APP Chair and Professor Pato Hebert presented a lecture performance titled 'Ojalá' in Abu Dhabi

Pato Hebert (artist and Chair of the Department of Art & Public Policy at NYU Tisch School of the Arts) presented a lecture performance titled Ojalá on March 29th in Abu Dhabi. The sharing of recent artworks and writing queried our relationships with land, language, chronic illness and one another in impossible times. 

Ojalá is Spanish for hopefully, if only, I wish. Ojalá derives from inshallah. Arabic is spoken in the Spanish and Spanglish of the Americas. Collective care is how we enact our hopes together, the sacred possibility of survival. In the face of empires and pandemics, collective care is how communities grow and deepen. Collective care is how we make a way together, despite the failures of states and markets. Art and language are part of how we envision that another world is possible. This is not the new world of supposed colonial discovery. Rather, it is the shared praxis of freedom. And, as we must, we do this over the long haul — hasta, hatta, until.

Introductory remarks were given by May Al Dabbagh (Associate Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi and Director of Haraka Lab).