Santiago Mostyn is an artist based in Stockholm, Sweden.
In the late 1930’s, a young American school teacher ventured over several summers into the far north of the western Canadian provinces. He travelled by canoe, either alone or in the company of Cree or Chipewyan (Dené) traders, through vast stretches of Treaty 8 territory: from the boreal forests to the Barren Lands, Great Bear to Great Slave Lake and beyond.
This panel conversation was initially planned to take place in collaboration with the independent art space Mint, run by Asrin Haidari and Emily Fahlén, in Stockholm. Taking its departure in a planned, open editorial meeting at Mint, the focus of this conversation was the material relationships that art criticism both presupposes and perhaps creates, including populistic notions that criticism meets and inhabits today. By departing from Mint’s investigation of the phenomenon “workers’ art”, historically and today, the meeting will further examine if there exists a workers’ critique, and if so, how it takes shape in contemporary populistic and conservative environments. The focus of the meeting departs from notions such as aesthetic autonomy, labor, and the editorial self-organisation’s history and contemporaneity.
The panel took place online, on 19 April 2020. The panel contributors were, in order of appearance: Michele Masucci, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Kim West and Santiago Mostyn. The panel was moderated by Frida Sandström.