Time to Work on that Survival Posture...

Coming up this winter at SPACES gallery in Cleveland: a group social experiment. Wanna join in? Read on for more details.

There’s been a lot of conversation lately among people I know who are social experimenters about the profound disconnection of the work many of us do to raise income from the work that actually supports our survival and the well-being of our communities.

Many of us are seeking to do work that directly provides for our community’s basic needs (growing our own food is just one example). This is a tremendously powerful thing to seek.

Yet, I think it’s important to realize that as a culture, we are very much in infancy when it comes to being actors in our own survival. Many skills basic to our survival are things we do not know how to do anymore. Beyond that, we have not often flexed the muscles that make us providers rather than consumers. A whole new set of cultural practices need to be created that support the strength of these muscles.

In the interest of building these muscles, I’d like to take a cue from feminist performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who, since the late 1960’s has used her art to make visible a hidden, stigmatized world of maintenance work that shores up our whole society. She has said that her work is a conscious attempt to re-link cultural practice with how we practice our own survival, saying that, “Art begins at the same level as basic survival systems.”

The point of the Survival Postures project is to re-link culture and survival deep within our own bodies.

Here’s the assignment: Choose a task that’s essential to your survival or well-being, or the well-being of your community, that you don’t know how to do. Then, sometime this February, learn how to do it.

You’ll document your learning (in photos, on film, in writing or in an audio interview). These will be exhibited at a dinner held at SPACES art gallery in Cleveland on Sunday, March 20 at 5:30. Participating artists are invited to be there to talk about your experience with people who show up.

The task you choose is up to you. It may not be an obvious thing or one that’s even physical. The important thing is that it’s something you feel is central to your well-being that you don’t know how to do for yourself. Choose something doable, and something you’re really motivated to learn.

How you go about learning it is also up to you. You can do it collaboratively, by yourself, consult a teacher or books, take a class… You can take the entire month of February or 2 hours to get it done. Whatever it takes. The point is to learn the task on a deep bodily level, to get to the point where you understand and adopt the posture of that task as survival posture, not a consumer posture.

If you’re interested in taking part, get a hold of me at stewardsoflostlands@gmail.com, and let me know what you might like to work on!