Presentation
May 27, 2014
Presenter 1: ..Excited to hear more about this fascinating work. Umm, that you’ve just been
looking, listening to, and looking at.
Presenter 2: I would now like to invite, eh, Yasser Musa to give his paper, and then we will
have Bruce and open panel for this section.
YM: Good morning!
Audience: Good morning!
YM: I’d like to begin with an act of performance, and before I commit to that act, I would like to,
preface it, and give it a context for it.
In the early nineteen nineties, I went to the university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, LSU. I sat in
an art history class, and I went to the library after that class to look up, an artist I had never
heard about. His name was Picasso. But it seemed that the people in the room had heard so
much about him. So I figured, this must be an important man.
Audience: (laughs)
YM: I am from Belize, Belize City...
Audience: Ahhh!
YM: ..and I came in here, yesterday. Spent nine hours on the bus.
Audience: (laughs)
YM: But I feel, I feel, extraordinarily... energized, by this fifteen minutes I’ve been given.
Audience: (laughs)
Presenter: I apologize.
YM: It’s ok.
Audience: (laughs)
YM: (laughs) But I can still know, feel that moment twenty plus years ago when I went to that
library, and I went to the shelf looking for the book about Picasso and took off the shelf a
massive book. I remember it clearly. It had a kind of cheesecloth cover and it had his gestural
signature blazed across it in black.
And the first thought that came to me then, and the thought that I have now: ‘is why... do people
spend so much time, putting things in books?’
Audience: (laughs)
YM: And so, I’ve spent the last twenty years, and with apologies to my electronic friend Luis; I,
he’s not here. He and I went through an email conversation about what I must, about to speak
today, and I wrote it down. And I printed it, but I don’t think I should read it, ‘cause that will
sound boring. But that’s on record and we will publish it on some website. Sometime in the
future I guess, but if that’s not, anyways, that’s not, the, an issue.
But, the central idea that I got from his, eh.. emailing was, mixing and combining or the
question of it. Are we mixing or are we combining or both?
And obviously I, ... could not possibly give you an answer in such, … twelve and a half minutes
that I have left. But…
Presenter: Thirteen
Audience: (laughs)
YM: Thank you! But…
I can tell you that since that moment with that book. I have spent the past twenty plus years in a
serious engagement. A serious intention... to figure out how I can work, in my society.
A society Belize, that the United Nations, in two thousand twelve, described at the third most
violent place on the planet Earth.
Audience: Oh! It’s..
YM: I know you don’t believe me because you’ve read all the brochures, that says its a jewel.
Audience: (laughs)
YM: And you, have seen... all the imagery that has been reconstructed about how we, who we
are, and how, what we should be about. And so..Th… I can’t believe I took so long to preface,
my act of performance.
Audience: (laughs)
YM: But I hold here, this is not a cocaine brick.
Audience: (laughs)
YM: This is a book called landings, and I will open it slowly, ‘cause this is why I spent nine
hours.
Audience: (laughs)
Brand new!
Wooo- hoo!
Woooo!
YM: Hmm!
It says on the cover, Landings, new art plus ideas from the Caribbean and Central America.
Two thousand to two thousand ten.
And what this book represents... is a kind of… coming together for the first time...of artists and
writers and thinkers without, the obligation, without the frustration, without the kissing of ass of
any government of any… ah, institution, of any museum, of any... thing, that calls themselves,
ah, what we call in this book the mafia, of art.
Audience: (laughs)
YM: And we took our responsibility serious, from nineteen ninety two, the five hundredth
anniversary of the, ah whatever, the crash...
Audience: (chuckles)
YM: ...and, we said, that we have to get this thing done, on our terms. And so, you can look it
up. I am sure that you can buy one of these online. And I encourage you to do so. This is not a
marketing exercise but, four hundred and sixty four pages, of the thoughts, of the ideas, of the
feelings, of the expression of young artists from the Caribbean and Central America. Let’s not
forget that!
What we call the hurricane zone, and why, my paper, was supposed to be called today I Wake
Up in the Yucatan. I tell my students in Belize, because I introduced, I am part of a team that
introduced for the first time, after a forty year negotiation with the Catholic Church, the teaching
of African and Maya history in our curriculum.
