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Town Hall Meetings: five cities discuss regional models of art and activism
A Sereis of Talks Initiated by Daniel Tucker
And Nato Thompson in Conjunction with Creative Time, March 2008
EdItor's Note: the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest helped to organize the Los Angeles event, by compiling a list of possible participants, and we agreed in advance to publish the transcript. It was hosted by Los Angeles contemporary Exhibitions,
The impetus for a series of “Town Hall Meetings” in the cities of Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and New york City came out of a belief and observation that many cities in the United States have produced robust infrastructures for art and activism1 and our hope to strengthen the much-needed critical art community by sharing models and by encouraging potential networks of critical artistic practice.1 Five questions were conceived of and then circulated to all participants prior to their attendance of the meeting. Then each participant was invited to respond to no less than one and no more than three of the questions with each response being subject to a three minute time-limit. The spoken in rotation, with gradual priority given to those who had not responded to previous questions. The participants were reminded that their role was unique, and that their responses should also attempt to articulate the broader concerns of their peers, collaborating organizations and communities – since they were at the meeting and others were not. This “representational” or “spokesperson” role is not a common position that artists are asked to occupy, but it is common in politics and is something we wanted to emulate in order to encourage a serious reflection on the broader context in which these artists were working. In circles that practice “direct democracy” this form would be called a spokes-council. The set up was a bit risky, with methods and tactics borrowed from town hall meetings, progressive activist group-process, sociology and crowd-sourcing market research – then introduced to a collection of artists who don’t necessarily know each other or the moderators, and who may have never given interviews – much less a group interview! And to add a bit more chaos in the mix – the five city’s meetings were visited and gathered over the course of twelve days with the two moderators traveling from one city to the next with a suitcase full of recording equipment. But somehow, it worked.
- Daniel Tucker
Transcript of the Los Angeles Town Hall Meeting, Question #1: Who’s your audience and how does your work mobilize them towards strategic local concerns?
Sara Daleiden : The collective was formed in 2004 for an exhibition at Art Center College of Design called gardenLab (www.fritzhaeg.com/garden_main. html) that was curated by Fritz Haeg and Francois Perrin. The participants in the exhibition were coming from a diverse set of practices in art and architecture, and to some extent, also stemming out into urban practices, such as planning, geography, all with an environmentalist bent. We actually formed to function as a facilitator inside of the exhibition. Out of a series of projects we took on the persona of the National Park service ranger. We brought this persona into a very large gallery warehouse in an attempt to activate peoples’ use of that space and to take on an interpretation of it by posing the question, “How are environmental concerns actually being represented by an exhibition like this?” Additionally, we did a series of campfire talks inside of the space where we were able to look at different urban phenomena that were happening in Los Angeles, from freeway land¬scaping to toxic tourism – again, just how to take on L.A. as a site itself, that could actually be called nature.
But let me just back up: what we found in there, in that show, was that our audience was actually this progressive community that was also exhibiting within the show, in terms of being in art and architecture and
urban practices. But because we took on this persona of the park ranger it
was interesting to see that there was a certain familiarity with the public –
this was up in Pasadena at the time – that were drawn to us and willing to
come in and listen because we had this character that was recognizable from
a popular recreational culture. Four or five years later, it’s been interesting
to walk a line, in a way, of whether we’re functioning as an art practice or
whether we’re functioning as an information source; and also, whether we’re
functioning as an authority figure inside of that space. With our Malibu
Public Beaches, due to a lot of the media coverage that’s come from Malibu
being such a contentious space our audience has grown quite a bit to include
beach lovers, real estate agents, and people from the neighborhood in Malibu
that don’t feel like they have access, and people who might use a beach –
in Venice or Santa Monica – who are feeling curiosity about this other space
that’s there. It’s been interesting to watch the audience change as the media
has changed in relationship to us. As we switch sites we find that there’s a
neighborhood association, but there’s also interest in other areas of the city
to try to penetrate that area.
