Leer esta historia en español.
The work of shifting power is fundamentally the work of changing our gaze. People act on how they see, and to change how we see, is to radically change how we act. By not exploring other forms of expressing, looking and creating, we’re limiting ourselves.
The development space is fixated on the written word. We are inundated by a constant flow of reports, research papers, figures, strategic frameworks: ‘the literature’. Behind every new buzzword and piece of jargon is a faith that to change words is to change the world.
Yet we keep coming back to the same sobering realization: concepts are not enough. Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely need to re-word a lot, challenge outlived vocabulary, and support the journey of reclaiming representation. But the enormous challenge of shifting stuffy power dynamics and dominant narratives asks us to go beyond changing how we talk, to changing how we see the world and how we act.
“In the midst of such uncertainty and overlapping crises, we need artists like never before to help us reflect, creatively reimagine and bring to life a vision for radically better futures.”
During these two years of the Power Shifts project, the urgency of rethinking how we communicate has come up many many times. I have been frustrated by development communications that only speak in one way, to one particular audience and in one language (you can guess which one). There’s been clear ruptures with this narrow approach coming from young organizations and movement spaces, but the more old school organizations are struggling to keep up. Committing to ‘decolonizing’ our ideas begins with making knowledge accessible, plural, collaborative. It means constantly opening up to diverse formats as well.
So, here’s a question I’ve returned to: how can we de-center textual knowledge to help us deeply listen to, and communicate, stories of change, structural injustice, and transformative practice?
I don’t have precise answers, but I wanted to approach this challenge from a place of play and creative collaboration. In particular, I wanted to reach out to visual artists to find new ways of building bridges across formats. In the midst of such uncertainty and overlapping crises, we need artists like never before to help us reflect, creatively reimagine, and bring to life a vision for radically better futures.
The result of this collaboration is our very own Virtual Gallery for Shifting Power, an initiative with two artists that aimed to capture the lessons and teachings cultivated over the two years of the Power Shifts project.
For this first exhibit, called “‘Development’: a visual story of shifting power”, I collaborated with Colombian collage artist Hansel Obando. Together, we wanted to tell the story of ‘development’, from its origin to its current challenge, from its contradictions to its possible horizons. Our guiding principles were the twin notions of decolonization and intersectionality: moving away from the unequal power structures that reinforce legacies of colonialism, and advancing explicitly anti-racist and feminist agendas.
Following these principles, through our collaboration we challenged each other to leave behind tired language and imagery. Collage, the medium that Hansel works with, can be seen as a metaphor for the practice of re-making and re-assembling our world. It allows us to clearly grasp what stories are – assemblages of fragments – and what storytelling is: a work of careful piecing together.
We invite you to take a look at the visual story below. It’s a small step, but hopefully it can inspire more bridge-building and critical thinking. These images are published under a Creative Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. So please go ahead and download, print and share them everywhere! Show them to your colleagues, plan a session to go through them together as a way to structure a conversation about ‘shifting power’, or dig deeper into a selection of images. (Just remember to please credit/tag Hansel Obando and María Faciolince when using them.)
Illustrations: Hansel Obando
Curation/writing: María Faciolince
What beautiful and inspiring work – images and words – by Hansel Obando. I am sure they will be shared widely. Thank you, Maria, for bringing them to us.
Grateful for your work too, Karen. Thanks for resonating and sharing!
Amazing. Every image, every word. Thank you for this important work, may it inspire many!
Hi Barbara, thank you for resonating and for sharing! Really appreciate the support. I hope more of this (and many more different things as well) can continue happening.
Wonderfully inspiring collection of powerful words and images to describe our sector history with hope and honesty – thank you
Hi Penny, thank you for resonating. I’m glad it is a valuable resource for you!
Tons of jargon, super hard to understand surrounded by some beautiful imagery. If this is an attempt to rethink how to communicate…. please, think again.
Hi Silva, as laid out in the blog this resource is one step towards a different direction – not an end point (which doesn’t exist either). It is aimed at a sector that still rarely listens to – or pays attention to – what it cannot understand. So much creative, silo-smashing work is happening but stays in the margins, or is de-valued as decorative “nice imagery” as opposed to powerful narrative tools. So if you’re working on radically different ways of communicating led by similar principles, please do share so we can all learn along. It’d be nice to have a collaborative disposition in this journey. I’m especially interested in how we can shift processes and formats in program evaluation. Thank you!
I understand the efforts. But, really, words like “paradigm, emergence, non linearity…” and the whole super conceptual writing are not helping at all. I wish that development at some point detox from the use of too many hollow words. Words we believe we understand. But then, so what? There are tons of attempts at using visual, drawing, cartooning. And also in the voices of people, rather than in jargon. The issue is that if the starting point is to convey abstract messages, they will always remain hollow, even if you put some nice color on them. Could the people represented in these collages understand what is written? If not, who are we drawing with and for?
It is exactly the clear, precise and beautiful and jargon used here, that the powerful message communicated through this series reaches ALL audiences. Aesthetics and academia, clear purpose and commitment are brilliantly brought together through this work.
Congratulations Maria!!
This is the type of (collaborative) communication we were lacking.
Disappointing that efforts aimed at improving communications and making them more diverse and inclusive have resulted in outputs that are inaccessible to many. It’s 2021, surely adding alt-text and image descriptions for the visually-impaired should be the default, especially when the handwritten style of the text will mean that even some people who don’t typically rely on screenreaders will struggle to read some of the text. That also includes those whose first language isn’t English: I get that all the spelling mistakes have been left in to make it seem authentically ‘messy’ and grassroots, but I’m not sure how much it helps people who aren’t fluent.
