Stewards of the Lost Lands

Fort Holmden Lives!

2012-01-25T14:50:00.001-08:00

Photos from Full Circle Mirror Image event held this summer

2012-01-12T08:41:00.000-08:00

Just found this set of beautiful images from a beautiful July event Maurice Small, Johnny Coleman and I worked on this summer. The collards they planted that day are getting huge now at SPACES.

Check out the photostream at: http://www.flickr.com//photos/spacesgallery/sets/72157627193929158/show

A Domestic Revolution?

2011-12-22T14:31:00.000-08:00

I had the amazing good fortune last week to go to Amsterdam to meet an extraordinary group of artists from around the world for work.

While there, I happened across a "The Grand Domestic Revolution (User's Manual)," a project being organized by Casco, a space that explores art in the public realm. Utterly taken by how closely related the project felt to Survival Postures, I was incredibly excited to be able to attend one night of "The Kitchen," a 10 day project where Casco set up a communal kitchen open to whoever wanted to come, at W139, another art space in the city. Every night, 2 teams cooked together, and people doing interesting artistic and political work throughout the city were invited to come talk, present or play around. It was a chaotic, critical, yummy scene, and it was ripe with the kind of participation it takes to make what can be a sad domestic task (like making dinner), into a party.

I was impressed by breadth of people they'd gotten involved, and the crossing over that happened even in the one night I was there, much less the whole 10 days.

Here's a link to the radio show that was being produced from the Kitchen for Red Light radio, with a quick interview one of the organizers Binna Choi, did with me about Survival Postures. It starts around 29:30, but the whole show will give you a sense of what the Kitchen was.

http://www.redlightradio.net/shows/w139radio/kitchen139-08-december-15th

Here are links to other shows from the Kitchen series:
http://www.redlightradio.net/shows/w139radio

And pictures from the series:
http://w139.nl/en/article/20350/kitchen139/

Great news from across the ocean!

The Power of Pizza

2011-12-22T07:11:00.000-08:00

Realized recently that I never really broadcast out the story that ran in The Plain Dealer about building the cob oven on Blaine, which is a shame, because the more we can share what an inspiring moment that was, the better.

I've never participated in anything that captured so much curiosity-- and then channeled the curiosity into people wanting to take part in what was happening. That oven was masterful at drawing people together, into conversation, into playing in the mud, into eating pizza in the company of neighbors and strangers...

Go oven! And go Blaine Avenue!

http://www.cleveland.com/taste/index.ssf/2011/08/handmade_pizza_oven_draws_fans.html

And here's more on City Rising Farm:
http://www.cityrisingfarm.com

Fort #1 Gets Built Last Week... All is Good.

2011-08-01T18:21:00.000-07:00

Cob Oven! Wow! We Built This! It Was Fun!

2011-06-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

This exists now on Blaine Avenue, due to the rock 'em sock 'em team of Josh Koppen and Elle Adams, assisted by a motley and eager crew of helpers. More pictures at: http://picasaweb.google.com/102761565216320118200

Full Circle Mirror Image @ SPACES July 10

2011-06-21T16:52:00.001-07:00

Join us at SPACES for an evening that's all about the plants and the people.

Maurice Small and Johnny Coleman collaborate on 'Full Circle Mirror Image', a living tribute to the full life cycle of one tenacious urban crop-- collard greens. A mirror installation inside and outside the gallery will both cook and grow collard greens, and tell the sensory story of what good food can do to bring people together.

In that spirit, we'll share a light, locally-sourced dinner and some good company.

For the last twenty years, artist Johnny Coleman has composed spaces activated as prayers: requests for guidance, conscious statements of intent, and thanksgiving. His process spans poetry, performance, and a sculptural format that integrates the dramatic presentation of a stage set with the oral tradition of storytelling, while consciously focusing upon private spaces that sometimes exist in the absence of a performer. He has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S., and continues to collaborate with artists nationally.

Master composter, worm translator, food broker and urban advocate Maurice Small has been building urban food systems, creating soil and training youth entrepreneurs for over twenty years. As Learning Garden Director at the Cleveland Botanical Gardens and Co-founder of City Fresh (a project that built food access in Cleveland neighborhoods, while improving urban market access for rural farmers), his work has taken the region by storm. Most recently he's been organizing on food access in Youngstown, and acting as Chief Compost Officer for Spencer’s Boy at www.mauricesmall.tumblr.com.

---
Full Circle Mirror Image
with Maurice Small and Johnny Coleman
Sunday, July 10, 5:00-7:30 pm
SPACES
2220 Superior Viaduct

Suggested donation $5-10 at the door. No one turned away for lack of funds. To reserve your spot and guarantee yourself a plate, please call or email SPACES: 216.621.2314 or contact@spacesgallery.org.