ARMANDO DURON: For Self Help Graphics our audience is anybody who we
can get to, who we can reach. The way we reach that audience to discuss
local concerns is mostly through the prints that we made and the exhibitions
that we have. To describe some of them for you during 2006-2007: we had a
series called “Love in the Time of War,” and it was ten prints done by ten
different artists that dealt with issues of war and immigration and genocide.
We had some local, well-known artists and we also had an Apache artist from
Arizona. All the prints were done in a cartoon kind of format but it was
designed to reach mostly young people. We just finished an atelier called
“Homobre LA” which dealt with the issues of gay men in our community. We
try to reach and educate our own community through some of the programs
that we’re now doing. Later this year, we’ll have a lesbian atelier production.
The issue that came up earlier regarding gentrification is very much in the
minds of the people of East Los Angeles, especially the Boyle Heights area.
We’re calling it a land grab, if you’re looking for a term (LAUGHTER ). In August
we’ll have an exhibition by the works of Roberto Gutierrez, called “The Old
Neighborhood.” As part of that we’re going to have panel discussions about
that issue, because it’s very important. But we also participate in a larger
level. In May 2006 we produced over a thousand broadsheets that were used
for the May 2006 demonstrations in downtown L.A. Four artists volunteered
and in a matter of three days produced a lot of broadsheets that were
distributed for the demonstrations.
ASHLEY HUNT: The way I think about audience tends to be in terms of how
the work that I produce or work within produces a public; understanding
that a work has an address that calls people into it and produces whatever
that audience is. I like to think of it as a public, because that can produce a
conversation that might not have taken place without the work that helped
to generate that public for that moment. One example of this is a feature
documentary I did around privatization and mass expansion of the prison
system, for which I got a grant to do a grassroots screening tour. The
strategy was to locate people in different cities and different organizations
who were already trying to directly address prison issues or people who find
themselves accidentally working on prison issues because they’re in public
education or they’re in welfare or they’re in any number of other service
sectors that are being folded into the prison system. We tried to get them
together and use the film as a way to start a conversation between them, and
then left that there in the community so new conversations could emerge.
ESL/Esthetics as a Second Language: ESL does not have an audience nor
is it a commercial gallery. We don’t have any econometrics, demographic
exercises, any focus or target groups, and we don’t try to generate those
types of contexts that seek to quantify audiences. Rather, we’re an exhibitions
program that understands itself as a debate interval between academia, art
institutions, and individuals interested in developing a conversation with only
the artist and the members of ESL.
Question #2: Given that the ways we make money impacts the type of culture
we produce, how does the local economy affect your art practice? Also, how do you
work to obtain and share resources?
Irina Contreras: So I just want so say,say, first off, I love this question. This
question was the deal-breaker, actually, when I got the email. I was like,
“Oh, yeah, I want to do this.” No one asks this question. I would like to
acknowledge that I definitely have privilege from attending two private art
institutions, but nonetheless the class structure that I come from is definitely
always apparent in everything that I do. My mother was a striking grocery
store worker and my sister and I joined her on the picket line in 2003. I’m jumping all over the place, but there’s one little story I want to share that I
thought was really interesting that I was just reminded of. I was invited to
participate in a show of temporary installations at a hotel that had closed in
Silver Lake last year or the year before, I can’t quite remember. The hotel was
being remodeled to reflect the new residents that have been moving in: a
boutique hotel with a spa inside, etcetera. It was a hotel that was notorious
for, you name it – people doping up, sex workers, etcetera, etcetera. I really
felt like I wanted to make something that was an ode – I don’t want to say an
ode to that kind of violent culture, because I realize that there’s violence – but
I wanted to make an ode to the disappearing culture that existed in Silver
Lake when I was growing up and to the kind of communities that I grew up
in, which I definitely [identify with]; I’ve always felt connected to the DIY
punk rock/activist/hip hop communities, which I think all have roots in class
struggle. I was thinking about the houses that I used to couch surf in when
I was – well, I would like to say in high school, but even when I was 25, 26,
probably. One of the things that I thought was interesting was a real division
of class in the way that people received my work. There were some people that
looked at it and said, “Oh, it’s scatter art, you do scatter art. How cool.” And
I was really disgusted (LAUGHTER ) because I do not do scatter art. And then
there are other people that looked at it and said, “Oh, you make folk art, you
make outsider art,” which also felt wrong. Outsider to whom? Mainstream
culture? White culture? And part of me was thinking, I feel or I want to be
[that kind of art] but obviously that’s not present, I acknowledge that’s not
present. But I feel like I’m connected to communities that carry on legacies.
