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A Bioregional Perspective: the place vocation


by Alejandro Meitín

Communities are identified with systems that are environmentally recognizable through a comprehensive totality definable as the place vocation. This integration of the place's symbolic role and the form built in the natural landscape has been represented by art in most cultures.

Advanced research on immunodeficiency recognizes that the human body is connected to the environment by means of a neurochemical communication network that determines our health and wellbeing to a great extent.

Thus, in order to be connected with the environment, it is not necessary to develop a sense of sentimentality or mysticism, not even a vital and intense sense of connection with nature. It is simply necessary to understand the place vocation and to "give advantage" to that feeling, recognizing that the environment -its cultural and natural manifestations- is only an extension of who we are.

Ala Plastica,
Ala Plastica, "Proyecto AA", 2000.
In contrast to this idea of natural understanding, an intervention in the environment is often conceived as an occupation based on the idea of transport corridors. In this way, zones are divided according to economic interests and the imagery is guided by commercial means of communication and financial institutions with only a few spaces of brilliant modernity. This can be defined as an ego-system, a system that generates social and environmental toxicity affecting life quality and health conditions seriously.

Unfortunately, what is not included in this matrix is the point of view of desirable social human relationships that links the economic and social system with the place vocation. To a great extent, the development of ego-systems occurs in societies due to the break of the flow of social doing -the ability to do things. When this social flow of doing fractures that power of doing turns into the opposite, the power-over who conceives but does not execute, while the others execute but do not conceive. Producers are alienated from their products and these products become exterior to them. The life the producer has put into the object confronts him as something hostile and alien. This condition of alienation between producers and products, can be compared to the design of cities, towns, regions or countries -defined as ego-systems- since their planning confronts men and the comprehension of the place vocation is limited to the acceptance of transformations, no matter how toxic and harmful they are. This derives into an individual, reified existence, which also becomes ill and fragmented.

What to do?

The challenge lies in how to articulate the force of engaged art practices in order to catalyze the regenerative possibilities of the community doing.

Two basic elements for the regeneration of an immune bioregional system are communication and the recovery of the social power of doing.

It is not just a change of scale or perspective; it is the possibility of developing another objectivity, another way of focusing ourselves in connection with "the Other" through the self-managed initiative of work.

In this way, the bioregional perspective of place vocation is strengthened for the purpose of integrating an emergent movement arising from a communal life experience in the form of an autonomous area in which the antipower of cultural and natural remnants grows and acquires corporeal existence in the co-operation, in the flow of life, in the consideration of a movement displayed as a social doing. The work installed through this doing emerges in the experience of collective life and creates the world.

Ala Plástica

ARTISTS AS AGENTS FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
Presented April 6, 2004 in Baltic, New Castle
Helix Arts

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