At the recent US Social Forum in Detroit, we got our first look at the Beehive Collective‘s amazing new campaign graphic: The True Cost of Coal, a project Provisions commissioned as part of its Brushfire initiative. It was a sensation, as throngs of social change activists not only got an amazing education on coal, they witnessed how a great arts and social change project functions.
Free Speech TV has been providing free live video streams and video clips of the US Social Forum.
Click here to go directly to the live stream and view other video clips from the event.
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
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.
Today, contemplate potentials and a future more promising than the present world. We can hope for, imagine, and thus direct a future of our own. In this vein, spend some time exploring:
1) Shareable’s Shareable Futures: a call to arms in the discussion and story telling of “a future we can all believe in.”
2) “Theses on the Terrible Community” by The French Collective Tiqqun. “The question we must answer in a final manner is of a more ethical than political nature because the classic political forms and their categories fit us like our childhood clothing. The question is to know if we prefer the possibility of an unknown danger to the certainty of a present pain. That is to say if we want to continue to live and speak in agreement (dissident perhaps, but always in agreement) with what has been done so far – and thus with the terrible communities – or, if we want to question that small portion of our desire that the culture has not already infested in its mess, to try – in the name of an original happiness – a different path.”
3) The Unplugged: “A shareable future from Vinay Gupta: what would happen if millions of people defined “wealth” as access instead of ownership?”
EATLACMA is a year-long investigation into food, art, culture and politics, a project produced by Fallen Fruit for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Fusing the richness of museum’s collection with the ephemerality of food and the natural growth cycle, EATLACMA’s projects consider food as a common ground that explores the social role of art and ritual in community and human relationships. EATLACMAunfolds seasonally, with artist’s gardens planted and harvested on the museum campus, hands-on public events, and a concurrent exhibition,Fallen Fruit Presents The Fruit of LACMA (June 27-November 7, 2010). It culminates in a day-long event (November 7, 2010) in which over fifty artists and collectives will activate, intervene, and re-imagine the entire museum’s campus and galleries.
You can participate by uploading your video to the project’s Show Us How You Eat YouTube page.
In case you missed the Maker Faire in San Francisco, see it here in 3 minutes and 18 seconds. The fabulously successful DIY adventure is coming for the first time to Detroit: July 31 – August 1, 2010, and on to New York City September 25 – 26, 2010.
Artforum’s Summer issue features Lewis Hyde’s pick hits here. Ranging from Leadbelly to Donald Judd, his list makes an eloquent case for open culture.
Poet, essayist, and cultural critic Lewis Hyde is a MacArthur Fellow; the Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio; a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the author of The Gift (Random House, 1983), a defense of the noncommercial portion of artistic practice. His new book on the ownership of art and ideas, Common as Air, will be published in August by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Aperture’s new issue (subscribe here) features a new project by Los Angeles photographer Kelly Poe. Poe started corresponding with individuals imprisoned for their environmental activism, many convicted in the post-9-11 terror hysteria that equated acts of property destruction with the taking of human life. Poe asked these individuals to pinpoint places in the real world that inspire them. After painstaking research and travel to remote locations and repeated consultation with the prisoners, she used her 8×10 camera to document those locations and share the results.
While they appear similar to great landscape photography from the 20th century, the addition of facsimile letters from the prisoners recasts these images in a decidedly 21st century light.
This weekend, the Open Engagement conference will feature three nationally and internationally renowned artists: Mark Dion, Amy Franceschini, and Nils Norman and will showcase work by Temporary Services, InCUBATE, and a new project by Mark Dion created in collaboration with students from the PSU Art and Social Practice concentration. These artist’s projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships, and tackle subject matter ranging from urban planning, alternative pedagogy, play, fiction, sustainability, political conflict and the social role of the artist.
Can socially engaged art do more harm than good? Are there ethical responsibilities for social art? Does socially engaged art have a responsibility to create public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability?
Open Engagement is a free conference May 14-17, 2010, in Portland, Oregon. This annual conference will be a focal point of a new low residency Art and Social Practice MFA that PSU hopes to launch in Fall of 2010.
More here.
Here’s a way to get perspective on the current size of the BP oil spill. You may need to download Google Earth to make it work.