And the legacies that I want to be part of are things that are connected to
street theater, things that are connected to street performance, things that
are connected to agitprop, to interventionism, and to direct action. Direct
action, for me, is very much tied to my performance work. Besides that, I also
think about how money impacts the kind of culture that we produce. I try
to be a part of a gift economy when I can. And by that I mean that while I
don’t have health insurance I think that health insurance is a façade to me,
anyway. Before Michael Moore started talking about it, I didn’t believe that
it was really going to make me safer, anyway. I’ve seen a number of folks in
my family and community who even with insurance haven’t been able to get
the care they deserve. I do, however, make more money than I have ever
made, and I make more money than my mother, as well, which is sometimes
really difficult to deal with. In that sense, I’m able to give whatever kind of
video production services that I can. That specifically came up last week
when there were Ice raids in high schools throughout South Central – one of
the things that I plan to do is to tape the different trainings that we’re going
to be doing.
MING YUEN: I have three main ideas in response to this question: the
idea of economics, the idea of privilege, and the idea of self-sufficiency.
Economics: in a lot of the conversations of this kind that I have participated
in there is consistently a dancing around the economics of the art world. It’s
actually a really important thing to have frank discussions about, but we
almost never do because it’s a dirty little secret – people never talk about how
they make money, how much money they make, how much of their work is
selling for if they make a living by selling their work. I really like this
question, and I think that, for example, if you think about the title of this
project, the Democracy in America Project, and you substitute art world for
America, if you think about democracy and the art world and maybe add a
question mark and exclamation mark then we might be approaching the crux
of the matter. I teach at a private liberal arts college that costs about $40,000
a year in tuition to attend. I teach full-time and I have tenure so I’m in a
comparatively privileged position. My job, which is stressful and laborintensive,
allows me a good degree of access and freedom. That brings me
to my thought about privilege. I’m not really interested in the liberal white
left’s constant self-flagellation about privilege, such as, “Oh, we have this
privilege. What are we going do with it? You know, we’re such bad, middleclass
capitalists.” I’m much more interested in how one can use privilege –
yes, one has privilege, and one acknowledges it. But how does one use it
productively? My students at the Claremont Colleges are rather privileged;
a lot of them are going to go on to occupy positions of power. It’s not fair, it’s
very problematic, but it is a symptom of the kind of transnational capitalist
society that we live in. For me, the issue is really, how do I work with this
privileged group of individuals, who are going to have a very large degree
of power, who can actually make change happen, in a realistic and pragmatic
way so that what they do later in their lives can make a difference? For me,
that’s how I chose to work with privilege. On a more institutional level, I think
that collaboration is a very interesting way of thinking about it. I know it can
be a cliché, but take my school, for instance, it was founded in the Sixties, and tried to incorporate the best and the worst part of that era. Community-based
learning is a very important aspect of education there, and while it is not
always successful, important lessons about collaboration with less-privileged
communities are usually learnt, and this is happening in the context of a
very privileged institution. That makes the access to power and privilege
productive. My third point, very briefly, is that I think self-sustaining models
are really important. Having a full-time job means I have health benefits, and
that’s really important to me at my age. Also, I do not write grants anymore,
and usually self-finance my projects through my salary and academic
research grants that I did not have access to as an independent artist. This
allows me a freedom; I don’t have to worry about the economics of the grant
writing and the power play related to that. Another aspect of self-sustenance
for artists to consider here is the model of nonprofit arts organization. I have
had the chance to look at a few budgets for nonprofit arts organization over
the past few years, and I just don’t think that model is self-sustaining right
now. I think that we really need to find a way to make nonprofit arts
organization truly self-sustaining.
