When I took World Cultures in 10th Grade, my teacher, a steely yet lovable cynic who could provoke laughter and the fear of God in the span of a sentence, sagely told us, “the human race will not get along until aliens come to Earth.” Straightforward enough, I thought. People fought, I knew this. My parents watched the news with dinner.
When I graduated high school and left my town for New York City, I came to understand this concept so much more profoundly, more intimately. Tribe mentality was not an ill-advised trait reserved for other, weaker people. I had it too, I had just never been forced to confront it during my largely homogenous upbringing. I was horrified.
Higher thinking and reason do not differentiate humans from our colleagues in the animal kingdom. Spiders make and execute plans, too. It’s the culmination of our unique mental capacities into empathy that truly renders our species remarkable. From an evolutionary standpoint, extending this empathy to anyone beyond our immediate family doesn’t really make sense. That’s why heroic acts of kindness make headlines every day. While society has developed at an incredibly rapid rate, we are still stranded with our primitive minds. In today’s global society, facing never before seen quandaries, our only hope lies in banding together. Our only hope lies in combatting our base instincts.
The migrant crisis is but one manifestation of the fever-pitch our world is reaching, and how we as a society have not yet managed to evolve to the plane required to alleviate our struggles. Spanish street artist Jofre Oliveras offered his take on the realities of this crisis with his latest mural titled ‘Beholders’ completed for Nuart Festival 2019 in Stavanger, Norway. The large-scale masterpiece occupies one building’s entire facade, and makes a striking statement in a very simple way.
In an Instagram comment, Oliveras explained that ‘Beholders’ is “a timely look at the ongoing migrant crisis. On one side there is the passive position of the observer, on the other side there is the position of the artist. Both act as beholders of the critical situation. With sunken ships being paraded at Bienalles as art, this is a direct shot at both the art establishment and the media coverage of these tragic events.”
His contribution to the world-renowned festival was spurred by current events in Norway. He wrote, “Now we are one week before the elections of the new government in the city and we’re almost shocked by the recent post by Sylvi Listhaug a politician of Norway where was using an image with a similar rhetoric of the mural (the image is shown in the last picture of this post), but where people is claimed to refuse the immigrants. The text of the post say: Norway should not accept immigrants. Seems the best moment to talk about the migrant crisis and the position we are taking part.”
‘Beholders’ succinctly states, in Oliveras’s signature photorealistic style, that rather than actively helping these direly endangered individuals, many are just spectating, perhaps convinced that paying attention is enough. As we’ve seen in recent history, awareness does very little. If we, ourselves, were in this situation, we would throw everything we had into fixing it. The intervals between ourselves and those suffering leave us comfortable with inaction. For some, the cultural distance even inspires distaste for the suffering.
The manifesto on Oliveras’s website explains the central aims motivating his career. “We live in a divided world,” it reads, “formed by faced societies where people are in conflict with themselves. Our logical way of thinking causes us to understand the world as a confronted dichotomy. It can even prove difficult for us to understand reality if it weren’t for the relationship between opposites, but far from seeing that opposing elements share the same essence we stick with the idea of rivalry. For many years we’ve related to the world from a binary perspective: masculine and feminine, right and wrong, true and false… and it could be that this is an imposed logic, as all these concepts are social constructions that are different depending on the culture and the region.” With ‘Beholders’ he gains powerful ground in asserting the necessity of abandoning our engrained patterns of thinking.
His message fits the occasion perfectly. On their site, Nuart Fest explains their goal “to help us make sense of the world we currently live in and how we can better navigate it.” The site continues, “Through the creation of public artworks, both sanctioned and not so, Nuart aims to challenge existing narratives, generate new ideas, and push the boundaries of what constitutes public and private space. This year, we focus on the evocative intersection of memory and the city, and the role of art on the streets in unravelling and reworking not only the city’s collective memories, but also the cultures.”
What can the layperson do? I wonder this for myself all the time. When I return to that homogenous area where I was raised, I meet upstanding, moral people with misguided views stemming from very real principles. These are “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” folk, who don’t always believe in helping strangers, but would give a limb for someone they loved. I look like them, I sound like them, and that lack of cultural distance allows them to let me in, if only for a wink. On my last trip home, I met an older couple who spoke with me about gun violence, how they were allowed to shoot rifles for PhysEd and there were no problems in their day. I tell them I think about this deeper, about the culture we live in the hawks capitalism and its unnecessary products so hard that we don’t value ourselves as people, but as purchasing machines. That kind of infinite pissing contest with no true benefit drives a person insane. It’s alienating. Maybe we should re-consider those values and their roles instead. They both paused. I may never know if it took.
Anything is better than inaction. Talking about these problems, in art, in mural festivals, in coffeeshops, in cities and pastoral landscapes, is a start. Action should always be the immediate goal.
Jofre Oliveras: website | facebook | instagram
Nuart Festival: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
