The Lure of the Local

Most educated people say,”Where is it written? Our people say where is it lived?
Steve Gonzales

We are in the epoch of simultaneity; we are in an epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near and far, of the side by side, of the dispersed.
Michael Foucalt

How will we know it is us without our past.
John Steinbeck

Community is local life aware of itself
Wendell Berry

The White man’s words are no good. They don’t give pictures to your mind
Anonymous Apache

One could say that when an old man or women dies in the Hispanic world, a whole library dies with that person.
Carlos Fuentes

Lucy Lippard in her book The Lure of the Local goes on to say…

“Place is a locus of desire. Every time we enter a new place we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity which is what all “local places” exist of. By entering that hybrid, we change it; and in each situation we play a different roll. The lure of the local is a pull of a place that operates on each of us, exposing our politics and spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one anecdote to a prevailing alienation. The lure of the local is that undertone to modern life that connects it to the past we know so little and the future we are aimlessly concocting. Every place’s name is a story, out outcropping of the shared tales that form the bedrock of community. Untold land is unknown land. Indigenous names tend to locate resources for common good-pointing out a place where a healing herb grows or the water is bad-or to say what happened there. "

This is why local art’s ultimate power is the chronicalizing of time such that the communal construction of humans can manifest itself in a sense of sacred place or space. Artists must root themselves in a place and consider that the one place out of which all time and space reveal themselves. In this space we discover the sacredness of our human longings, our deepest desire for meaning and purpose. In this particular place our creativity and artistic expression become a reflection of the really real. Root your creativity in a people and place. Know the names of beauty's location.