OMAR FOGLIO: How does the local economy affect our art practice? Well, it’s
made us be honest, it’s made us be on time, pay our bills on time, and it’s
made us be friendly and try to be as generous as we can. Sometimes these are
things that you see are lacking. It’s actually made us be better, and by generating
jobs you can give jobs to other people and that helps everyone, which
feels good. How do we work to obtain and share resources? Well, we run our
own company, but more than running the company is the same as doing an
art project – we keep on doing projects that are creative, but that will actually
give us the money to continue, and that’s why we formed the corporation.
In reality, the corporation and Bulbo, the art collective, is the same thing. The
only thing that changes is how we organize and how we present ourselves
to outsiders.
Questio n #3: Describe a local cultural event that productively expanded the
social networks that your practice operates in; that is to say, the event produced a
new sense of community that had political potential.
KELLY MARTIN : For me, it’s undeniably the Democratic National Convention
of 2000. Basically, I had accidentally seen Marc and Robby Herbst, from the
Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, in 1999 in Seattle at the battle in Seattle.
I was coincidentally there for Thanksgiving to visit my brother, saw them,
and then saw one of them in L.A. at an art event and asked them about what
they were doing up there in the battle in Seattle. They invited me to participate
in the Indymedia Radio arm of the Indymedia Center, basically an independent
media recording of the Democratic National Convention that was located at
the Patriotic Hall in downtown Los Angeles. We manned and womanned the
Internet radio broadcast that was going on during the four to five days of
protests and interventions and events. It was going between the Patriotic Hall
and the Convergence Center, which the Arts in Action grew out of, on 7th
and Wilshire. It also coincidentally ties back to bicycling, as it seems like everything
does these days (LAUGHTER ). During the four days of protests, a Critical
Mass ride through downtown Los Angeles happened to be the largest mass
arrest by the LAPD during the protest. There were about 300 people on
bicycles, biking through downtown L.A., being escorted in front by motorcycle
cops, and in the back by bicycling cops. Critical Mass, if you’re not aware, has
a formation where the people who are in front lead the ride, so the cops led
us to an alley off of Washington and 14th and blocked it off. All the people who
were in front got mass jumped and arrested. There were 73 arrests and there
actually ended up being a class action lawsuit that the people who were arrested
won after a couple of years. But it extensively opened up my networks in
a number of ways, obviously, by infusing my own personal artistic practice
with ideas about direct action and intervention. Also, in a very local way of
how I get around town.
SANDRA DE LA LOZA: One event I want to speak about, that speaks to an
aspect of Los Angeles I love, is an event actually opening this Saturday at
Self Help Graphics, and that’s the Mujeres de Maiz event. This is an event that
has been organized over ten years, on and off, in recognition of International
Women’s Day. It’s organized by a collective of artists, activists, and cultural
producers. It’s a Chicana-centered event, but open to expressions by many
women of color. The month long exhibit will be comprised of many mini events
that will include, film screenings, a visual art show, performances; I think
there’s a self-defense workshop, and there’s a day dedicated to healing, so
healers will share their practices with the public. I think this event speaks to
the question of visibility and brings together a movement, for lack of a better
word, that has been present in Los Angeles for a very long time, but isn’t
always visible. It brings together a lot of practitioners, a lot of artists, a lot of
cultural producers, and for a moment it creates a temporary space, and that is a Chicana-feminist space, if I’d call it that. It’s a very strong and powerful
event, and it makes visible this practice that’s ongoing and has been ongoing
for generations. I think we get to see our collective potential during this event,
as it brings together a lot of women who work in many different realms, and
all of the work together creates a presence and a certain consciousness.