In fact, as it stands, I see these images only appealing to those working in INGOs in the Anglophone ‘global north’ who want something unchallenging to share on social media, since without the contextual background the first image or two seem likely to merely alienate those working in non-Anglophone CSO/CBOs who have learned the word ‘development’ to describe what they’re doing and are now being bluntly told it means something else.
Hi Dan B,
I welcome your first point on mages being inaccessible to people with visual impairment – the images have alt text of the quotes. I do take issue with your other points, however, so I have taken the time to reply with some thought.
This visual story was actually written in Spanish (our mother tongue), responding to demands from networks inside and outside of this sector to help shape the language. Creating these images across different languages, without external editors etc, means we didn’t spot those sparse spelling mistakes. For us, English isn’t our first language either. I’m confused why you think this was an attempt to perform ‘grassroots messiness’ when they were spelling errors, which are being corrected/updated as we speak. The original Spanish version comes out tomorrow.
As for your final point, I’m also puzzled: who taught ‘people working in non-Anglophone CSOs’ that they are ‘doing development’ in the first place? Is your assessment of the piece that we’re telling people what development is/isn’t? The whole point here (which is mentioned many times) is that there are indeed plural ways of ‘developing’ – steering away from what was taught and imposed on many of us as a linear trajectory towards progress. What your comment assumes is a monolith of development workers in non-Anglophone countries that have passively absorbed what was imported. Development does mean something else to a lot of people – there have always been other ways of seeing, doing, and thriving in well-being. Perhaps it’s time to realize this.
This is one tool, one step, towards strengthening this plurality – not a seminal piece for Development Studies (as stated in the blog). And just as a final reminder: these images follow 2 years of work on elevating critical voices and non aid-led stories of change through the Power Shifts project. These were the main points taken by an array of voices, social change ‘actors’ and ‘experts’. We’re not striving for perfection here, but I do hope we can all listen better.
The irony of us talking about decolonising thought and practice whilst spelling mistakes are assumed to be ‘messy’ and ‘grassroots’ rather than simple error.
I mean … you can only laugh.
These are such beautiful images with critical messages about our sector – I am blown away by your illustrations and articulation! Thank you Hansel and Maria.
Thank you so much Mayumi for wanting to listen, see and act differently. Glad it’s of use!
This is truly one of the most beautiful and inspiring outpouring that I have seen in a while. Thank you, Hansel Obando and María Faciolince for sharing your brilliance with us. Are these images compiled into one PDF or something of the like? Selfishly, I would like to be able to have all of these images in one place to be able to revert back to them again and again. They are so grounding, so thanks again.
Wow! How do we get this out to more people?
Thank you for these beautiful words and images! Already thinking with our team how to use these as tools for reflection and action.
Fascinating as the art work may be, the premise of this exercise: “The work of shifting power is fundamentally the work of changing our gaze” is seriously untrue. Power structures are not the product of perceptions; they are a matter of material relations among people. Why is this reversion to philosophical idealism so fashionable?
Curious to see how you see the reversion to the philosophical idealism in the piece given that the visual story consistently talks about material relations and changes (ie. ‘Powershifts are inconceivable without a redistribution of resources’), and highlights the concrete impacts that outdated ideas in development have had on communities around the world. It’s not a simplistic either/or as your comment suggests – inequalities in material relations between people arise in part because of ideas, mentalities and ideologies. The development sector is overdue an internal questioning – that’s not a fancy philosophical exericse, but a necessary material shift.
Brilliant
I question the premise, nothing else. The premise says power shifts are *fundamentally* about changing the “gaze” — which in the post-everything jargon means perception/discourse. It doesn’t say “in part”. That is as close as a definition of the idealist view of the world as it is possible to get. Hegel in modern garb (by way of postmodernism).
Think that confining it to simple ‘perception/discourse’ is reductive, and also misrepresents much of the research and theory around gazes in development – which very explicitly deal with the material impacts of ideologies and colonial legacies in the development space. Take Robtel Neajai Pailey’s article in ‘Development & Change’ on the ‘white gaze of development’: ‘In this article, I have illustrated how development is about negotiating poverty and power, and how this feat is not confined to the so-called globalSouth. Whether we work as scholars, policy makers or practitioners, ourexperiences of and encounters with development are inevitably fashionedby race. If we say we are committed to ‘opening up development’, we must acknowledge race as foundational to this field. Until we can come up with a new lexicon that recognizes the dignity and humanity of people of colour inthe so-called global North and South, development will always suffer from a ‘white gaze’ problem.’
What a gorgeous, illuminating and powerful piece! Thank you María and Hansel for this inspiring offering!
The images take my breath away. I will devote time to the study of them. In order to squeeze every bit of influence on my way of seeing.
Such a magical and powerful piece! We are collective queering dev language and disrupting the system aroung grantmaking and international cooperation. Thanks for the inspiration Maria and Hansel <3
This is just such beautiful and powerful work I can only imagine how many will be moved to a changed place after spending time with it. Thank you for visioning and creating such profoundly inspiring work. Recognising the injustice that underlies the dominant narrative practise and perspective, mean this art making is revolutionary work. Thank you.
Also yes so much written words we at Oxfam have… I am a lover of words but I too think we often miss other knowledge and ways of knowing.