Disrupting the Map: Strategies for Funding Cultural Sovereignty in the Global South
David Mura
Moderator/Organizers: Clarissa Crawford, Ericka Jones-Craven, Jaime Sharp
Speakers: Ananya Chatterjea, Ashe Helm-Hernandez, Shey Rivera Rios, Joe Tolbert Jr.
From the U.S. South to Puerto Rico and across diaspora communities, artists are cultivating cultural power, resisting erasure, and building networks of solidarity in the face of state-sanctioned neglect, political repression and economic divestment. Yet traditional arts funding often fails to meet these artists where they are, or recognize the strategic brilliance of their resistance. This session will center artists and cultural organizers from the Global South who are creating sustaining movements at the intersection of arts, activism and community care.
We will explore how funders can shift from transactional to transformative relationships, resource cultural work as movement infrastructure; and strategically support coalitional-based initiatives across BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and immigrant communities. Participants will leave with concrete tools to apply place-based, justice-centered grantmaking practice.
Ericka Jones-Craven, organizer, and Clarissa Crawford, moderator, asked the audience: How do you define the Global South?
How are multiple Souths enmeshed/implicated in each other?
Ananya Chatterjea — Anaya Dance Theater
Ananya stated “I live and work in land of Ojibwe and Lakota communities, and I am the artistic director of the Ananya Dance Theater where black and brown woman create dance and practice at our Shawmgram (resistance) Center. I am from the Global South, Bengali, and I want us to move outside nation identity and more to language & culture. At ADT we work to create and establish relations multiple communities of color. The South is active in the work I do: disrupting the map, claiming cultural specificity, practicing activism for justice, thinking beyond colonial nation states, asking how we bring our desire for liberation closer to us.
Ashe Helm-Hernandez — Director for Philanthropic Organizing, Funders for LGBTQ Issues
Ashe Helm-Hernandez has lived in Atlanta and worked on organizing there, but Ashe now works in Louisville where there is more resistance to the work Ashe is doing. The Trans Future Funding Campaign, TFFC Steering Committee, raised 10 million dollars, and they try to make sure they know who they are working with in their grants. Part of this entails giving without saying it should be done in certain ways with certain outcomes; instead, let the people and organizations they give funds to determine what the people need.
Philanthropic Organizing distributes funds to many groups and serves as an intermediary for these organization in the south: Funds for Trans Generations, Out in the South, Campaign for Southern Equality, Queer Mobilization Fund, Third Wave Fund, Astraea, Transgender Strategy Center, and the Trans Justice Funding Project.
Power is in perception, so we need to change the perception. We need to be creative in strategy and create spaces for strategy making. Song Southerners on New Ground couldn’t get a meeting with a judge about helping people within the justice system and so they gave the judge a “ticket”; in other words, they created a visual metaphor/art piece for what they needed, and the judge quickly responded.
Some of the ideas Ashe mentioned: Bringing artists to literacy program, having people create puppets for guerilla theater, queer brown folk getting together for protection, creating billboards about protecting Trans youth. The South is a place where we are trying to disrupt the map and dealing with the fact that we are now deemed illegal.
From L to R: Clarissa Crawford, Ananya Chatterjea, and Ashe Helm-Hernandez
Shey Rivera Rios — Studio Loba
Shey Rivera Rios has don organizing in the arts in Puerto Rica and Rhode Island, and much of her work centers on the role of artists in affecting policy and building cultural infrastructures. She stressed the importance of the unseen in such work, creating and moving together with other people. The focus is not so much on the end goal, but how people are impacted in the practice, how they are empowered.
How do we protect what we build? Shey asked. How do we deal with the experience of migration and extraction? At this point, many of us are multi-geography humans and part of a diaspora or descended from those of a diaspora; we may live in the North, but fund our families back in the South, what it means to be a multi-place human. Clearly Trans and queer folk aren’t funded enough. Where are the queer and Trans figures in our history?
We need to create art and artistic practices which confront these issues and questions. In one project Shey and the participants took over the steps of an old community museum. In another, in Puerto Rico, artists created their own currency as a mark of independence and decorated with figures from Puerto Rican history. In Columbia, they worked with cultural elders and cultural practitioners who formed collaboratives, sharing photos of each other. In this way wisdom and history is passed down and the bonds between community members are strengthened, especially through the generations.
