For this Mexico-based filmmaker, art is not only the practice of love and freedom - it can also play a crucial role in how we design better, safer, and more equitable societies.
Pablo Martínez Zárate believes in the transformative power of art and media, urging others that “artistic practice can help us envision worlds that we would like to inhabit”. In his view, artists cannot be indifferent to the state of the world we live in.
A pioneer of web and interactive documentaries in Mexico and Latin America, Pablo delivered the Bailey Morris-Eck Lecture to a group of young artistic and media leaders at the 2023 Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change.
Pablo engages with critical art, meaning art that recognizes itself as part of the crisis, immerses itself in the situation, and acts critically. He describes himself as a media artist, documentary filmmaker, and scholar who aims to “bring forth new questions on the world, our reality, and the possibilities that we have to change this reality”.
Delivering a lecture on Art and Horizons of Possibility: Towards a Poetics of Care, Pablo encouraged participants to imagine a future world where people rely on cooperation instead of competition, tenderness instead of brutality, and ultimately care for each other. His focus resonated with this year’s Media Academy theme of Imagining Inclusive and Equitable Futures.
“Both art and media have a deep influence on the ways we imagine the world and ourselves within it. Art and media are pillars not only for imagining distant futures but for representing our own identity,” Pablo stressed. “Art is the highest form of hope” for improving our world by giving artists and the broader community the freedom to change our current situation.
As a long-time participant and faculty member of the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change, Pablo believes that such spaces “are critical to generating that confidence that we can change the world and that we are changing the world, or at least writing history, every single day. I feel [that Media Academy participants] get out of this the certainty that their lives [and] their voice is really important”.
Coming to Schloss Leopoldskron makes him feel like he is part of a historical tradition where “people are truly engaged with what they do and have the certainty that their work is impacting or affecting the life of others”.
Pablo hopes that after the Academy, participants will gain energy “for the world we're living in and the world to come. I hope they [have] the courage to live by their dreams. I hope that they can also trust their own dreams”. After giving Pablo a standing ovation for his passionate lecture, Academy participants left with the belief that their artistic endeavors could contribute to building a more inclusive and equitable world.
To read the full transcript of Pablo’s speech, please click here.
The Bailey Morris-Eck Lecture is an annual lecture on international media, economics, and trade which was established in 2004 through the generosity of former Salzburg Global Board of Directors member Bailey Morris-Eck and her family.
