Thirty-five years ago, Gayatri Spivak published the historic essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, in which she maintained that post-colonial discourse in the West effectively erased the voice of subaltern women as individuals, instead fetishising their collective identity and positioning western intellectuals as the only possible interpreters of that collective condition. In the world of contemporary art, a similar pattern persists in which artists can only attain visibility by representing collectivity and can only gain legitimacy by gaining the approval of establishment experts. Here, Coco Fusco will analyse how creating one’s own critical and reflective interventions as a public intellectual can alter these entrenched power dynamics.
The activity is held in the MACBA Meier Auditorium, but you can also follow it live on the museum’s website and YouTube channel.
