Truth be told, I'd been putting off writing again—but then I remembered I need to tell people I have a thing coming up and that I have many reflections to share from what turned out to be a very busy summer season. I’m rushing and it’s messy writing, but it’s a new season so here I go.
A (Belated) Invitation
If you're in or around Detroit this weekend, you're invited to come see Wake Work* as I bring it home (from Seattle, where it was originally exhibited). It'll be up for a few months, so feel free to stop by anytime while the gallery's open over the next few months, even if you won't be around for the opening.
Wake Work*: always to rupture the present
Location: Boggs Center, 3061 Field Street
Opening: October 15, 2023 from 2-5PM ET
2:30 PM Musical Performance by Venus [Vanessa Reynolds]
4:00 PM Artist Talk in Conversation with Ash Arder & PG Watkins
The exhibit will be open from October 15 - December 2023.
And, stay tuned for updates about another (related, but collaborative) show opening on November 10 at Riverbank Arts gallery in Flint.
This summer was a summer of workshops.
Making Room for Abolition (the workshop) happened two more times over the summer—or eight, depending on who's counting and how—in very different settings from the first version back in March. Once with staff from Allied Media Projects and once with participants in the BLM x Emory Douglas Youth and Family Arts Program. I'm still making sense of what came of these variations and still feel like I need to run it ten more times to truly know what can come of it, but the act of repeating it, in the first place, feels good and necessary and right on time. I'm marinating on what it could mean that the artifacts imagined in these collective settings are far more whimsical than those practical, believable, tangible artifacts I crafted for Making Room for Abolition—the installation—back in 2021. I made a conscious effort not to rest too heavily on inexplicable, black box technologies or magic as the underlying foundations enabling abolitionist transformations in that first instantiation. I was very concerned with making sure that each object was believable and relatable and real.
But, in these workshops, participants turned to magic, miraculous mushrooms, and other imagined mediums as the basis for many objects' abolitionist potential. It's a lot more fun, for sure. It's a little less believable / plausible, too. This is just a thing I'm observing and taking note of, by the way, not a judgment. I'm not entirely sure why the direction shifted, either: I wonder if it's a product of the collective nature of imagining and making, that we're more imaginative when we gather than when we work independently? Or the fact that there were no built-in rules or prompts about believability? Or if people were simply prepared to think and make with fewer restrictions because of the playful nature of the game itself that is the basis for the workshop? Or if they'd been primed to lean into the absurd, surrealist approach by an example we offered that rests heavily on a storyline featuring a holographic forest forcefield? Maybe it's all of the above? Maybe none. Either way, I love a good old absurd imaginary just as much as the next person. I haven't had time yet—for anything, lately—but eventually, I want to parse what these more fantastical imaginaries can accomplish and how.
I've worked with friends at Liberation in a Generation over the last few years on a few different projects: Designing a visual language around racial capitalism + liberatory economies and supporting their popular education work with organizers across the country. Lately, worlds (speculative design and policy) collided when LibGen asked me to help craft a session to gather feedback about policy proposals like guaranteed housing and guaranteed income: We ended up designing a workshop that relies on speculative artifacts and scenarios from worlds where housing and income are guaranteed to evoke reactions from participants about the minutiae of how these policies would operate, ranging from organizers to staff at nonprofit service delivery organizations working on related campaigns and programs. Instead of talking "about" policies abstractly, we situate our frame of reference around that of a mother who just received their first guaranteed income check or a family searching for guaranteed housing on the Federal Social Housing Authority's app. These are—ostensibly—politically implausible futures made believable by the mundanity of each artifact: A check stub, an app, a newspaper, an email. Here, plausibility matters, but maybe what’s becoming clearer the more settings where I practice this work is that the benchmark for what’s believable is a moving target depending on who you ask and what their orientation to the context is. I know plenty of people who’d find guaranteed income just as wild as a holographic forest forcefield.
