Out There

This room houses a series of writings specifically investigating the possibilities of imagining fields other than Art, and beyond the Arts from where to engage creativity. One of the premises of this is that creativity is not the exclusive domain of Artists, but it is a force available to All. The other, is to look at the creative process as an energy that can move through the most mundane aspects of life. This section welcomes texts from thinkers from all backgrounds, form dance to theology, to name a few.

Writings: Who Cares? / No More Goals / Off I go. But Where?

Who Cares?

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful

Anukampa is a concept new to me, the same way art was until I was about 8 years old or so. This lack of familiarity did not prevent me from drawing while resting on my belly on the cold tiled floor on a Caribbean porch. It did not prevent me either from building puppets together with a plywood theater to invite neighbors to gather for an afternoon function. And there were times when both anukampa and art would mingle in my vicinity unknowingly. On Valentine’s Day, I would walk to the paper supply store to purchase red cardstock to trace and then cut out hearts out that I would give away.

The Buddhist term anukampa refers to care and points to the act of caring, which can involve physical or spiritual caregiving. In other words, it is the act of giving attention to oneself or to others. In my novice’s understanding this is an exercise in seeing and holding (without judging or grasping) that which is in front of me, but also that which can be far away into unquantifiable distances, or simply deep within. The subject receiving anukampa can be a living creature, or an inanimate thing–like my blue kitchen counter. This week, for example, I have been carefully tending to the faux granite surface in my kitchen that houses the sink, and where I also place the cutting board to chop vegetables, and where I have some of my meals in silence, while facing the wall connecting my neighbor’s home with mine.

The practice of being present with my counter entails wetting a fuzzy towel with warm water and wiping oily spots or gathering tiny bread crumbs. I similarly move the towel along the edge of the surface in question for the sake of caressing it until I see it shine. From time to time, I lift baskets filled with cosmic messes, including a set of new combs and expired prescriptions, and I lift the flowered-printed tray holding a bottle of cat laxative to go under it and clean the area thoroughly. But what does this have to do with art? I initially treaded into this field in search for meaning. Perhaps it was while looking for tools and a term to name my eccentricities. For similar reasons, I welcomed art as channel through which I could co-create community and be able to express care for strange ideas or ways of being. When I was 7, I could have used art and anukampa to explain myself when building small wreaths out of yellow and orange calendulas to travel to the municipal cemetery to place these offerings on the graves of those who did not have any candles, plastic flowers or photos on their tombs.

Art would arrive for me formally through my studies of theater at 8 or 9. Anukampa, although already in motion then, has only become fully understandable as I am entering elderhood, at which stage the meaning of art is starting to crumble like the specks on my counter. Meanwhile the performing of care is taking center stage in my life. Art for me has been replaced by creativity, whereas I now understand of myself as a creative funneling an energy that is available to everyone, not just artists. Gradually, I am finding less meaning in art, as it relates to the making of objects to trade in the market, and as it speaks of the persona that I am expected to assemble for the consumption of an industry that churns one person after the other, as it seeks to deliver shiny goods and sparkly excitements to a public 24/7.

The layers that held together the meaning of art for me–like an onion–have been disintegrating in my hands to expose its core; pure emptiness of the kind that opens up to All and nothing concomitantly. I now have my bare hands to care for and to care with. I can put them into motion in an ongoing, perhaps continuously unfolding performance that could expand the scope of my relationship with creativity into the unmeasurable; starting with an old kitchen counter in a late Victorian house in the Bronx.

Meaning is pointing into the meaningless. There are unwholesome relationships to release myself from while also caring for them; and the goals that I visualize like stepping stones that I can polish for the mere sake of watching them glow under the full moon. Nothing else. More appealing now are becoming the countless minute things and beings in all dimensions who can use my care and have not gotten it before because of distractions provoked by Instagram likes, and the grant-writing tasks that have syphoned years of life force from my body with the enticement of a little bit more recognition…a few more lines to add to my 20-page CV, which I would be selfish to print when actually wanting to care for the present and presence of trees and bees and rivers and rain and the future of all. In the next panel I am scheduled to participate, I will introduce myself as a student of caring and proceed to care for those in the room, one by one–myself included–, our loved ones at home or on the road, our departed ones, and why not our future selves too–without having to explain anything to anyone or necessarily having to lift a finger. I will aim to talk with empty hands and an aging heart moved by care.

No More Goals

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful

Imbued in my professional artistic training was the practice of setting goals. I would hone this as I also read the densest texts for my postmodern theory classes, and while developing new recipes for ceramic glazes to test. At the time, the late 1990s, working with clay was the domain of a subgroup of creatives that read Ceramics Monthly and Studio Potter and whose artwork inhabited a nebulous space between crafts and fine arts. And the skills to learn to project into the future, or to strategically discern on what specific stone to step on to reach the desired side of the river, was thought by my professors to profit both the ceramicist and the academic in me. One particular exercise for a seminar I took entailed writing how I saw myself three years from then, then five years, and finally ten. “I want to live off my artwork, I want a house in New York City, I want an exhibition at a major museum in Manhattan…” With the wants visually planted into the ether of capitalism, I forwent the essence of life, even when I wrote copious statements about how my praxis existed within the day-to-day. Years were measured in regard to projects, a term that I have come to distance myself from, perhaps more so for semantic reasons than for what it might mean: an enterprise connected to an aim. Nothing wrong with that. However, my interest is centered on the everyday as a door into creativity and yet, reducing life into a project is, in my opinion, a disservice to the mystery I seek to engage unencumbered.

