While navigating our censorship issue, we began to wonder… How many others have been censored? Who and why? Do they even know? Were they able to fight back? What happened to their work and what did they grapple with as artists, creative practitioners, museum workers, voices from the front lines, and witnesses from the sidelines? What did they learn and what did they accomplish? How?
For us, the only reason we were made aware of the censorship was because a box of our disappeared art zines were found on a residential street and then we pushed hard against the lies and bureaucratic rhetoric from state officials. But we are still unpacking the questions that remain. How does this change us and our work as artists?
In light of this, we are reaching out to artists, creative practitioners, museum workers, and curators to gather extracted, disappeared, and censored artworks and projects into an online public presence, called the Chronicle of Disappeared Arts (CODA). It is our intention that this space generate a new platform from which we might be able to experience, interact with, and help promote these creative and critical struggles, while also engaging in dialogue around issues of censorship and artworks which counter systemic oppression and environmental injustice.
If you would like to be involved or have a censored, disappeared, suppressed and/or extracted project that you would like to propose, please contact us. We will be developing CODA throughout 2020 with a launch anticipated in conjunction with the 2021 international program, Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss
In solidarity,
Jeanette Hart-Mann and Asha Canalos
