Deb Mexicotte, managing director of the interdisciplinary initiative Arts Engine and principal investigator for one of nine Arts Initiative Pilot Projects joined Michigan Minds to discuss her project, Photocracy: Defining Democracy Through Stories and Art.
“You may remember that in the early part of 2020 and even previously, there was a lot of social unrest going on throughout the country and there were a lot of questions about where we were heading as a democracy, how our leadership was responding to the needs of their communities and arts engine, being an interdisciplinary initiative is always looking for ways to leverage the arts engine technology in new ways to bring new insights, new understanding, new expression, and new knowledge to the kinds of things,” she says.
“Early in 2020, we were thinking about what can we do? That might be a demonstration of how democracy and its many facets actually affect our students or affect our faculty.”
She provides further insight into the beginning stages of the project, the crowd-sourcing conducted to understand U-M community members’ feelings on how democracy affects them and what democracy makes them think of. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way Arts Engine continued with its project.
“We were also playing with how to remain engaged, how to actually activate our community when we were in lockdown. We were just trying to figure out how to continue the educational mission, and our social missions. We asked for submissions and we got a few, but it certainly wasn’t at the level that we were hoping,” said Mexicotte. “But those submissions were then thought to be used instead of just as standalone’s, as something that would then springboard to a couple of artist commissions. And that’s where we pivoted. We solicited artist-commissioned works from a graduate student and a faculty member at the university.”
Mexicotte also mentions the benefits of the Arts Initiative Pilot Project grant and the Democracy and Debate-themed semester grant, which allowed her team to commission these works. She dives deep into one specific commissioned work by Amy Chavasse, Arthur F Thurnau Professor and Professor of dance, and Charli Brissey, assistant professor of dance, the Paradox of Democracy, Faultlines and False Algorithms of Consent and Dissent, and its incorporation of voices and experiences of American democracy in an online platform and its inter
“It actually asks the visitor to think about the platforms on to think about the land that they’re are, to think about the various pieces they stand on, including that idea of democracy as a foundational standing place. They want you to interact with it in a very sort of deliberate, non-linear way that you pass through a series of reflective pages or reflective interactions where they’re asked to take notes, where you cannot proceed if you don’t answer certain questions, where you’re given a series of randomly generated ideas and concepts to react to as one reacts to poetry or one reacts to discordant thought,” she says.
While Mexicotte shared how the project transformed from its original idea to its achieved state, she also notes how the project is relevant now due to the upcoming midterm elections of 2022.
“I think it still requires us to think about re-engagement, rethinking, reexamining the things that we knew to be true, pre-pandemic or pre-2020, and then realize that our new normal should incorporate those things that we miss that we think are important, that we want to maintain as far as our democracy, but that there have to be new ways to engage,” Mexicotte says. “ We are not the same people that we were two and three years ago, but we can be better people in that difference. If we reengage, reassess and reconnect.”
