There are parts of oneself that are unseen, left behind and forgotten. They come out at night, calling for one’s attention in dreams. If one responds to the call, one can re-member oneself and redirect the newly gained energy to a new place within and without. If one keeps neglecting the call, it becomes a nightmare, haunting oneself in dreaming and waking realities.

  1. First drawing, I start by writing: “I know how to draw, and the thing (I name it) in front of me knows how to be the thing in front of me” and draw it according (that I know how to draw a thing that knows how to be itself)
  2. Second drawing “I know how to draw, and the thing in front of me doesn’t know how to be the thing in front of me”
  3. Third drawing “I don’t know how to draw, and the thing in front of me knows how to the thing in front of me”
  4. Fourth drawing “I don’t know how to draw, and the thing in front of me doesn’t know how to be the thing in front of me”
  • First drawing, I start by writing: “I know how to draw, and the thing (I name it) in front of me knows how to be the thing in front of me” and draw it according (that I know how to draw a thing that knows how to be itself)
  • Second drawing “I know how to draw, and the thing in front of me doesn’t know how to be the thing in front of me”
  • Third drawing “I don’t know how to draw, and the thing in front of me knows how to the thing in front of me”
  • Fourth drawing “I don’t know how to draw, and the thing in front of me doesn’t know how to be the thing in front of me”

This one-hour meeting will work with participants’ night dreams to communally address, hear and respond to the needs of the forgotten parts of the self. It will provide basic tools for sensing, feeling and understanding one’s own dreams and re-turning to them as to a source of infinite, abundant, embodied knowledge.

For the participants: Bring into the session a recent dream.

We live in a haunted world. Our present is imbued with ghosts speaking from both past and future. They are a paradox, an absence, human and other-than-human, that is nevertheless eerily present and influential. They might point out that something is missing, something is wrong. Ghosts show us that time is not linear, but entangled, thick and layered.

Rasa Alksnyte

Chapter 1

MY FAMILY:
THE REPRESENTATION OF A PART
OF THE COMPANY IN COLOMBIA

And the reflection of a part of me.

Part 1.

We debugged many things between us, we were talking about things from the past and cleaning every corner of my parents’ house. We also try the emotional corners, this takes more time and work.

I see my family about once a year. But I have not been with them 24 hours a day for 14 years and less in such long periods. Which brought us to other concrete confrontations with issues such as: gender, and beliefs regarding ways of life. From the positives to the negatives. We are 6 children of the same father and mother. And a 7 sister only on daddy’s side. That she is 6 or 7 years old and I still do not know her. It is difficult for my father to understand that there is no problem and that integrating things through communication is easier and more loving.

Within my family nucleus, according to what I heard from one of my sisters in this “visit” we are 17 people. Their activities are intense on a weekly basis, as they participate in many individual and social activities together. On one hand I am the most isolated because I live in another country, on the other hand I find it suffocating many times. Other times I miss it.

How do we form community connections?

Places are an important ingredient in the connections we are able to form and sustain, whether it be a city, a theater, a neighborhood, or a video lounge. Amidst post-pandemic cultural production many performance makers are moving from stage to site, engaging novel contexts for artistic exploration and presentation. However, this shift is more than a matter of location. A site is also a place which reflects many natural and social histories and communities. As we face troubling legacies of colonialism, displacement and gentrification, and environmental destruction it is urgent to address how we access, interact and impact the places we engage. Here we hear from Joanna Haigood, artistic director of Zaccho Dance Theatre, on her work to engage sites as architectural, material, and cultural environments.

“The Happy Seven”

things to be a Good Listener:

1. Being silent

The first prompt is slightly banal, but proven: speech is silver, silence is gold. When you listen, the majority of your attention is focused on the interlocutor, so by the force of things, you use fewer words. Have you noticed that closed-mouth people are usually believed to be the best listeners?

Who We Are

We believe that relationships are the first site of social change.

The Skywatchers Ensemble is an enduring dialogic performance-based and cross-disciplinary community arts program in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, informed by an ethos that large-scale social change begins with forging durational relationships of trust. A mixed-ability ensemble composed of professional artists and Tenderloin neighbors subject to conditions of housing insecurity and disenfranchisement, the collaborative partners together create works that amplify underrepresented stories about neighbors’ lives, histories, and urgencies, and then position these voices strategically within artistic and civic discourses.

