As we begin this decade, it is worth asking whether we continue to lightly label much of the work of active artists as “political art,” giving this name to certain productions that refuse easy aestheticism, visual gags, the purely decorative and retro fashions. Perhaps we are refusing to see the specific conditions and situations of the works that artists produce.
Lester Rodríguez’s OCUPACION project deals with issues that could be considered political, such as regional crises, emigration, democracy and democratization, power, the meaning and place of borders. 1 Perhaps without intending to, Rodríguez also highlights an almost imperceptible social symptomatology, the latent restlessness that continually combusts within us and that Zygmunt Bauman calls Liquid Fear, the fear of pollution, urban violence, ecological catastrophes, financial bankruptcy, state abandonment, old age without a pension, and “the easiest dangers to locate – the most malleable and tractable of the countless and indefinable dangers that this impenetrable world and its uncertain future hold for us.”