This is big, news. This is art news.
You might ask, well how the hell can that be art. The work of artists is not, to make art. That is
just the product. The work of artists, to me, is the engagement, is the process, of trying to
undermine systems that have gotten us to the point of becoming the third most violent place on
Earth.
So this image, while it doesn’t look violent, is a brick. It looks like I’m into bricks. Of ice, it’s a
project I did, called the Ice Project. And I took it, this block of ice, I properly put it in a, a
sarcophagus of a cloth. Like the shroud of Turin, I guess. And I put it in an icebox and I went to
the Barrier Reef. This is the famous Barrier Reef, you see of Belize in the brochures. And I set
it there, and just yesterday, my good friend Joan Duran reminded me of how it looks so much
like a Stella.
But it, the metaphor, I, it’s a new, I reinvented what this thing means. I used to say something
until yesterday. I’m saying a new thing now. This thing now means, it is a, actually, this ice will
just melt away. Nothing! Into a kind of nothingness.
YM: (to presenter) How do I move now?
Presenter: Up.
YM: (to presenter) Oh, sorry.
But the reason, I’m in, so fascinated with these books…
(to presenter) how much time I have left?
Presenter: You have about si, four minutes.
YM: Wow! Alright! Let’s go! This book didn’t just happen like a genie out of a bottle. It took from
the red to the orange. Landings. I will end my, eh, conversation on this concept of Landings.
We, provoked… a push called Landings. The name of all these, ah, books, from the red to the
orange, and each book represents the red one. It’s the first Landings! Two thousand four in
Conkal, which is right north, a small town north of this, ah, city. Conkal, Mexico. Ah, and we
exhibited our work in a former Franciscan, eh, monastery. And then, we went on... and
exhibited in other places, including, eh, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic, and Havana,
and Washington and Taipei. Yes, Taipei. That sounds frightening, but it is. And we ended up
with the orange in Belize City, with a forum, not as big as this, but with all the seventy plus team
members that we corralled, that we encouraged and harnessed over the six, seven year time
span, and we invited them to Belize City, to the Image Factory, an art foundation that I’ve been
working, ah, managing for the past twenty years.
We had a summit of all summits, I thought. It’s, we recorded it, and I still have all the recordings,
thirteen hours, so the nine that I spent getting here is nothing.
Thirteen hours of talking, I’ve not reviewed it, but that could be put in a, well, who..., who the hell
would want to, eh.., listen to that. I’m thinking right now.
But the point is, that, unless we take matters into our own hands, and when we mix.. our work,
we can not be brutally honest, unless we confront the history, ah.. of our environment, and that’s
why I said ‘I.. I wake up in the Yucatan’ because although we are now bordered as a country
called Belize, essentially, we are all connected in this Hurricane Zone. And the hurricane does
not refer only to the climatological hurricane, but to the man-made hurricane that has, not, not
has, that continues to hit us. Yes it comes as an eye, electronically, through the media, calm
and beautiful, just look at, eh, Christine Ma.. Malvo and Christinane Amanpour. They are
beautiful people. From CNN and Aljazeera. But they’re, they really are, the storm is hitting us.
And so, artists. This is how I’ll end.
(to the presenter) I have a minute?
Presenter: Yes
YM: Artists, and thinkers, and writers, and poets have a responsibility for social engagement.
Because it, not. It is not, a luxury to be an artist, it is a responsibility that you have to your
society.
Thank you!
Audience: (applause)
YM: thanks!
Presenter: I thank you very much for your, ah, presentation. It was so fascinating. It allowed us
to see artists performance, artist activism, artist collective independent action, and artist
hurricane. And of course Bruce Paddington is our next presenter, and whose last film is about
the kinds of ways that art can in fact investigate ideas and revolutions. I would like to invite
Bruce to give his presentation.
BP: Ummm. I don’t know. Ye. It’s very difficult to come after that very… um, engaging eh,
presentation by Yasser. And also, I’m very privileged to be on this panel with Leslie, and looking
forward to seeing the documentary. And Edward’s art is phenomenal, fantastic, and I don’t know
how we don’t know more about you in the Caribbean. That’s one of the sad things about the
Caribbean. We don’t need...