Let’s Re-make!

Block by Block stencil poster

I grew up in Nashville, TN. For the week on November 17-21, we will be in Nashille as part of the Art Makes Place public art series, organized by Adrienne Outlaw. Art Makes Place is a year long series where each month artists create temporary public art projects that involve the Nashville community. Participating artists include Mel Ziegler, Lindsay Obermeyer, and Mike Calway-Fagan, among others. During the week we will be volunteering and talking with folks at the Campus for Human Development, a non-profit organization in downtown Nashville that provides shelter, education, and recovery programs for people in transition from unhoused to housed. Through conversations and workshops we will develop a series of posters that illustrate the stories we hear.

We are planning to make the posters from stencils. The image at the top is a stencil we made recently for our neighborhood. In our Urbana, IL neighborhood, we are talking with folks about how we can imagine neighborhoods organized differently-sharing food, labor, and friendship to build and encourage alternative infrastructures of support. The Campus for Human Development works to build a community around the people that it works with in Nashville. The process at Campus provides a sense of stability and support that is nesseccary for people to regain footing and succesfully weather transition. The social relationships that make and shape place are often forgotten in both neighborhood and non-profit situations. We chose to work with Campus for Human Development because they place emphasis on fostering sustaining relationships. We also want to encourage and draw out these relationships as we work on this public art project, and in our own community back home.

Our friend Bea Nettles invited us out to her friend’s house to pick apples this past weekend. Bea’s friend has about 5 apple trees,  that had not been sprayed with pesticides. Five apple trees does not sound like a lot but apparently you can collect quite a bit. We collected 6 or so canvas bags full of apples. Another friend collected 4 bags full, and Bea herself collected much more the weekend before. Five small trees in a backyard produced plenty for many people.

With all the bushels, pecks, pounds, etc of apples we went home and made:

12 jars of applesauce.

2 gallons of hard apple cider (more soon on that)

1 apple pie

Many snacks of single apples.

Picking apples, and a tool needed to process the apples.

Here in town people have one or two trees in their yard and they don’t know what to do with it, but local activist, Jacob Barton made a map so you could go and help them our with all of their apples!

The next issue of the JOAAP is not yet ready, but will be soon. We contributed an article that we will eventually make available for download. The next issue looks really good and very timely. Below is a preview of what is coming.

From the good folks at JOAAP:

On our new issue 6!
Issue is near completion and will be released in October.
Pre-order your copy or subscription now.
Subscribers will be mailed their copies in a timely fashion.

The 6th issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest is divided into three sections, “I Love To We” which focuses on forms of collectivity and projects that critically position themselves both within the art world and within community organizing, “The Antiwar Survey Section” which attempts to survey West Coast antiwar activism, and “The Other Theory Section” which asks critical questions about approaching the contemporary moment, or perhaps the insurrectionary moment.

“Thus with no illusions, we are given a new opportunity to clearly address the enormous crisis that we face.  With a fresh-face for experience we can frame questions and histories that will help inform the new cycle of resistance we have yet to imagine. We also know that by assuming that the crisis is already upon us, we are a step ahead it the game by acting now instead of worrying about when it will arrive.”  -Excerpt from JoAAP’s Call for entries, Issue 6

I Love To We
Amy Franceschini, Fritz Haeg, Bonnie Fortune, Brett Bloom, Juliana Parr, Charlotte Sáenz (aka Lozeh Luna), Kelly Marie Martin, Aviv Kruglanski, Kate Rich, Ben Schaafsma, Aimee Le Duc, Mark Chamberlain, Lisa Ann Auerbach, Veronica Wiman, Town Hall Meetings (Daniel Tucker, Nato Thompson and LA Participants)

Antiwar Survey Respondents:
Andrew Boyd, Ashley Hunt, Alexandra Juhasz, Steve A Anderson, Veterans for Peace, Art for a Democratic Society, Janet Weil (of East Bay Code Pink), Center For Tactical Magic, Eric Estenzo, Ehren Tool, Hillary Mushkin, Jene Despain, Keith Hennessy, John Carr (of LA VS WAR), Lizabeth Eva Rossof, Melissa Day, Scott Campbell (of Direct Action to Stop the War), Sandy Wood

Another Theory Section
Sharmina Afsana Hossain, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, J Cookson, Dorit Cypis, Karla Diaz, Mindy Faber and Open Youth Networks, Marc Leger, Ami Motevalli, Mark Rodriguez, Gregory Sholette,  Greg Smithsimon, Steve Stuffit, Tran, T. Kim-Trang, Annette Weisser, Grant Wahlquist, Rebecca Zorach

At the end of the exhibition Songs of Returning, Both Silent and Loud, our field of paper corn was burned in effigy. Above are images from Mike Wolf, the organizer of the exhibition.

A Call to Farms Cover

This summer we participated in a mobile seminar called Continental Drift through the Radical Midwest Culture Corridor. The Continental Drift project originated with Brian Holmes and the 16 Beaver Group in New York. It examines neo-liberal globalization and resistance strategies to this, as well as politics of scale. This seminar traveled over 10 days, 3 states, and hundreds of miles to explore local food, sustainable energy, environmental justice movements, delicious food, plum wine, and some contemporary theory.

