#10 Evidence of Hope
Dear friends and colleagues, dear faraway nearby,
It's been a while since I made my way into your inbox, in fact, it's been actually the longest interruption since I've started these monthly letters at the end of 2015. 2020 has been demanding its own pace, scheduling many unplanned things and demanding to adjust at a faster pace than feels comfortable for most of us. I've been learning a lot, walking many trails in the mountains, thinking, developing new supportive habits. I'm really grateful to be surrounded by this landscape that offer me relief and space to think. I'm also very grateful that I got to write (more so over the past months as we had to postpone exhibitions and events). A larger research project around racism, museums and education in Switzerland will hopefully be published in the coming weeks, and endless notes around success and failure as a museum worker are currently resulting in a book draft.
One topic that has been on my mind over the past months has been HOPE. Not because I do feel particularly hopeful, at least not in the standard definition, there are actually many things to be desperate and angry about, but because hope feels rebellious right now. If we look closer at the definition of hope it seems way less naive than many argue. Rebecca Solnit wrote in her updated foreword for the reissued 2015 edition of her book Hope in the Dark these beautiful lines:
"It’s important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act. It’s also not a sunny everything-is-getting-better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything-is-get-ting-worse narrative. You could call it an account of complexities and uncertainties, with openings. “Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïvete,” the Bulgarian writer Maria Popova recently remarked. And Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, early on described the movement’s mission as to “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.” It’s a statement
that acknowledges that grief and hope can coexist."
(...)"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand."
(...) “Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,” the theologian Walter Brueggeman noted. It’s an extraordinary statement, one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats and cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation. A memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants, a memory that includes our power, produces that forward-directed energy called hope." (Solnit, foreword, xiii-xix)
The fight for social justice is inevitably connected to hope because it channels anger about injustice into transformation. It believes in possibilities and claims a space to dream about these options. Hope is so much more connected to progress than cynicism; hope is about building worlds and tearing down outdated unjust models. And let me say one further thing, hope can be angry and impatient, but it will always cares more about justice than revenge, and that is something we need to defend right now.
Writing
I've been writing a lot, and before I add everything in here, have a look at my writing page.
Two things I really want to share with you are these two pieces:
On October 19, 2020 I had the pleasure to host a #MuseumHour on twitter around the topic of failure as a museum worker. Read in this post the many insightful replies and discussions around the topic.
There is another interview in the ongoing interview series "What does success look like?" where I ask art professionals about their personal definitions and learnings on all the shades between success and failure. This time I'm interviewing Esthir Lemi a composer and artist currently based in Athens, Greece. I've been working with her over the past months and I really appreciate her perspective in connecting more presumably abstract theories around musical composition with visual thinking. Her perspective in making music more accessible has changed a lot of my own understanding. At the end of summer we did an artist conversation about her practice, the non linearity of artistic work, being a women artist and so much more. The view from her summer house will make you smile.
Reading
I loved this intelligent stitching together of concepts of care, love and attention that writer Austin Kleon did in his post We love because we care
Curator and writer Yesomi Umolu shared “14 Points on the Limits of Knowledge and Care” on her Instagram account, sharing reflections around museums and collections.
What should a museum look like in 2020? By Kimberly Drew
As COVID Dampens Art-History Job Prospects, Yale University Decides Not to Accept New Graduate Students to the Department in 2021
VENICE BIENNALE AWARDS POSTHUMOUS GOLDEN LIONS TO CURATORS OKWUI ENWEZOR AND GERMANO CELANT
Reni Eddo-Lodge and Emma Watson to redraw London tube map with women's names
‘Museums must evolve or they will not exist’: Curator Adam Szymczyk Speaks Out on the Future of Museums, Colonialism and his documenta 14
Samaria Rice, Mother of Tamir Rice, Speaks Out About Art Depicting Her Son After Canceled Exhibition in Cleveland
What has been on your mind lately? Where do you find hope these days? Drop me a line by replying to this letter or get in touch directly via anabelroro@gmail.com. You can also find me on Twitter or Instagram.
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May you be able to find some softness in these tense times.
In solidarity,
Anabel