Joe Tolbert Jr. — The Waymakers Collective
Appalachia is often referred as forgotten South, said Joe Tolbert. The work of Waymakers involves re-narrativizing ourselves: Art and artists are crucial to that work, whether it’s working on Black Lives Matter in the mountains, organizing protests against the building of prisons, or supporting artists to tell their new story. The work is community controlled rather than ways land and labor were exploited and extracted. Ironically, often this is the wealth that created foundations.
Self-determination starts at individual and how to move up to the community. If we’re not prepared to govern and work together, we’re not going to be able to create the world we want. Cultural organizing is not just about art it’s about the process and the practices that undergird our culture. We want to work in solidarity with the organizations and artists, standing with and not over. Artists can use their imagination and innovating for problem solving and new visions. For example, in one of their projected, they funded undocumented artists who dreamed of a green book for undocumented queer and Trans immigrants.
Joe spoke eloquently and urgently of safety concerns for the queer and Trans communities. Joe defined safety as the right to create and organize and share resources without fear of harm or exposure. Joe talked about how in the past year they received fewer grant applications and when he talked to some of the organizations, one person told him that their organization is in a small Southern town, and if Waymakers did a big publicity push about what the organization was doing and its programming, they feared there would be backlash and attacks. So Waymakers simply listed the grant but without describing what work the organization was doing. This question about safety came up in other panels I attended.
How are you all balancing being seen and being protected? What would it take for funders to become co-works in that situation?
Shey talked about how she was going to do an exhibit at a university, but the university pulled out piece that she did criticizing the church, and so her gig was cancelled. But students and faculty and community protested, and from this, we understand that safety in part means you are not alone, you are part of a community. Our art practices can build these community connections, and these connections are a source of power and protection.
Colombia has the highest rate of oppression of artists. How do we protect artists and activists in other nations? An artist was kidnapped in Mexico, but she had contacts with Spanish diplomats and when she was kidnapped, they facilitated her release by threatening relations with Mexico.
“This case of enlisting the help of Spanish diplomates to protect an artist in Mexico illustrates an old principle of power—If you are in conflict with someone at your level of the organization or power, you need to cultivate allies who have greater power. Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power should be required reading for all those involved in the arts, grantsmakers, organizations, artists and members of the community. ”
Ananya – I wish that funders would do their homework and research. Artists are dealing with different kinds of oppression, in India, here. Don’t go with easy facile notions of difficulty; if we do justice work it’s a complex multilayered process so do the work of research if you’re a grantmaker.
Ashe – The One percent all know each other. Largest funder of LGBT funding is at World Economic Forum said we’re going to stop funding domestically. We need to push against set limits for funding, we need to fund new leaders.
When grantsmakers say we’re protecting our reserves, well, this is the time you need to deplete your reserves. There are powers who want to destroy/eliminate us. If you don’t use your funds now, there may not be a future for our communities. How do we navigate these emergencies and attacks so that folks are not just relying on one government or funding backing.
How can censorship be used to an advantage, especially in sensitive communities?
From L to R: Ericka Jones-Craven, Shey Rivera Rios, Ashe Helm-Hernandez, Ananya Chatterjea, Joe Tolbert Jr., Clarissa Crawford, Jaime Sharp
Censorship affirms truths that the system wants to keep hidden, get information about what system fears and how it is attacking back. Censorship can create energy to organize and empower the community. Speaking out against censorship encourages others and gives them courage. Fighting against censorship is fighting to change the narratives supporting the censorship, the narratives used as rationale for the censorship. We need to continue to tell the stories of how people have been silenced and erased; we need to support artists who remember the resistances.
Can you give an example of bias in funding that shapes decisions and a solution that can happen instantly?
What is legible to funders? That’s a bias we need to address. We need to fund experimentation, fund things that aren’t like the things your organization has funded, challenge yourselves to be open for experimentation and newness and funding forward. Work on having more dialogue with artists, organizations and communities instead of just producing one thing. Do more sight visits, talk to more people. Recognize social practice is now a practice of art. We need funding for infrastructure, such as covid tests for artists. We need to think of ethnicity not as an essentialist identity or something that is set but a process that is continually unfolding and changing.
