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The School of Panamerican Unrest
A project by Pablo Helguera

The School of Panamerican Unrest is an artistic project that seeks to generate connections between the different regions of the Americas through discussions, short-term and long-term collaborations between organizations and individuals. Its main component will be a nomadic forum or think-tank that will cross the hemisphere by land, from Anchorage, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego. This hybrid project will include a collapsible and movable architectural structure in the form of a schoolhouse, as well as a video and book collection component inside a van with which the journey will be made. The project seeks to involve a wide range of publics and engage them at different levels in a dialogue about alternative ways to understand the history, ideology, and lines of thought that have significantly impacted in the political, social and cultural events in the Americas.

The actual journey will be initiated at the end of May 2006 and will conclude toward September of the same year. The virtual forum and preliminary dialogue will initiate in early 2006 in this webpage, with the objective of starting to generate ideas, interest, and support in the different areas to which the project will travel. During the trip, a blog will provide an update of the journey’s experiences. After the journey, a documentary project will be initated, taking the likely form of a video documentary, an exhibition, and a publication.

Initiated by Mexican artist Pablo Helguera, the School of Panamerican Unrest responds to the need to support inter-regional communication amongst English, Spanish and Portuguese speaking America, as well as its other communities in the Caribbean and elsewhere, making connections outside its regular commercial and economic links. In contrast to Europe, which over the years has been orchestrating its cultural integration through an open flux of dialogue, many Latin American countries still have a limited cultural exchange amongst one another, and often limited to the connections offered by the hegemonic points such as New York, Miami, or even Madrid. Many years after the initial impulses by various Latin American intellectuals such as José Vasconcelos, Simón Bolívar, José Martí, who once envisioned a unified cultural region in the Americas, this poject seeks to revisit and evaluate the meaning of those ideas during the time of the Internet and post-globalization.

In the debates, programs and roundtable discussions, the project will seek to articulate and debate issues that pertain to local concerns around culture and society. We will also seek to discuss ways through which artistic practice in the Americas can acquire an influential role in public life, political, cultural and social discourse, enriching the perspective communities in a productive and propositive manner.

As an artistic project, the SPU seeks to innovate by combining performative and educational strategies, creating new forms of presentation and debate about political and historical subjects and creating a discussion infrastructure that will break with the usual academic formats, and the predictable means of communication and debate that are normally used in the art world.

The SPU currently has nearly 30 participating organizations throughout the Americas. Nevertheless, we are still in search of curators, critics, artists and/or cultural activists thoroughout the continent who may be interested in participating at the level of members of this project’s network.

Artists, writers, political activists, sociologists, economists and educators are being invited in this nomadic think tank. At each location we shall present at least one panel discussion, all of which will be pre-planned amongst international and local participants.

The project is inspired in the travel itineraries of those who once crossed the continent, randing from missionaries, explorers, scientists, revolutionaries, intellectuals, writers, and others. In the utopian spirit of those who once conceived the Americas as a unified entity, the SPU will cross the continent literalizing the very idea of Panamericanism.

Once the journey is completed, the documentation of it will be brought together in the form of a publication, a documentary and a traveling exhibition.

The School of Panamerican Unrest is a project supported by the Creative Capital Foundation in New York.

© Pablo Helguera, November 2005

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