CHRISTINA ULKE (Jou rnal of Aesthetics & Protest): I just wanted to briefly talk
about a very small experience that happened in 2006, in this space. It was
Civic Matters. It was organized by Brett Littman, Irene Tsatsos and Veronica
Wiman as an exhibition in progress involving local artists and practitioners
and designers/artists from Scandinavia. JoA&P organized a campaign for it.
Initially we called it the ROCK WOMEN FOR REICH CAMPAIGN before we
knew what the campaign was about. We had four hours to conceptualize it
together with exhibition participants and whoever came for our event, invited
or uninvited. What we did was address everyone who was in the space as one
constituency including ourselves; there was no separation between the
audience and what we were doing. We used activist organizing strategies,
like consensus building, to break down the campaign and to develop its
goals, strategies, aesthetics/banners and slogans in small groups. Then we
worked with our limited time as our reality, the idea being that at this point
this was all the time we had available to us, and to create common ground
within that limited space. We had to use opportunities, small opportunities,
and it was a very powerful experience because we managed to consent upon
a campaign. We went out in the street, where the ROCK WOMEN FOR REICH
CAMPAIGN had turned into the NICE CAMPAIGN and we gave apples to
everyone. But I wanted to say, bringing it back to the first question, I think
that the question of the audience is somewhat limiting, actually, in that it’s
already describing a relationship that should take place. If you want to move
towards a culture of caring you have to overcome the idea of the audience
and think more in the sense of, “OK, we’re in this boat together. What can we
do at this point in time?”
I want to share a recent submission for our next issue; it addresses issues
of self and other, I think in a beautiful way. If you don’t mind, I’ll just read it.
It’s by Lozeh Luna….(2)
“Detras de Nosotros, Estamos Ustedes is almost impossible to translate satisfactorily
into English, as it contains a paradoxical use of plural terms for self
and other. It would be something like “Behind us, are (in we form of being)
you (all),” where the “we” form of the verb “to be” is implicit in “are” and “you”
is plural (akin, but not identical) to the French “vous.” It is another way the
Zapatistas articulate the encompassing and inclusive reach of their movement
and ideology. Such notions of “I am you” and “us is them” are central to my
work with communities in Chiapas, Lebanon, Iran, and the U.S. Through
local and long-distance collaborations with others who are living, learning,
and working in similar ways, I have come to learn and participate in transformational
projects and processes such as those of Al-jame’ah, Universidad
de la Tierra, and the Learning Societies Network.”
Questio n #4: As a politically engaged artist or organization, how does your
practice relate to existing social movements?
SUZANNE LACY: There are three things that I think about in terms of my
context as I begin to work. One is social and political movements, and the
ones that I’ve been involved with have been, first, civil rights, then farm
workers, and then feminism, and finally racial politics, in particular white
hegemony, in a variety of regions. The connecting theme is the discourse of
oppression. Class is harder to work on here in the U.S., but is very important
to me, as a working-class person. The way these are conflated and work
together is partially what motivates me to enter the art environment, along
with a love of sculptural and performative forms, but I think I enter it first
through personal story. I’m committed in my performances to providing a
public platform for multiple, sometimes hundreds, of people to express their
experience, often around specific social issues, but they’re not proscribed
conversations, nor are they scripted. The organizing that I did in the ‘70s
around women and violence was quite emotional at times. I learned to start
with the emotional and direct experience – often one not heard in the larger
culture, invisible in some way – and connect that to larger issues of equity
and justice through political and pragmatic analysis.
The analysis of teen pregnancy, for example, is based on a much deeper
look at the research information available to us, on the conflation of race and
class and gender politics at play, and the actual experience of young women.
What is apparent, according to sociologist Mike Males, is that teen pregnancy
isn’t necessarily an example of youth promiscuity as much as it is adult predation, as the largest percentage of teen moms had their first sexual experience as an underage female with an adult male.
Finally, whenever I start a project I track the organizations that exist
around these issues and engage with them to understand how the community
is already working on the issues. On any project I might work with between
10 and 30 organizations over time, depending on their political strategies, but
I don’t necessarily support one strategy to the exclusion of others. For example,
Cop Watch organizations and Police Athletic Leagues and city council and
mentorship clubs – all with differences in strategies and analyses, but all
concerned with youth well being. Even within political divisions there are
ways, often, to bring people together around a shared value.
