The purpose of my intervention was simply to spark curiosity in the public and spread awareness about my cause, so that people can look into it further on their own. For my piece, I set up a poster and speaker in Central Park, and sat and stood dressed in my attire with a baby toy for onlookers. This is to represent all crimes against children and women and other injustices committed by LLDM, a group I excommunicated from. I realized that just my performance alone wouldn’t be enough necessarily for members of the general public to understand, so I also created a poster and flyers for this piece. My goal of spreading awareness was influenced by page 90 of our textbook, in which the principle titled “don’t preach, teach” is exemplified, “ This confusion was intentional. using parables like these, Jesus created an opening for his audience to make the message their own…[he] asked listeners to puzzle through their mysteries and meanings. One can imagine the scene following one of Jesus's impromptu teachings, people walking away, debating among themselves what exactly this wacky holy man meant.” Given the low context nature of my cause towards the general public, I wanted to create a scene that would cause people to be shocked, stare, and look up names and pictures from the flyers. I chose central park to try to spread awareness to where some of the most privileged of new yorkers can be found and try to spark the conversation amongst another group.
I took inspiration from multiple sources including our textbook, the videos from class, as well as my own personal knowledge of movements and fused them together to try and create a piece that can be both artistic and activist in performance. From page 109 in our textbook, I was specifically moved by the principle titled “make the invisible visible” by suggesting, “...by dramatizing those aspects of reality that are hard to see, or that we are reluctant to look at, we can make the invisible visible,” which is what I attempted to do here by creating an emphasis on people who are generally considered invisible such as women and children. I also took inspiration from performances done by Shaun Leonardo’s focusing on expression for latinos and generational trauma through his fashion and emotional releases amongst other performances which inspired me to incorporate what this means to me as someone coming from a similar background. From prior knowledge, I was also influenced by Red Rebel Brigade which fights against climate change with some similar expressive approaches in attire and femininity. I took some inspiration from guerrilla girls, whom we talked about in the beginning of the semester. I wanted to keep anonymity for my own safety but also for intrigue and to cause the onlookers to look up what certain things may mean. I also wanted to incorporate the use of graphics in this project and create a statement piece comparing the leader of LLDM, Nasson Joaquin Garcia, and his associate Alondra Ocampos to the famous case that has been in the news for several years now of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
The video, which was cut down to only around 3 minutes long, included the public performance in which there were many stares, gawks, some pictures taken. However, nobody felt comfortable enough to approach me during the almost 30 minute long performance in central park. My partner, who was behind the camera, was offering flyers out to people but no one had taken, which we chose to cut out because it was generally very awkward, so unfortunately, it was not really a success in central park as we kinda just were freezing outside for about an hour total as we set up, performed, and took down. Off camera and on our way back to Jersey, I was still in my attire and hadn’t brought a bag or anything to put the poster away so I was just holding it as we walked through West New York. Here we were approached by one woman who was aware of LLDM, but not the crimes associated with them and she was very shocked to say the least when she learned what happened, but overall supportive and curious to learn more it seemed. So, I would consider it a partial success, but the experiment overall gave me much more to consider when I try this again in the future.
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