Cristina Morales is a London-based Spanish-born cultural activist. Interested in deepening her knowledge of human beings she studied a BA in Socio-cultural Anthropology in the University of Barcelona where, along with other personal and social conditions and experiences, she developed her political consciousness. With a passion for art as our human expressive language by excellence and our best asset to question, imagine, create and inhabit meaning and other realities, she later specialised with a MA in Arts & Culture Production from the Open University of Catalonia becoming a socially engaged curator, writer and self-taught multidisciplinary artist linking art with politics. She works since then for freelance projects and public, private and nonprofit organisations using arts & culture as an agency tool to challenge society on identity, decolonialism and community development. Examples of such projects and organisations include HostelArt, Ribermusica and Interarts in Barcelona or Black Cultural Archives, Peckham Platform, Mahogany Carnival Arts and Haringey Arts in London to mention a few. In addition to being the founding curator of the first decolonial thinktank mapping Cultural Activism worldwide Counterspace, and the founding artist of the Situationist brand of political designs and scenes Totem Taboo, she also writes on decolonialism and counternarratives, Social Practice and human development through art, and African and African diaspora arts & culture, for national, international and specialised critical media such as El Mundo; Wiriko; and Radio Africa.
THE COMMON THREAD
Art as counterspace
©The Common Thread by Darius Devas
Cristina Morales
Tribune
I sometimes get observations about the eclecticism of my endeavours. I am always surprised since the questioning couldn’t fall further away from them.
From the moment you choose to study human beings you are obliged to study their culture. And from the moment you study culture you are obliged to study its art. Culture is nothing but the way human beings express, in collective ever-threading motion, their identity. Art is the way that culture expresses itself, in search of meaning. Art is then the liminal space, the vessel for meaning searching, questioning and creation. The space where dysfunctional meanings come to die and alternative meanings are born. The space where through subjectivity, which is already a personal and social experience, we reach the social body of culture to deliver a message and unapologetically create a new ephemeral, temporal or ever-lasting, sovereign legacy. In this conversation, whether this message conveys freedom ahead of what feels the most imperative political and existential urgency or not, it always conveys a liberating meaning as a universal life purpose, for any human being. True art is a society’s meaning factory, wherever you go. The science of freedom according to Joseph Beuys. And true artists are their agents, embodying the most transcendental space of being alive. Anybody can relate to it because whether you have allowed yourself to define yourself as an artist or not, we all are, or should be, crafting our existence towards meaning. Likewise, the specificities of every society’s identity and language are, in collective ever-threading motion, quilting the patchwork of a diverse cultural heritage with the same universal goal, which is the misunderstood beauty of difference, apart from the natural overwhelming beauty of specificity itself.
When the common thread is clear, it doesn’t matter what you do around it. Especially when the path is already not fitting contemporary values in a capitalist society. You are then obliged to do it all. Whether you write about it, curate about it, visually or performatively craft about it, film about it, or teach about it, you have got to do what you can from your own level of oppression — by any means possible — to deliver the same message, towards the same purpose. Just as art does, to unapologetically create a new ephemeral, temporal or ever-lasting, sovereign legacy. You can’t even see differences between different artistic languages since beyond the specific beauty of every form, we can’t but fall in love with what is a meaningful conversation. An artist, as a life-lover, is just an amazed lover of every life manifestation, who becomes a fighter to preserve it in the face of those who are determined to oppress and exterminate it. But regardless of the context, and gifted with life’s resilience, we are here. We have always been and we will always be. Not worried about notoriety, but believing in the power of transcendence. Because we have felt the one of the famous and anonymous heroes who have raised our souls, intertwined with our personal essences and stories. We know it is the driving force. The fuel. The harder the story, the more powerful. We know it is humanity’s conducting wire. And that we can’t live otherwise.
Anything else around art, as a meaning generator and materialiser, whether we are talking about beings or their crafts, is a form of coloniality.
Bibliography
1. Camus, Albert. Create Dangerously. Penguin Books, 2018.
3. Jordan, John. ‘Barricading the Ice Sheets.’ Oliver Ressler, Vimeo, 10 March 2020, URL.
4. Roesch, Ulrich. We are the Revolution! Rudolf Steiner, Joseph Beuys and the Threefold Social Impulse. Temple Lodge, 2013.
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