Soil Repair as Wishful Thought...

2011-05-03T07:33:00.000-07:00

This week, a proposal on doing large-scale soil repair in Cleveland that I submitted with The Green Triangle was accepted by this AMAZING project from the Institute for Wishful Thinking (www.theiwt.com). They asked for proposals on what we think the government should be doing and supporting-- and are working to promote those who responded as Artists in Residence with the US Government. It's an exciting vision for bringing people-based design work into public policy.

All the proposals they received are online, so check it out!

http://theiwt.com/proposals/artists-kate-sopko-the-green-triangle/

Animal Alphabet Shout

2011-04-24T19:31:00.000-07:00

This book of collages I made for my incredibly charming nephew Noah this Christmas may get printed for wider consumption this summer. Keep your eyes out. But for the moment, here's a photo I just came across again of all the pieces laid out...

Here's What Happened at Survival Postures

2011-03-23T21:28:00.000-07:00

A website documenting the Survival Postures project and exhibition (which happened at SPACES on March 20) is up and running! Check it out at: www.survivalpostures.weebly.com.

Standing Tall

2011-02-25T07:50:00.001-08:00

Responses on Survival Postures have been incredible! Around twenty folks from Cleveland and beyond jumped head first into this social experiment, and have taken on some amazing projects.

Cleveland puppeteer Diana Sette worked with a master weaver to learn how to process and spin wool, and built a large-scale “human loom” made out of people. Emelio DiSabato and Joel Solow chipped away at snow on the Abbey Bridge in Tremont, attempting to clear a path on one of the two walkways into their neighborhood that becomes unpassable to pedestrians and cyclists after snow, often for days on end. Simon and Giulia, members of a new farm collective in New York state, began the process of brewing a cup tea from scratch and spent the month learning how you decide what trees in a healthy woodland can be harvested for firewood and how to use a chainsaw. Maria Miranda, of Cleveland’s Whisper to a Scream, translated the assignment into what it takes to survive within culture as it currently stands. She spent the month being “beauty-compliant,” wearing makeup and fashionable clothes, processing her hair, and consuming the media and products marketed to her to craft a “successful look”. Several people learned how to sew for the first time, Carmen Tracey making homemade menstrual pads after researching the toxicity of feminine hygiene products.

These folks and many more will show their stuff at the Survival Postures community dinner and exhibit held at SPACES on Sunday, March 20 at 5:30 pm. Come be a part of it!

Time to Work on that Survival Posture...

2011-01-16T19:12:00.000-08:00

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!

Inviting You to Spend Some Time Dreaming About Myths

2010-01-18T14:58:00.000-08:00

You are invited to participate in a large-scale imagining: in collaboration with Cleveland author RA Washington, I'm asking a group of writers, artists and visionaries to use the following writing on myths in our time as a prompt for a piece (writing or visual art: your choice) of your own.

We will be collecting submissions of selected work done off this prompt into a book and a public reading.

The deadline for submissions is Friday, April 2, 2010. Work can be sent to stewardsoflostlands@gmail.com, or you can contact me there to arrange a drop-off. After the work is reviewed, we’ll let folks know the plan for releasing the collection and staging a reading/viewing. If you have any questions, drop a line at the above contact info.

We look forward to seeing what people come up with! The writing prompt follows right... now...

---
Why the Leaves FallBloomFall

The earth was a goddess whose daughter was abducted by the god of the underworld. Hades kept the girl a captive underground, while her mother raged and withered, unwilling to put forth any fruit until she found her Persephone. The leaves withdrew, the grains hardened, the sun clouded over. Demeter did eventually bring her daughter home, but not before the girl (perhaps starving for a simple taste of above-ground ripeness) had eaten 4 pomegranate seeds in the underworld. For this, she was condemned to return there for 4 months each year, a season her mother would from then on make cold, barren and bleak.

So, winter is because of pomegranate seeds, or more succinctly, because someone was held against her will. Which feels like winter, doesn’t it? Like darkness rolling in at 4:00 pm and icy forbidding streets to slip on while carrying your groceries. Like dirty slush, full buses and the sudden awareness through its freezing on your bones that your flesh is simply meat after all.

Demeter, Persephone and Hades are such a part of my mind’s firmament that I refused some pomegranate offered me in late February this year, out of fear I might draw the long winter out even longer. Strange to think a story so couched in antiquated human dynamics can still transfix me.

I was told their story as a kid to illustrate how myths animate the world with characters whose actions explain why things happen the way they do. But what makes a tale like this stick, when its characters are a bit tired, really, and its human interplay a throwback to my ears? Have we simply not come up with new stories compelling enough to replace them? Or do they hold a specific grotesque, primal magic that new times haven’t produced stories to match?