“Together, Skywatchers is co-creating work that at once celebrates our shared humanity and speaks directly to the most profound ruptures of our society. We position our work strategically in the public domain and the civic discourse with a shared commitment to addressing structural inequity.

We are learning to collaborate in ways that are beautiful, rigorous, powerful, and true to community concerns and urgencies. We are learning every day.

Witnessing and creating together, we discover and invent myriad ways to embody, agitate, celebrate, and render complex stories in eloquent ways that feature the talent and creative abilities of ensemble members. The distinction between self-described artists and community participants is one that we deliberately and regularly transgress in our work, claiming our individual experiences and expertise without placing comparative values on our respective contributions.”

Our process is our product.

Anne Bluethenthal, Founder and Associate Artistic Director of ABD Productions and Skywatchers

pon., 13 cze 2020 

liebe agata,
my name is veronika blumstein. I live in southern california. such critical times here.  I’ve been gone for so long. how can I really know what’s happening there if I’m here and vice-versa.

Materials in the collages have been collected from educational booklets on nature, science, guides on hiking and fishing, an illustrated guide on weight lifting, all printed in the socialist period. They we all found in Estonia, in Massiaru school, in Massia project space (massia.ee) in August 2020.

Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, offered this lecture on The Rite of Spring by Nijinsky and Stravinsky at CounterPulse in June of 2020. Halberstam explores issues at the intersection of queer theory and wildness/modernity.

This lecture is related to a chapter in Halberstam’s latest book, forthcoming in October 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: The Wild Beyond: Music, Architecture and Anarchy.

Our Values

Collaborative

Skywatchers Artist Facilitators engage in enduring collaborative relationships with Resident Ensemble members on projects large and small, and involving a broad range of disciplines and creative practices. All are arts-based celebrations of the lives, histories, wisdom, talents, victories, challenges, and urgent concerns of Skywatchers participants.

Community-Centered

The Skywatchers process is “of, by, and for” its participants-residents of the Tenderloin and beyond. In collaboration with Skywatchers Artist Facilitators, community members become storytellers, co-creators, performers, and audience members on a creative platform of their own making.

Reimagining forms of relation entails imagining new genres of experience

Sex, or the Unbearable — Laurent Berlant and Lee Edelman

I have sought to show how the terms ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are abstractions which in their concreteness are identical

Peter Sjöstedt-H

Embracing Complexity introduces the concept of Radical Sociability; a strategy for enacting an intersectional affinity based politics. It is recommended to download the audio file and take a walk with it someplace where you will have little distraction, and hopefully some greenery. 

This piece draws on my research and includes many references from contemporary writers. For ease of listening in this format, not all references have been listed in the sound piece, but please see here for a list of quotes and acknowledgements.

I intend on continuing this research, and am very much aware of gaps in my own experiential knowledge. If you have feedback or comments, please get in touch to discuss: [email protected]

“The ethics of affluence insist upon civic obligations and when we assume that obligation we reveal not our solitary goodwill but our dependence on others… None of us is alone: each of us is dependent on others – some of us depend on others for life itself.”

Toni Morrison, The Price of Wealth, The Cost of Care, May. 9, 2013

III

DREAMING THE FUTURE

Exercise

Next time your Eyes are closed

Imagine your most desired future Self

Imagine the most desired feeling that your Body wishes for

Imagine the most desired sensation of your Interconnected Body

Imagine the most desired state of your Earth Body

Imagine the most desired experience of the Cosmic Body

Imagine your most desired future Self

I did not watch the news last night. Instead, I looked at a small robot color in the states once they were called. Borders made by men so thin on this paper.

To scale, the robot hovering from left to right making tiny halted rotations as it colors in blue and red and blue and red looks like the most giant UFO. The visual ASMR of quiet repetitive motion, the patient scrawl, the stillness until there is something known.

Thursday
November 5th, 2020
9:15am

I expect the swing states are still sitting blank in front of the robot holding her markers. All these numbers are humans. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that.

(When is the last time we had a one term president? When is the last time we had a president who did not abuse his power for the sake of power? I told myself I would not be surprised any longer. I did not tell myself I wouldn’t be disappointed.)

