential problems, assumptions, and oversights inherent in current dataveillance systems in order to help people understand the effectiveness of OSINT processing and its impact on our privacy. The project was initiated by Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki.
More information
Inteligencias colectivas, worldwide [075]
This project has been featured seperately on the Tropical Commons article Inteligencias Colectivas: an open source database of local construction techniques from around the world
How to Submit a Project
Arte Útil invite people to submit a project via the online platform. Please take note of the criteria above. Forms to fill in include a description, goals of the project, benefactors, initiators, how it’s maintained, dates, location, with an image and links.
Further Information
Arte Útil
www.arte-util.org
YT: Arte Util FB Group
Tania Bruguera
www.taniabruguera.com
I: @TaniaBruguera T: @TaniaBruguera
Main featured image was provided by El Sistema in Venezuela ©FundaMusical Bolívar
