This week’s installment of Basekamp’s ongoing online dialogue on Plausible Artworlds:

“El Centro is an artist-run space of interaction and debate for artists and thinkers from around the world, with an emphasis on rethinking norms imposed by northern “centers”. The CIA began operations in 2009, but emerged from intensive discussions in 2006 on the need for renewing art education, devising more plausible teaching models and education environments going beyond disciplinary and geographical frontiers were. The CIA’s activities are extradisciplinary, with a strong pedagogical focus on historic research and art theory conducted virtually and physically. The CIA seeks to hone the critical tools needed to challenge the frontiers of genres and disciplines, expanding the borders of practice, genre and media; promoting those that propose new ways of production, of exhibition and exchange; those that explore broader social contexts than the institutional or market-based mainstream.”

Tomorrow, Tuesday July 20 at 6 PM, have a discussion with the creators of “CIA” and Basekamp at 723 Chestnut St, 2nd floor, Philadelphia USA or via Skype: Skypename: Basekamp.

Based on the understanding that race is an ideology performed on a daily basis, this conference will investigate how and why performances of race are manifested or subverted in African American visual culture. The panels include “Race and Museum Practices,” “Race and Abstraction,” and “Performance in/of Contemporary African American Art.” The symposium will begin with keynote speaker Dr. Richard Powell of Duke University, on Wednesday, September 15th at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.  The conference will continue on September 16th between 9:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. at the Adele H. Stamp Student Union Building on the University of Maryland College Park campus.

The Sept. 15 Keynote Lecture is FREE for the first 40 people to register, and the Sept. 16 Symposium is FREE with registration.

For more information, click here or call the David C. Driskell Center at 301.314.2615.

The U.S. Social Forum begins this week. From June 22-26 non-profit organizations, artists, activists, socialists, anarchists, and capitalist social change entrepreneurs alike will be gathering from around the country in Michigan’s own Motor City. What will commence is a week of workshops, people’s assemblies, seminars, lectures, camaraderie, alliance building, and general social change brainstorming. Needless to say, Detroit will be serving as a venue for one of the largest change-makers assemblies to date.

The USSF website states, “The US Social Forum (USSF) is a movement building process. It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples’ solutions to the economic and ecological crisis. The USSF is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history.”

With well over 20,000 people registered, the forum is looking to be a powerful, moving, and productive event.

Our very own Donald Russell will be attending this year as a Provisions Library delegate. As well, our friends at the Floating Lab Collective will be partaking in a plethora of events, interventions, performances, and workshops across the forum and the city proper, including the exchange of a Floating Lab currency with others at the forum, collaborations with poets for a projection project and a tentative ride on a grease powered bus through Detroit. Click here for Floating Lab’s Twitter feed, which will be updated frequently throughout the week on their highlights, thoughts, and adventures.

Provisions Library and Floating Lab will likely be attending many of the following workshops throughout the week:

Art Is Change: Art & Creative Practice for Cultural and Political Transformation

Reclaiming Place, Restoring & Sustaining Living Communities

Off Grid and Unplugged: Sustainable Lifestyle Choices & Renewable Resistance

Community Currencies, Microcredit, and Banks: The Banco Palmas Model

Ending Mountaintop Removal

Creative Think Tank

Creative Organizing: Using Puppetry and Performance to Move Your Campaign

And many more

Click here for a full list of workshops at the Forum.

If you are not able to make it to Detroit this year, you may be able to catch some of the action at the USSF audio and video feeds.

In response to the vast amount of poverty and struggle within Detroit, a direct result of capitalist failure and crises, Detroit itself has become a quickly transforming hub of grassroots and progressive social movements; however, there is much work to be done. One of the coolest aspects of this year’s USSF are the Work Projects and Work Brigades: “Leading up to the forum, hundreds of folks are coming in Work Brigades to support and work with Detroiters, from gardening to healing, screen-printing, exchanging organizing methods & retrofitting houses. During the forum there will be Work Projects where folks can go into the community and get their hands dirty making real-life, needed improvements here in Detroit which will last long after the Forum.”

As well, individuals will be able to partake in socially conscious tours of Detroit: “Detroit is a living historical center. We will be doing tours of the gardens of Detroit, labor tours, movement tours – there are so many ways to see this amazing place you will be in.”