Not Invested

11/03/2020

Just because I am really invested in Trump not being reelected, doesn’t mean I am invested with Joe Biden. I like Kamala for the obvious diversity, sanity, intelligence, class, gender, and point of view that she brings to this election. And of course she will be making history as the first BIPOC woman Vice POTUS. With all this said she has made some pretty questionable – fucked up prosecution, and legislative moves as San Francisco DA and Later as the CA. DA. Her congressional record is OK.

Introductions Footnotes

1. HMD is working with consultant Safi Jiroh (LeaderSpring Center) on developing a model for its transition to distributed leadership.

2. Power Shift: Improvisation, Activism, and Community, the Bridge Project’s 10th Anniversary program, concluded in November 2020. Visit bridgeproject.art for a full archive to this and other Bridge Project programs.

Question #1

What role does deepening distributed leadership within HMD play in dismantling white supremacy?

Slow Rave

(something for your soul)

Conversation with Zornitsa Stoyanova and Sarah Vanhee

Embracing Complexity introduces the concept of Radical Sociability; a strategy for enacting an intersectional affinity based politics. It is recommended to download the audio file and take a walk with it someplace where you will have little distraction, and hopefully some greenery. 

This piece draws on my research and includes many references from contemporary writers. For ease of listening in this format, not all references have been listed in the sound piece, but please see here for a list of quotes and acknowledgements.

I intend on continuing this research, and am very much aware of gaps in my own experiential knowledge. If you have feedback or comments, please get in touch to discuss: [email protected]

Practice Prayer

Buy Digital Track

at bandcamp.com

Contributors

jose e. abad, Zoe Bender, Anne Bluethenthal, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Malia Byrnes, Hope Casareno, Gabriel Christian, Rebecca Chun, Melanie DeMore, Leigh Gaymon Jones, Jubilee July, Shakiri, Dazié Grego-Sykes, Donna Rae Palmer, Yanina Rivera, Deirdre Visser, and Joel Yates.

Gabriel Christian, Rebecca Chun, Melanie DeMore, jose e. abad, Zoe Bender, Anne Bluethenthal, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Malia Byrnes, Hope Casareno,Leigh Gaymon Jones, Jubilee July, jose e. abad, Zoe Bender, Anne Bluethenthal, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Malia Byrnes, Hope Casareno, Shakiri, Dazié Grego-Sykes, Donna Rae Palmer, Yanina Rivera, Deirdre Visser, and Joel Yates.

References

Astrida Neimanis, Hydrofeminism, Or on Becoming a Body of Water, in Undutiful Daughters, New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practices. Palgrave Macmillan 2012.

Bruno Latour, From Multiculturalism to Multinaturalism; What Rules of Method for the New Socio-Scientific Experiments. Nature and Culture, V. 6, Spring 2011.

Appendix

FEMME-ifesto

Please click through here to read

Me in Bogota

spontaneous recording, 01. April 2020
(in Spanish)

Grand re Union Statement

see all versions

a live-broadcasted event

Grand re Union JAM

from LAB Project in Poznan, Poland
streamed on Facebook Grand re Union

Friday, June 25th 
19:00 CET till 23:00 CET | 18:00-22:00 BST | 10:00-13:00 PDT

Stream Program
Moving the Mirror

the team (Caroline Neill Alexander, Aleksandra Borys, Oliver Connew, Marc Lohr, Peter Pleyer, Paweł Sakowicz, Maria Stokłosa) will improvise live from Poznan and from afar on the screen.

Grand re Union talks

with the instigators of the project (Marta Keil, Joanna Leśnierowska, Julie Phelps, Rivca Rubin, Peter Pleyer) about past & future.

One subject, two people, ten talks

Andrew Morrish from Australia (on the screen) and Ola Bożek-Muszyńska (from Poznan) will perform together live.

Addendum

the following is my realization of this score:

today

i face north and think about greenhouse gas emissions and the melting of the arctic ice

i face east and think about the ‘illiberal democracy’ viktor orban is manipulating into existence in hungary

i face south and think about the unceasing conflict in the middle east

i face west and think about one of the many places in the world experiencing severe drought