We’re in new times now, and new times call for new myths that answer to the times, making sense of the world as we know it. So, I want to start asking people a question: what could you use a myth to explain for you?

Maybe a myth for the birth of the imperial mind, how the prevailing assumption got made that domination will always trump cooperation.

Or, a myth to explain Messiah complexes, and the desire for Messianic figures, and the complex complexes built around Messiahs for the people that follow them.

I could use a myth about the speeding up of all things: thought, desire, gratification, discovery, information, ambition, and our minds as well, taking it all in, flashing like strobes.

How about a myth for what happens to the presumed eternal forces of earth and air and fire and water when under the influence of pollutants? Do they look and act the same as in the old stories? Rule the stars reliably? Or are they sick and tired?

Maybe there should be a myth about epidemics of boredom and malaise when there is so much waiting to be done.

I’d like a mythology where women don’t have to be raped by gods to give birth to or be something sacred.

I’d very much be into a myth about the drive to couple and uncouple, the difference between expectation and possession and love itself, and what you reproduce for in the end-times. What sex and relation can produce in end-times.

I’d like one for a virtual world, for infinite anonymous personae, for disguises upon disguises upon disguises and the impact the concealments have on the true and the slow.

And then, maybe a myth where binary and nonbinary thought duke it out in the dark woods.

I wonder, how would they conduct their fighting?

-- Kate Sopko, Cleveland, Ohio

Newsflash: Obama Defunds Yucca Mountain Project

2009-03-10T13:45:00.000-07:00

Here's an exciting update on the plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain covered in "Stewards". The Obama administration has pulled funds from the project for 2009, with the exception of money that would be used to review it for licensing.

The whole story's here:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gytJPJlVIdkL9W6KPUevCUbtU-sgD96J2P3G0

This very overdue critique of this project is great news!

Saturday, April 19, New York City

2008-04-16T15:35:00.001-07:00

Community is Conversation

2008-03-19T17:02:00.000-07:00

I like the idea of a noun like "community"(something often presented as a fixed entity) instead being the dynamic result of a million personal decisions. Community is what comes of many, many small investments. People choosing to (or choosing not to) talk with one another, scrape each others' cars out of snowdrifts, share dinner... Those are the small things. And the big things-- like maintaining schools, facing crime in neighborhoods, deciding what businesses are welcome where you live-- grow from the small things having been done.

On Thursday, April 3, I'm putting together a dialogue called "Community is Conversation" at Visible Voice Books in Tremont (1023 Kenilworth). It started off as another "Stewards" reading, but honestly, I'd very much like to move from the point of simply putting the material forward, and instead talk among friends and strangers about some of the ideas the book goes into.

The event announcement follows. If you're into it, come on by...

***
Do you ever think about the role of community in modern-day America?

About what brings people together and pushes them apart?

About what impact virtual reality is having on how we interact with one another face to face?

About the increasingly tentative hold young people have on history and what that does
to our investment in the world around us?

About where hopeful momentum can come from when there seem to be too many reasons
not to care anymore?

Come discuss the kinds of ideas we don’t talk about enough, in a night inspired by ‘Stewards of the Lost Lands,’ a new collection of work by kate sopko about how an American mental terrain can limit the social initiative of people who care.

You don’t have to have read the book to be a part of the discussion. You just have to be interested.

Community is Conversation: A Reading and Dialogue based on Stewards of the Lost Lands
Thursday, April 3, 8:00 PM
Visible Voice Books (1023 Kenilworth Avenue)

Teacher/Student

2008-02-21T18:03:00.001-08:00

"I have come to believe over and over again, that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.... My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.... and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken." (Audre Lorde)

I've never been a natural at social outings...

One of the more unexpected parts of adulthood for me has been the experience of suddenly losing old patterns of behavior-- things, like social anxiety, that always felt permanently embedded in my personality. Somehow, just like snakeskin, the human body knows when to get rid of obsolete psychological functions. They can and often do simply slip out of use when the time comes for them to go.

The funny thing is, it's often our inability to believe something has changed that makes an old pattern end up overstaying its welcome.

Finding your voice means you are then called to use it. Part of the act of finding it, too, means you've been refining its usage, whether you're aware of the fact or not. When we are called upon to speak, we are quite capable of doing it.

I remember the tremendous feeling of power I found in the words of Audre Lorde, when she wrote (in the context of fighting breast cancer) that our silence does nothing to protect us. She was really pointing out that there is nothing for people to gain by drowning out what they know. The truth can not be hidden forever. It floats upward like oil in water. This is not always apparent, since prevailing forces spend much time making sure that critical voices are quieted, whatever it takes. Many countercultural voices of great value have been explicitly given the choice between speaking their truth and having their lives taken or the quality of their lives reduced through violence or threats of violence. Lorde argued that this is a false choice: the underlying truth is we have more to fear from negating our voice, and that whenever we respond to fear with silence, we have handed over the very source of what makes our lives livable to an ill culture.