Detroit, as one of the most economically devastated metropolises in this country, might not seem like an ideal canvass for positive thinking or change making at first glance; however, one needs to take note of, not a supposedly terrifying absence of capital flow, but the birth of social movements within Detroit, which have arisen in the chasm created by the abandonment of industry and the powers of capitalism therein, despite the concurrent struggle therein. Over the past couple of years, Detroit has slowly become a center of alternative community, economy, and green movements and is now serving as the birth place of a powerful and unified national force of social movement: another Detroit is possible, another world is possible.

The D.C. based organization Men Can Stop Rape has come up with an interesting and simple way to engage teenage boys- free pizza. Kedrick Griffin, the Senior Director of Programs, leads the year long programs, gently titled “Men of Strength” or MOST Club. The activist organization keeps things intentionally vague in the beginning, so as not to scare off the teens with their true intentions: to challenge the patriarchal structure the boys have grown up in. The weekly club meetings begin with, of course, pizza and soda, followed by a “check-in”- a time for the teens to reflect on what is going on in their lives. Griffin uses this open dialogue to segue into heavier topics, like understanding rape culture and respecting women. The idea is to slowly change the perspectives of these young men, in hopes that gender relations in D.C. schools will begin to shift.

More here.

For more on male feminism and men’s work against sexual violence, check out the work of Jackson Katz.

16 June 1976: ‘This is our day’
by Lucille Davie

“It is a day violently etched on the South African collective conscience. Commemorated over 30 years later as Youth Day, an official holiday, it is the day that honours the deaths of hundreds of Soweto schoolchildren, a day that changed the course of the country’s history: 16 June 1976.

On that day the government and the police were caught off guard, when the simmering bubble of anger of schoolchildren finally burst, releasing an intensity of emotion that the police controlled in the only manner they knew how: with ruthless aggression. SA History Online puts the number of dead at 200, far higher than the official figure of 23.”

more

[From the History and Heritage section of SouthAfrica.info. Photo by Sam Nzima. Cross-posted to the blog of Goal 2010!, a soccer and social media project.]

DC area folks,

This month attend “Sowing Seeds Here and Now: A Chesapeake Urban Farming Summit” on June 18th.

Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) 10300 Baltimore Ave College Park, MD 20705

Click here to learn more about all of the exciting and extensive list of workshops, seminars, speakers, etc. which range from learning about the drastic links between food and health to how to plan an urban farm and the connection between food, farming, and environmental justice.

“The goal of our one-day hands-on learning and strategizing event is to catalyze and support urban farming throughout our greater metropolitan DC area.”

Wednesday, March 3 – 11am

Public Space 1
Iowa City, Iowa

F@S Session 4: Worm Composting

“Don’t know what to do with your banana peel? What about those coffee grounds? And that moldy takeout?

Why not compost?

Don’t have enough space? Come to 827 E. Market St. #2 to learn how to build a worm compost bin that fits under your sink! If you would like to build your own, please bring two large, plastic bins with lids and some newspaper.”

More:
Worm Composting
Composting With Red Wiggler Worms

[Information and graphic from organization mailing. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Tipitina’s Uptown
501 Napoleon Avenue
New Orleans, LA
ph. 1.504.895-TIPS

February 28 | 1 – 3:30 pm
Sunday Music Workshop Series
Featuring The Johnny Vidacovich Trio

“Resurrecting a program that was popular in the early ’90s, the Tipitina’s Foundation proudly announces the Sunday Music Workshop Series, the brainchild of Stanton Moore and Johnny and Deborah Vidacovich. These free workshops take place every other Sunday fro, when students have the opportunity to play with and learn from the best musicians in the city.

Sunday Music Workshops offer young, aspiring musicians from all walks of life the unique opportunity to play with and learn from some of the area’s most experienced and celebrated musicians. Each workshop offers students a hands-on, improvisational approach to music education. Students should bring their instruments! Each child will have their own chance play with the veteran musicians or solo on the famed Tipitina’s Uptown stage. Usually, workshops close with a jam session mixing students and veteran musicians together for a real Tip’s concert experience! As many of the city’s various music programs have been put on hold since the storm, these workshops are serving a vital need in the rebuilding process: passing on the musical traditions to a younger generation. Featured artists so far have included Stanton Moore, Johnny Vidacovich, Kirk Joseph, and Theresa Anderson. The free on-stage workshops are only for students, but all members of the public are welcome to attend.”

