Manifesto! ARTinACTION! On The Front-Lines Since JULY 2006
"What was here is inseperable from what is here." - Lucy Lippard AORTA Projects (formerly ARTinACTION) is a grass-roots, on-going, public art project. Believing the creative process to be a powerful tool for affecting social change and healing from trauma, the core mission of AORTA Projects is to participate in the physical and spiritual re/animation of post-disaster landscapes, beginning with our hometown New Orleans. Through this work, the artist's role in a very challenging modern world expands and crisis becomes an opportunity for positive growth.
We recognize that man-made and/or natural disasters are devastating historical events that can be transmutated into powerful medicine only by maintaining a dignified honesty about their continued impact. By galvanizing a wide variety of contemporary artists to create site-specific art only in areas struggling to recover from trauma, working only with permission from with land owners and neighbors, AORTA Projects supports efforts toward renewal and participates in the dialog concerning the conceptual and social potential of contemporary art. This is "free art", ephemeral, offered as a temporary gesture in the liminal space created by crisis; in this way we actively participate in the re/definition of our evolving world.
Governed by the AORTA Projects requirement that participating artists intimately connect with the people of post-disaster landscapes, we assert that personal experience of a site must inform work that attempts to function as site-specific. What we mean is that by adhering to the parameters of ARTinACTION's manifesto, the artist is not doing favors for the people or the land - it is always and only the other way around. The art object and specific goals of "finality" take a backseat to the fluid experience of intimate connection.
Furthermore, we suggest that by cultivating process-based methodologies we maintain creative cultural traditions that define New Orleans and that persevere as a message of hope for people who find themselves embroiled in current and/or future disasters. Ultimately AORTA Projects can function as a model of one way that artists can respond to the long-term challenges of future catastrophic events. AORTA Projects' sincere intention is to motivate empowered regeneration and set in motion an inspired process that can perform itself under multiple guises for many years to come.
Artists interested in participating in AORTA Projects are invited to contact us at the email below for further information. Please feel free to write us with project and/or site suggestions, feedback, etcetera. If you are interested in sponsoring an AORTA Projects installation we would love to hear from you.
AORTA Projects Tours are available - please contact us at the email below for availability.
Contact: Elizabeth Underwood, Director aortaprojects@gmail.com
This project is supported in part by the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Neither AORTA Projects nor their financial and/or site sponsors are responsible for any damage to art works or any damage to persons or property that may occur while installing, volunteering, or visiting AORTA Projects sites.
COMING SOON
ON-GOING INSTALLATIONS: Jennifer Odem "Blue Fence" (Upper 9th Ward), Jonathan Traviesa "Native & Contemporary" (St. Bernard Parish)
FUTURE INSTALLATIONS: Homemade Parachutes, Susan Neely, Nick Stillman, Minka Stoyanova, X Collective and more.
PAST INSTALLATIONS: Jessica Bizer, Stephen Collier, Beth Dary, Maxime Demetrio, Sean Derry, Courtney Egan, Generic Art Solutions, Butch Merigoni, The Neighborhood Project, Terrence Sanders, Secret Gardeners, Christy Speakman, [ ] Projects, and others.
