The SOA Cycle 1 Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Jan 1 2015

Location: 

New York, NY

"SOA Cycle, and what it later became, which is called the Democracy Cycle, is a group of seven large works that approach the question of democracy. What is democracy? How is it constructed? How is it implemented? Is it something that is to be thought of in relation to its political influence? Or is it something that plays out in terms of cultural and social, and even emotional terms, for instance?

The SOA Cycle manifested itself in many, many different works. So there is, for instance, a work that is called, Brief History of U.S. Interventions, which is a gigantic chalkboard work where I have listed interventions, beginning in 1801, throughout the world. People are offered chalk to intervene in the construction of that history or memory. It becomes a kind of democracy wall of sorts. There’s also a film, which is called Memory of a Protest, which documents one of the protests by the SOA Watch, which is the activist organization against the School of the Americas in Chile. I really like that film because it presents the anachronistic impulse of these activists that are still trying to redeem the memory and the role of the U.S. military in that region—for ideological purposes, but also because of their involvement in the disappearance of so many people, for instance, in the Chilean context. So there is this question of justice that is attached to wanting to close this institution."

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