[Text from Tipitina's website. Photo from NolaFunkNYC. Cross-posted to Signal Fire.]

From February 1^st to March 1^st 2010, people are gathering in a storefront in the lower East side of New York, engaging in workshops ranging from the rudiments of the Lindy Hop to the principles of economics, from butter making to Baudrillard, from urban foraging to festival planning. At Trade School, students have the opportunity to participate in courses diverse in their physical, skill based, intellectual, and playful curriculum. Teachers of widely varying practices facilitate these classes, but everyone shares an investment in teaching for trade, not for money. In exchange for offering a workshop, students bring a good that is requested by the instructor.

Near by Essex market on the Lower East Side, Trade School is collaboration between the design company Grand Opening and the peer-to-peer networking organization, OurGoods. Trade School is currently functioning in Grand Opening’s storefront, a space that regularly facilitates innovative projects.

When walking by and glancing through the storefront windows, one would have a difficult time defining the scene Trade School provides. Part Levi Strauss trading junction, part tea party potluck, part modernist schoolhouse, the space is equally inviting and ever changing. Though it functions in a storefront, it is neither a store nor a café, working as its own immutable entity. Dried goods, cooking tools, textbooks, and readers line the left wall. In the front, a table offers a potluck of food that both students and teachers provide. A chalkboard spans the entirety of the right wall, displaying the notes of previous courses ranging from kimchee recipes, song lyrics, and handwritten graphs of various economic principles.

Though innovative for the predominantly currency-based system valuation of the contemporary context, Trade School is based off of a much older model of exchange. People trade skills and goods individually valued as compared to adhering to a predetermined monetary system.  In an ideal setting, the needs of both parties are satisfied by this process.  As co-founder of project School of the Future and Trade School instructor Christopher Kennedy states, “losing currency helps us to focus on what the currency is actually doing.”

Trade School is a success because it provides a structured, regular arena for endlessly evolving exchange. Andrea Liu, Trade School instructor of Baudrillard Camp states, “In a nutshell, I am interested because it is not ossified yet, and it hasn’t been glazed over yet into a package.” Each day, the space transforms: During the day, the storefront serves as a forum for the teachers of the workshops. People use it as a workspace and as an opportunity to potluck both food and ideas. At night, Trade School fills with students, and depending on the nature of the course, the utilitarian furniture constructed by Our Goods founders Caroline Woolard and Rich Watts is rearranged, providing a venue for intimate and large groups. (more…)

Matt Yglesias on the blog thinkprogress.org wrote a post recently concerning a troubling trend in America’s meritocracy: it doesn’t work, at least not as well as in other countries. Except for the United Kingdom, the United States has the lowest level of intergenerational income increase, meaning that, more often than not, people stay put in their parents social class. His data come from a Center for American Progress study. Here’s an illustrative graph:

The data contrast family incomes between late 60s/early 70s and the late 1990s/early 2000s.  While it seems hard to dispute such a comprehensive statistical study, the good news is that there may be other factors at work, at least in a few of the countries above. In the late 1960s, Norway had yet to exploit its substantial oil resources. At the same time, Germany, riven by the Berlin Wall, was emerging from the process of recovering from World War II, as was France. In the later half of the 20th century, however, things got better for Scandinavian and Continental countries. The United Kingdom it seems, however, has less of an excuse. There, stubborn distinctions of class seem to be at work, a barrier to a rising post-war tide that lifted everybody’s boat a bit.

What is to be done, though, in America remains unclear. The U.K. has a far more comprehensive social safety net, as do Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. But since Congress seems incapable of drafting legislation that will help keep the U.S. labor force alive, at least, there’s probably little hope in any effort that seeks to increase social mobility through redistributing wealth, at least as far as political reality is concerned. And, besides, it doesn’t seem to do much for breaking down class in the U.K. Perhaps the answer is more funding for education and school loans. But then that might mean having a less luxurious welfare state for America’s hard working corporate persons. Still, somebody’s got to lose in order for everybody to win.