MARC HERBST (Jou rnal of Aesthetics & Prot est): How do we relate to social
movements? This may bleed into the local and the national, but we meet, we
email, we phone, we write, we network, we think with people and theorize by
speaking and by mixing dough. We open our mouths when invited to do so
or not. Many people do all these things. One thing that we do pragmatically
is that when we send out announcements we include other peoples’ announcements.
We also put up things not related to us on our website which we think
are important. This is very small, but I think a good symbol of relating.
As a journal, we show other peoples’ productions, we ask other groups
of people “What needs to be said right now? What needs to be thought about
right now?” We actively edit and participate in their thinking and editing of it.
We generate ideas in spaces. I wanted to give a few examples. As a magazine,
we’ve documented ideas for the globalization movement; we’ve done that in the
past, with our first issue, especially- documenting gas mask projects for street
protests, doing interviews with Indymedia workers. We put out specific calls:
we put out a poster project about the war on terrorism in 2001 and 2002, which
was trying to connect the war on terror and its effects on our communities
to the neighborhoods people wander through on a day-to-day basis by doing
site-specific stuff. Open call projects like these get people to say, “We need to
think about this.” We ran a symposium for a while entitled “Inventing Antiwar
Culture” that aimed to work with artists of all stripes to foment an antiwar
culture. All these acts are key to seeing how we try and relate to existing
social movements. On May Day in 2006, during the called general strike, we
tried to organize a general strike among artists, contacting several art
organizations and saying, “Let’s put out a call! Let’s shut our spaces down for
the day as well! Lets do this as a public act!”
ROBBY HERBST (Jou rnal of Aesthetics & Prot est): Just to add two sentences:
As a group with an expertise in expanding the discourse around politics,
we find it interesting, surprising and/or problematic that our relationship to
social movements in L.A. is largely one-way – one-way is underlined. We ask
for collaborations; they either do or do not happen. We are never asked by
social movements in L.A. to collaborate with them. That’s just interesting.
PAMELA MI LLER-MACIAS: As I’ve mentioned before, how the L.A. Poverty
Department relates to existing social movements is basically to interweave our
work with the community members. I just wanted to put some faces to some
of the things that I’ve been talking about. One of the social movements that
LAPD works with is the L.A. Community Action Network, LACan, and one of
the things that they do on Skid Row is to police the police, so to speak, and
monitor the abuses that are taking place by the police toward the residents there.
One of those members is a man named General Dogon. The General was
incorporated into the REDCAT show; he had an autobiographical piece where
he was sitting in the audience and when his vignette came up, he stands up
and he says, “I am General Do-gan. The police will tell you what you can do.”
Or, “The police will tell you what you can’t do. I will tell you what you can do.
If the police stop you, ask them, ‘Am I being detained?’ If they say no, walk
on. If they say yes, ask them why.” And it goes on like that. That’s a specific
example of involving individuals from the existing social movements into the
work. Another thing that happened in the Glimpses events, where people gave
their individual glimpses of utopia, someone named Redd, who is a member
of the Skid Row community – meaning he’s someone who lived in a box for ten
years on the corner of, I think, 5th Street and Crocker, and is a survivor of
addiction and is now a counselor in prisons – spoke at one of the Glimpses
of Utopia events. There was also someone there who is the director of special
projects for Skid Row Housing Trust, which is a nonprofit developer that
operates more than 1,200 units, and people who work as policymakers on
Skid Row are pretty connected to the community. It’s not an up here/down
here thing. But I do remember really, really vividly a moment when Redd had
given his talk – he’s a beautiful orator – and he was talking about what goes
on in his visits to the prisons. And Molly, this person who makes the decisions
about housing on Skid Row, was saying something like, “We have all these
debates among ourselves about zero tolerance policy versus harm reduction,”
and talking about the relative merits of each, in this very intellectualized way. She looked at Redd and said, “Well, what do you think of that?” For me, that
was a really profound moment, because I know that they’re not so far
removed from the street, but in that moment, she really wanted to hear what
Redd, someone who lived that kind of experience, had to say. And I don’t
know how she took that information and translated it into what she does in
her day-to-day work, but it’s an exposure that she had; I don’t know if she
would have asked someone that kind of question that directly otherwise.