With no clear understanding of the detour I was taking, one day like any other ordinary day, I pulled a hard plastic binder out of one of the filing cabinets in the room I call my archives. The scissors were in the desk salvaged from the corner of Banana Kelly Highschool in my neighborhood in the South Bronx. The job of cutting up unpassionately months of past writings and years penciled into a future was not at all difficult. I did put on the breaks when I came across my obituary, knowing that what I was doing represented a death of sorts: the end of goals. How was I to move from here and still make meaning out of my life? Afterall, I had been schooled to draw the road I intended to take, the salary that I imagined myself entitled to receive as payment for my thirty years in pursuit of higher education, from medical school to art school and, eventually, to seminary. Without stones to step on, or steps to climb on the ladder I was left with the freedom to jump into the river and befriend the muddy current, or to trust the branches of a tree going in all directions. Did this liberation from goals open up the possibility for autonomy?

With no goals in sight, I started to experiment with meaning as a compass for moving out into the world; and with the world itself as a collaborator. Purpose in this choreography, rather than being a synonym of goal, has become a motivator to remain attentive to caring for self and others in the web of life. One example of this has been my involvement with Bodies of Water: Fluid improvisations Along the Bronx River, a series of actions on the banks of the only fresh water entity in New York City of its kind, and where I have sought to co-generate social/movement-based responses with the ecology of the place and in relationship to other human-animal creatives. While there is a defined statement describing where we might go together, the emphasis in Bodies of Water: Fluid improvisations Along the Bronx River has been on mutual explorations and on learning in partnership with all beings. What would otherwise be goals are gestures that are invited to remain in constant motion, sustaining me (and I hope everyone involved) in the present, instead of forcefully pushing me/us to shape a future deprived of the now and its teachings. This has allowed for compassion to come forward during tender encounters, and for intention to rapidly shift course for the sake of everyone’s wellbeing. At this stage in life, the purpose that propels me is one that arises from interdependence and that is deeply rooted in dancing with All at the core of the moment. I become one with the wet Muskrat swimming under the Amtrack bridge over the Bronx River. This creature’s fleeting presence becomes purpose to me; everything there is to attend to. I give this graceful rodent my full devotion.

Off I go. But Where?

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful

Before the advent of cell phones, and even a while after it, I fully relied on people along the road to guide me through uncharted territory. I mean, this could pertain to locations like Zagreb in 2012, in the middle of the night, in the dark, where I had never been before and was looking for the host who I had yet to meet, and who had rented me a room in his apartment. I had no internet connection on my device, so talk about taking chances and trusting the universe. The same could apply to the Dominican city of Santo Domingo in the 1980s, where I arrived one late morning from my art school on the eastern section of the island without one single peso in my pocket. Procuring from a stranger the basic funds to pay for a ride home was an exercise stretching my limits on surrendering to the care of others and, at the same time, testing the autonomy with which I had initially embarked on this uncertain journey. But how can these two seemingly opposite ways of engaging life coexist in one single occasion like the one that I am illustrating in this last example, or in the first one?

Of all places, I live in a Euro-American dominant United States, a society/culture that, generally speaking, prides itself on self-reliance and in instilling independence in individuals starting at a tender age. This obviously collides with any expression of vulnerability, let alone soliciting passersby for help with a cab fare. And there can be a degree of isolation in autonomy that makes this a challenge for me to trade for the expansiveness that can reside in the fortuitous. Now, where is freedom in all of this and what is its connection to autonomy? After all, the United States is said to be the Land of the Free. A drink of carbonated water comes in handy here. It is good for settling my upset stomach, as well as for giving me the energy to untangle the mess in which I find myself at this moment, in this reflection. The image of freedom that comes to my mind is that of the “American” supermarket with its deceptive stock of possibilities orchestrated to please the wants of every single consumer. When I think of autonomy, if there is truly any in this context, I get a saccharine response. Almost all comes down to sugar.

Anything can be sprinkled with confectionery powder or decorated with sweet crystals and marketed–sold quickly before crypto currency tanks again one more time. This is how false decision-making, masked as autonomy, permeates most aspects of life. However, for me as a creative, the capacity to tread wisely through the unknown relies on collaborations and partnerships that honor a search for personal meaning, but that are also linked to the collective with the care that this calls for. I opt out of applying to a sizable art grant that will go to a single person. Why not distribute these resources equally among several creatives, I ask myself? Autonomy in me kicks in, and kicks me in the butt, urging me to focus my attention on what will bring me regeneration, restoration and happiness. I listen to it and dispose of the link to the life-consuming grant into my computer garbage bin. I exit the competition quadrangle to catch an inner glimpse of freedom… it feels rather good.

Where does the aqueous being in Fluid Improvisations: Bodies of Water Along the Bronx River end in the experience that I have been co-generating with a cohort of five other creatives? Is it on its banks delineated by cut stones? Is it at the edge of the greenway, or does the Bronx River non-visible presence somehow encompasses Westchester Avenue until it reaches the Bruckner Boulevard and meets the far reach of the industries that provide much needed jobs locally, yet still pollute Hunts Point? Does the River conclude where it is no longer wet and muddy or does it continue into me and into those I am collaborating with? This is the autonomy that I am interested in bringing into motion; the one that makes me confront my porosity. The one that gives me the strength to cross boundaries with respect. Not the one trying to bestow an artificially sweetened sense of freedom in me that sends me home with a plastic bag full of empty calorie items. The autonomy that I am slowly starting to embrace is one that does not thrive in seclusion, but that is actually activated and comes alive within the relational. Yes, at that very core where rough contours and sharp borders grate and grind stridently, seeking a way, although not necessarily with a destination in mind–in solitude, maybe, but certainly not alone. Autonomy might in fact be the meandering road into interdependence with all beings, with all I meet with and who meets me.