Thursday, February 11, 2021; 6pm PST 40 minute panel followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at the lab.org RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK
Terrain: Art & Crisis in Downtown Oakland, a new standalone print publication, features Oakland artists who responded to the interlocking crises of 2020 with mutual aid, public art, and a commitment to principled, collective struggle against racial capitalism. Published by Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS, Terrain includes essays, manifestos, design, interviews, and criticism seeded during a year of privation and unrest in and around downtown Oakland and Lake Merritt.
This installment of Forum features five Terrain contributors in conversation: alex cruse, whose “Towards a Back Loop at the End of the Worlds” locates local protests and a weed-ridden Oakland police herb garden in the “back loop” of resilience ecology; Julian Francis Park, whose “Catastrophic, Everyday, Confrontational — Mutual Aid” uses local examples to clarify the differences between social-reproductive solidarity, charity, and anti-oppressive mutual aid; Tara Marsden of Moments Cooperative & Community Space, which describes prefigurative excavation and collectivity in “When the Walls Are Torn Down;” Dio Brooks, whose conversation with codesigner June Little Soldier and printer Mollie Underwood appears in the publication as an insert; and editor Sam Lefebvre, whose “Plywood & Paint” examines the groundswell of protest murals as counterinsurgent artwashing underwritten by landlords.
Terrain, a 44-page publication perfect-bound and risograph printed in an edition of 200, and available now for presale, was developed through Lefebvre’s writer residency at Pro Arts Gallery & COMMONS. Other individual and collective contributors include Queers United in Community Care, We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, Phillip Greenlief and Brian Bartz.
The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?
Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.