Questio n #5: These conversations come out of a nationwide concern about the
fate of democracy. How do you see your projects tying into a larger national
structure? Is organizing nationally productive? What are its limitations?
KELLY MARTIN : When you think about one of the definitions of democracy
as just directly meaning the common people, especially with respect to their
political power, it’s doomed. It’s impossible to talk about it without mentioning
its destructor, capitalism, or the domination of the corporate class, like the
privatization of social institutions such as healthcare and education and now
art. Thinking about even five to ten years ago, if you went to an art opening
that was sponsored by Red Bull or Stoli vodka, it was a different kind of art
opening than a fine art opening; and now it’s normal, it’s a normalized
activity. Not only are institutions and individual artists now competing for
funding and approval from companies and corporations, they’re also looking
for hipster cachet. It starts to get really scary then. I was thinking about that
as an artist; I was applying with my collaborator, David Jones, for a Center
for Cultural Innovation grant, and we had to choose between going for tools
or going for marketing and planning. And I was thinking about that whole
idea of, well, how would I even talk about, as an artist, what is my marketing
strategy? (LAUGHTER) It just seemed really ludicrous and scary to me.
On a positive note, thinking of a national or international model, I’ve been
talking with some friends about the ways that locally there are all these great
groups that are doing things, and that you come across them in various
situations and there are these cross-pollinations or exchanges that happen
between cultural, community and activist organizations. We were saying we
should just print our own money or scrip to use between us, and my brotherin-
law, Angelo Logan, said, “Use the word barter instead,” because obviously
money or scrip needs to have gold behind it or whatever. And of course,
obviously, bartering is a lot more realistic and viable. But then it really got
me thinking about maybe what we need is a grant kitchen, much the way we
have the Bicycle Kitchen, which would be made up of kick-ass grant writers
who effectively could go after the big money hoops that are out there and
around town. Organizations could be members equally and then the cash
could be distributed equally. You wouldn’t have to apply. One other thing on
that is – just thinking about the idea that there are a lot of groups that are
fostering new ways of thinking and producing cultural activity. I think that
the next step is to go nationally and internationally, and one local example
is the model of the Bicycle Kitchen. There have been groups in Santa Monica
that started a similar space called Bikerowave, and then in northeast L.A.
and Highland Park, there’s the Bike Oven. Their name gives a nod or a
shout-out to the model of the Bicycle Kitchen, and our model is one that’s
national, and the way that we come together and share information and ideas
is this conference called the Bike-Bike Conference. I think that that could happen on a national level with other things, as well.
AMI TIS MOTEVALLI: I think one of the issues I have with this question is –
well, of course, I wasn’t born in this nation, and I have never seen this nation
as a place that actually contained any kind of democracy. So the fate of it is
kind of obvious to me, but in terms of actually trying to produce democracy,
that’s another question. For me, a lot of dialogue and a lot of what moves
forward has always worked through relationship-building and working through
those relationships; sometimes in small collectives and small groups, where
a lot of threads tie people together and reach beyond. Recently, I was able to
work with a group of women, and a book that we were involved in called Voices
of Resistance brought us all together. It was basically all women who were
Muslim, either born Muslim, converted into Islam, or gave up Islam, but it
had something to do with Islam. And through that space I was able to develop
relationships that built into something else. One of the things that I realized
was that every time my family members ever wanted change in their life it
was sparked through intimate dialogues. A lot of those dialogues happened
in the hamam, in the bath space, in the kitchen, in friendships, and at small
gatherings and parties. Again, some of our personal issues were turned into
something that was much more political and dealt with what was going on
in the world.
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