this is a work in progress
Ingredients
- You, me, us
- rooted in anticapitalist, black radical, abolitionist, decolonial, global south liberation. and yes even communist/marxist, socialist, anarchist knowledge
- desire to un/learn, contribute to turn things around
- open to different approaches
Steps (in no specific order, iterative)
- Explore root of art making as paths of both self-expression and collective radical possibility.
- Understand intricate value of life, value of what we make
- when what we make shifts/holds a mirror to/de-normalizes/calls out the unforgivable, unrecoverable harms from violence and violation by structures of oppression,
- when what comes out are calls for existing beyond capitalistic/imperialistic/white-supremacist, patriarchal imaginations
- when what comes out lets us know we’ve been capable of creating from within informed by our ancestries, all along, unlike what capitalism would have us believe
- when the act of making for each other, rooted in our truths and revolutionary imagination, without exploitative profit schemes, has the capacity of transforming and has transformed our reality
- when culture making is so important, the c i a tried v hard to manipulate cultural output to be able to shape people’s perception of state-backed, imperialist violence
- when it has the pontential and has been used to facilitate material support for marginalized, directly-impacted people
- on-going and/or non-trasactional support
- Rooted in this knowing, collab as your default, instead of an occasional project
- Be open to the vulnerability that this demands
- Keep going, even when there’s conflict. Work thru it
- With artists, and non-traditionally-defined artists, with cultural weavers, organizers, rooted in community, in life, in earth, in being.
- collab, rooted in whose unceded territory we stand and live in, Black radical tradition and liberation, radical and revolutionary indigenous knowledge – from the americas and beyond
- collab to take down oppressive art spaces that claim to hold us as they take from us
- permanent shift to collective liberation, collective success, over individual “success”
- Being in a supportive, sustainable, co-operative, nonhierarchical space
- that values the artist as much as the art
- that has close, supportive relationships with the neighborhood it exists in (by having membership that lives in and has connections in same neighborhood)
- that is supported by the neighborhood too
- to have the material resources necessary to be a sustainable space