While we’re speaking of workshops: I had the pleasure, early this fall, of witnessing one of my favorite humans of all time—Juan Carlos Rodriguez Rivera—facilitate a Taller Collectivo—which roughly translates to "collective workshop," except the word “taller” is a bit more nuanced in Spanish—at SAIC on his collaborative body of work called "Images for Decolonial Futures."
It was one of those moments where I watched my best friend do something deeply resonant in their practice and was like "Oh, duh. This is why we're besties." In partnership with his collaborator—illustrator Claudia Alejandra González Parrilla—Juan Carlos is reshaping the Puerto Rican imaginary by deconstructing images from láminas and recombining them into surrealist visuals that offer provocations, critiques, glimpses of possibility, and new propositions for Puerto Rican futures. Láminas are illustrated workbooks given out in Puerto Rican elementary schools that deliver a very particular (often colonial), curated set of lessons about the island’s history, culture, and social science. When Juan and Claudia host Talleres Collectivos, participants cut up the images from these workbooks and recombine them to imagine new scenes. In effect, they're imagining what it means to be Puerto Rican with remnants of images that have long shaped kids' beliefs about themselves, their island, and its history. As they take the workshop to different settings, they’re exploring what it means to practice / hone this method of collective imagining with non-Puerto Ricans, too. In the particular instance that I witnessed, students were asked to imagine gathering spaces. This approach is also, in an odd way, reminiscent of what I'm trying to do with Wake Work*, transforming photographic depictions of anti-Black state violence to reconfigure how we see anti-Black state violence.
Funnily enough, we both—neither of us collage artists, specifically—landed on collage as a technique for collectively imagining through art making. It's approachable and relatively quick, familiar to artists and non-artists a like. This summer, I also hosted Making Room for Abolition as a six-week series for BLM x the Emory Douglas Youth and Family Art Program. It was meant to be a sequence where each class built on the last; where we pulled apart the act of imagining abolitionist futures previously delivered in a rapid-fire, 3-hour workshop setting into a multi-week, cumulative, slow-building exercise. But, as we learned in my last seasonal update: Nothing ever goes to plan. It became clear early on that we wouldn't have the kind of consistent attendance required to make the sequential model work, so I switched things up and ended up turning it into a collage series, where we learned new collage techniques each week and used the cards and prompts from Making Room for Abolition as inspirations around which to collage.
Watching Juan Carlos facilitate and reflecting on the many workshops I've held this summer, some of the core questions behind this work are thrown into sharper relief. These are the reminders I needed. What does it look like to imagine otherwise, collectively? What does it look like to imagine other than capitalism and American imperialism? Other than the seemingly inevitable? Other than oppression? How do we reconcile that practice of imagining with the practical realities of our lives? How do we create openings for imagination at different scales and levels of depth? In theory, I should want to find as many entry points as possible—there should be no wrong door for imagining otherwise. Or, what's the value and effect of absurdist imaginaries—as compared to hyper-realistic, believable ones? Are they in conflict? Or do they just serve different purposes? If so, what are they? How do I know when to employ them? Does it even matter? Why am I so concerned with optimizing imagination (or am I)?
I'm beginning to understand these (and other) experiments in facilitation, workshop design and popular ed as a part of my larger interest in education / pedagogy, broadly. While I did return to an academic setting this fall—shocking, I know!—I'm always looking for ways to abscond, subvert, circumvent, and resist the ways institutions force learning to take very particular shapes. The pivot to collage in the six-week workshop series was an attempt to meet folks where they were, to find an opening in an otherwise relatively rigid structure (that I had set up) where people could instead just show up, make a thing, have a conversation, and leave without too many strings attached. For some reason I always want it to be deeper and more prolonged and more transformative, but the reality is that.. isn't always realistic. So now, the question becomes: How can I make imagining and materializing imagined futures more accessible? How can we “drop in” to collective imagining? And, as I think through how to translate some of these practices into the (formal) classroom, I'm considering what it means to translate what I've encountered elsewhere into a traditionally carceral / punitive setting (higher education) without compromising to the whims of academic infrastructure and assessment in ways that contradict the ethos of liberatory imagination, itself. Will report back, stay tuned.