Guide

Explicitly—or not—protocols determine most of what we think, say, and do. Transcending categories of “good manners,” they regulate how we relate to one another, to our cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. With advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, controversies surrounding data mining and privacy, the embrace of Indigenous land practices long shunned by extractive industries, demands to decolonize our institutions, and vast disparities in responses to Covid-19, protocols are emerging as essential tools of both oppression and empowerment: evidence of governmental, political, social, or corporate structures, they speak of power—and thus invite subversion, improvement, and action.

We are thrilled to welcome five extraordinary artists to the Vera List Center at The New School—Carolina Caycedo, Etcétera, Maria Hupfield, Adelita Husni Bey, and Rasheedah Phillips. For the next two years, under the heading of As for Protocols, we will together analyze protocols and explore their potential to shape community, facilitate equitable engagement, and imagine reconciliation. Once again, we will rely on the academic breadth and reach of this university to support their research and bring the projects to fruition, while ensuring that New School students both on campus and throughout the world benefit from the collective experience assembled here.

We love that protocols play on so many registers. They refer to documentation and minutes, signaling hybrid temporalities of simultaneous projection into past and future. The term “protocol” itself originates with the book, those opening pages left blank that set the tone of a tome before the book gets bound (prōtos ‘first’ and kolla ‘glue’). Protocols are never just metaphorical but exist in enacting themselves. With the engagement of our fellows, we will consider protocols as the foundations for the performance of living—and begin thinking and working toward new spaces of political empowerment. All over the world, people are marching in the streets, fighting systemic racism and demanding to be seen and heard. In these precarious times, we are grateful to be able to strengthen the fellowship initiative and expand it from two to five recipients.

We thank the artists for their trust and our collaborators for their partnership, especially the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University. The Vera List Center Fellowships 2020-2022 are made possible by significant support from the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, the Schaina and Josephina Lurje Memorial Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Kettering Fund, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, members of the Vera List Center Board, and other individuals. We gratefully acknowledge their support as well as the additional support provided by our academic home, The New School.

Carin Kuoni
Assistant Professor, Visual Studies
Senior Director/Chief Curator, Vera List Center for Art and Politics
The New School