Since April 2011,
Tania Bruguera has engaged with the life and activities of a flexible community space in Queens, New York—being concurrently the headquarters for Immigrant Movement International—reaching from there to various social organizations, legal services, politics, activist efforts, and artistic endeavors geared towards a reform on immigration. The condition of the immigrant is what connects experience and the status of millions of people across boundaries, nations, genders, languages, classes, races, and religions. Despite the potential of political power this reality encompasses on a planetary scale, the immigrant remains the embodiment of the oppressed, exploited, and marginalized. Immigrant Movement International centers on learning one’s own rights, but also the potentiality for global connection and exchange. The classes held for and with the community provide the opportunity to learn the various skills that might be required to enact such a potential change, including legal, social, economic, language, and other skills. In a manifesto-like announcement, Bruguera rearticulates her experiences into an open source of knowledge available to anyone, anywhere for unlimited use, both within the field of art and beyond, arguing for the notion of “useful art” that breaks up the boundaries that maintain the space of so-called contemporary art within a comfort zone all its own.