The book includes maps and images from the Drift and, features the words of:
Claire Pentecost, Jessica Lawless and Sarah Ross, Lisa Bralts-Kelly, Ryan Griffis, Mike Wolf, Martha Boyd and Naomi Davis, Rebecca Zorach, Nicolas Lampert, The Langby Family, Eric Haas, Sarah Holm, Brian Holmes, Dan S. Wang, mIEKAL aND, Sarah Kanouse, and us.

Click here to download a pdf of the booklet

To purchase a copy of the book visit the Heavy Duty Press Site. Heavy Duty Press, “Esoteria for the Common Man”, is run by Mike Koppa out of the Driftless Region of Wisconsin. Koppa created the amazing cover art collage.

We live in the middle of an agricultural apocalypse - monoculture from horizon to horizon - in central Illinois. The presence of these non-food crops is oppressive, especially when massive quantities of pollen or pesticide from the fields permeates the air making it difficult to breathe. It almost makes us long for the smog and particulates of Chicago, our former home, instead.

We have spent the last several months devouring as much (books, newspapers, magazine articles, mp3s, etc.) as we could about global food crises- dramatic food price increases because of unregulated speculation, failed structural adjustment policies of the IMF/WTO/World Bank, people who have rioted in over 30 countries because they don’t have food, and the ridiculous rush to produce ethanol in the U.S. instead of pursuing renewable, green/clean energy.

So, when we got a call from our friend, artist, and organizer, Mike Wolf, to participate in his exhibition Songs of Returning, Both Silent and Loud our research fit well with the ideas behind the exhibit. Here is a little of what he had to say about the exhibition:

“How do we touch the land and how does it touch us? There is a long, vibrant history of so-called “back to the land movements.” But in fact we have never left the land. We have always been dependent on the land–and the people who work closely with it–for our survival. When we fill the tank, flip a switch, open a bag of chips, sit quietly in a comfy chair, or get on-line–even though we are largely unconscious of it–we are in relationship to the land. We are constantly touching the land and it is constantly touching us back.” – More information and the entire essay can be found at Mike’s website.

The emphasis on land and relationships to land, made us consider our own removed and violent relationship to the land within an economy of extraction. For the exhibition we created a field of dead corn, 52 stalks made of found wood and a year’s worth of the New York Times. The exhibition is at Art of This in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The field will be made into a bonfire to burn monoculture in effigy.

Visit this page to download our new poster and booklet.

The Journal of The New Alchemists
Edited by Nancy Jack Todd, The New Alchemy Institute, Woodshole, Massachusetts, 1971, 148 pages, paperback

“ To restore the Lands, Protect the Seas, and Inform the Earth’s Stewards,” states the directive guiding the members of the New Alchemy Institute (NAI). The NAI – operating from 1971 - 1991 – researched and developed several influential sustainable design projects. Their research was informed both by a highly critical stance towards industrial agricultural practices and concern for living in balance with the environment. Enclosed systems for shelter and food production, systems that supported themselves were one of thier key interests. The NAI has evolved into the Green Center in Cape Cod, MS; their prescient original research is highly relevant today.

Nancy and John Todd, and Bill McLarney, founded the NAI. It became an international movement for science and lifestyles in harmony with natural ecosystems. Nancy Todd edited The Journal of the New Alchemists from 1973-1981. The issues are similar in to their book The New Alchemists. They present the issues and areas of research that the NAI was involved in, from bioshelters, and energy use, to the development of the Ark, a living house, and aquaculture system.

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Domebook 2
By Llyod Kahn, Pacific Domes, 1971, 128 pages, over-size paperback, ASIN: B000H02IU8

Download:domebook_2.pdf

A dome is just a portion of a sphere. Lloyd Kahn is at it again, with Domebook 2. Kahn’s seminal book Shelter (page 27) was one of the original inspirations for our library project. He says about the Domebook, “It’s much easier to build, than it is to write about it.” True to this sentiment Domebook contains over 100 pages of beautiful images and illustrations with brief and clear instructions – both written and drawn – and conversations about inspirations for building shelter out of domes. Buckminster Fuller, the key thinker behind Kahn and others’ fascination with dome building, gave away his original design for what he called the Sun Dome in the May 1966 issue of Popular Science. The plans, after Fuller improved them, were later sold for $5 by the magazine. Fuller’s geodesic geometry was built with mathematics, wood scraps and staples; a model that Kahn took up with a passion, continuing the meme with Domebooks 1 & 2, building domes around California.
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The San Francisco, Bay Area People’s Yellow Pages: Number Four

Made and distributed by Mary Donnis, Sally Harms, Winifred Mullinack, Joan Saffa, Diane Sampson, and Jan Zobel, 1975, 193 pages, paperback

What do the Turnabout Thrift Shop (secondhand clothing), Theater of Spontaneity (psychodrama workshop), Childcare Switchboard/Single Parent Center, Lesbian Voices (a newsletter), Black Sheep Press (printing services), and Join Hands (a prison reform support group for gay men in prison) have in common? They are all listed along with a dizzying number of other resources in the 1975 issue of The San Francisco, Bay Area People’s Yellow Pages. The guide compiled by a six-member all-women collective, bills itself as a counter-cultural resource. It is that, but the counter-culture qualifier perhaps ignores the fact that the guide book functions as a thorough resource for the needs of those marginalized by mainstream capitalist culture. The women collected a comprehensive array of resources from drug-treatment programs, affordable dentists, and access to local food sources, to organizations resisting the Vietnam War, and art collectives. Reading this guide today gives one the sense of a powerful collective imaginary for how a city could be organized for the people that live there.
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