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.

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?”

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.”

Yesterday, Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare launched a new public art project as part of Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth program.  It commemorates Britain’s colonial trading history in Africa and the East Indies as an opening for dialogue and celebration of today’s multi-culturalism.

Plan before you plant. Check out this City Farmer post; they have been digging up some vintage videos from the victory garden era. See some of them here. Scroll through City Farmer News to read about urban gardening movements all around the world.

Owning land in Detroit just got even ‘cheaper’–increasing plausibility of a new commons therein.

“You’re invited to buy land and ‘move’ to Detroit,” says Loveland, a project which developed in the summer of 2009, “with a vision for combining the social fun of online games with the creative development of real land, and an open ‘let’s figure things out as we go along’ attitude.”

Combining both the fantastic and the real, part Farmville, part real life commune, Loveland allows individuals to purchase land in Detroit for $1 per inch along side other purchasers or, better, investors. The objective: to provide  access to land and space wherein the purpose of that space is  determined by the common; intent can span from conceptual project to tangible actual urban renewal.

Wrap your head around it all this Tuesday by tuning into Basekamp’s weekly Skype ‘potluck’ discussion on Plausible Artworlds wherein they will be conversing with the creators of Loveland and others who care to join in the discussion.

Here’s a video from Jerry, Loveland mastermind

*Above: Inchy, Official Mascot and spokesperson of Loveland

Artist and activist Ellen O’Grady documents personal and political circumstances facing Palestinians as Israeli continues to expand settlements.  Her new book, Outside the Ark: An Artist’s Journey in Occupied Palestine, is based on seven years’ experience working in Palestine and Israel.

Join Ellen in Washington for an event co-sponsored by U.S. Campaign to End Israeli Occupation and Foreign Policy In Focus, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. Please RSVP to netfa@ips-dc.org or by calling 202-787-5229.

Order the book here.

Mostar has been a divided city for over fifteen years now, and there are no indications that this fact will change soon enough. It has been divided since the 90’s war in Yugoslavia, and the borderline since then has been a street in the center of the city called the “Boulevard.” This street, although in a state of reconstruction and revival, still functions as a phantom limb – a mental borderline in the consciousness of people. Today, this division is supported by parallel educational and cultural institutions which glorify the separate nationalist attitudes and their programs; ideologies reflected through architecture; divided water supply/waste systems; and urban construction works that keep the city being divided.

Next week, with the city of Mostar as a backdrop, The Festival of Divided Cites will showcase the research of a group of citizen-activists living and working in the divided cities of Mostar, Kosovska Mitrovica, Beirut and Berlin. The Festival treats the city as a starting point for a multidisciplinary approach to the issue of public space divisions. Research participants will present, analyze and discuss various material, including artwork and concepts as well as theoretical works on the subject with the aim of deconstructing myths of stereotypical divisions.

Since the arts can be an agent for social change, and community arts propel this in the public realm, then how do we, within an economic system that tends to manipulate public activity for profit, thus often watering down or altering such potential for public artistic expression, maintain the integrity, sincerity, and purity of our work therein? Although such a question has been asked before, it must continuously be revisited; thus, similar questions were recently explored at At the Crossroads: A Community Arts and Development Convening at the Community Arts Training Institute and the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission at RAC Cultural Resource Center in St. Louis, MO.

Key note speaker, Arlene Goldbard,  presented “Reframing Art’s Public Purpose,” which can be downloaded here. The piece involves its audience in an interactive workshop aimed at preparing others on how to “justify art’s public purpose” beyond economic models. Goldbard states:

“For too long, advocates have been trying (and failing) to justify art’s public purpose with weak secondary effects: art boosts tax revenues through the economic multiplier effect, playing in the school orchestra raises students’ test scores, and so on. The net result is a 30-year decline in arts allocations; for instance, the NEA has lost nearly half the real value of its budget since Ronald Reagan took office…These advocacy strategies are too confining and too narrowly conceived to excite public support. As cognitive science has been demonstrating, decisions about social issues are based on reasoning that includes emotions, metaphors, stories and other kinds of information, and often these factors are more determinative than numeric data. Advocates need to connect to resonant emotional themes and images that can really engage people.”

For further reading on this topic check out No Room to Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City from Mute Magazine, which deals with a new era of public artists who continuously have to deal with the “exclusionary politics of urban regeneration.”

“Breaking down into a report and collection of interviews, this investigation consistently focuses on the possibility and forms of critical public art within a regime that fetishises ‘creativity’ whilst systematically destroying the preconditions for it in its pursuit of capital accumulation. How, they ask, is critical art shaped by its interaction with this aspect of biopolitical governance?”