That's an idea to keep firmly in mind.

My struggle with this now is subtle. It lies in not totally believing my voice works, in being thrust into positions where I am speaking but am not used to having my words publicly received.

Part of speaking in public and of being received is that Americans are not very used to participatory discussion. We tend to place performer/audience or teacher/student roles upon anyone presenting information. We want to know who's in charge, who is supposed to speak, who is supposed to be listened to, and who we shouldn't bother paying attention to. Imagine walking into a room for a lecture: many people would get automatically anxious, maybe even leave, if it appeared that the room was set up for small-group discussion rather than for a traditional presentation from a podium (something that doesn't demand more from us than our apparent attention...)

This is hierarchy. It is hard to challenge. I have found myself unsure of how to respond to feedback on my work lately, because I keep assuming I am being responded to as something of an authority figure. I know I am not an authority on anything but the glimpses of life I have lived through, and that teacher/student roles are very fluid things. The tricky part is bringing this view to the surface in conversation, asking questions about content and ideas and having discussion allow everyone involved to contribute.

Not much by way of solutions here, just thinking...

The Interview Game

2008-02-07T15:04:00.001-08:00

This is something I've loved to play with people for a few years now. Simple as hell, but a good way to equalize conversation and to learn a lot about someone in a short amount of time. There are only three rules:

- You take turns asking questions.
- Answers must be 100% honest.
- You may not ask the same question back.

I learned through playing this game frequently that I like EVERYTHING about interviews! Making up questions, hearing answers, finding out what others want to hear about...

Which brings me to how happy I am to have had a couple opportunities in the past few weeks to go on radio shows and talk about ideas that excite me. The next one of these is this upcoming Tuesday night (February 12), from 9:00-10:00 PM on Cleveland's WRUW, 91.1 FM. This is Voices and Choices, a great radio show that's been laying out the facts about threats to and organizing around reproductive rights for years.

Neat! I wish more people got to have intense conversations over the airwaves. I would listen with great interest...

Dense.

2008-02-05T08:59:00.000-08:00

This past week, Language Foundry writers Joseph Makkos, Carmen Tracy and me, and tech crew Jose Luna took a trip to New York City under a bad moon. We were heading out to read as part of a Small Press reading done monthly at Greenwich Village's Think Coffee (thinkcoffeenyc.com/cup-and-pen). The reading was sweet, though we rolled in 20 minutes late after a series of unfortunate events-- the kind that come with such severity, whimsy and synchronicity, it's hard not to read some sort of meta-narrative into them. Like, are we supposed to skip this trip entirely, now that the 60 mile-per-hour winds are blowing, and the electricity's gone, and all the male intuition around us has its red alert blaring?

But we made it, and the reading was great. If you're from New York, check out Think Coffee. I was really impressed with the list of upcoming events I happened to see advertised there. Friday night, there was a panel on alternative energy, including staff from Just Food (a great NYC organization that sets up CSA's and urban gardens: www.justfood.org).

I ended up stranded in the city for two extra days after buses into Cleveland were cancelled due to weather. I walked around a lot, saw many different sections of the city... New York's tough. I think I tend to assume that when you have such a density of people, you'll see a lot of interesting social interaction going on: the magic of chance meetings. Instead, I got the feeling that the density has really made people put up invisible auras around themselves to ward off possible conversation or contact. You can be standing a half-inch away from someone on the subway and never make any indication they exist. In fact, that's par for the course, the accepted way of doing things.

I was lucky to get to talk with several people I love who now live in New York-- Angela, Megan and Manuel. All of them had things to say about the social isolation of the city, most interestingly, that they felt cut off as artists and activists from other artists and activists, which is pretty crazy, given how I'd always thought both were alive and very well in New York.

Which they are, just not on the surface. What's on the surface is money, not people. People are everywhere, but getting to see their faces is so very difficult-- so much social expectation to navigate, so much fashion sense to cut through, so many rules about where you can sit and how much it will cost you.

It was good for me to see this particular dynamic, as depressing as it was. I've written about how suburban culture pushes people away from each other, and how I believe urban life in certain forms can combat that, just by people being in proximity to each other. But New York really underlined to me how in the end, proximity can help people get in each others' space, but it doesn't mean people will choose to relate with one another. Relationship really is about making a choice, and we seem to be excelling in America lately at coming up with mores that distract people from doing that.

Doing It Yourself

2008-01-28T16:17:00.000-08:00

The thing I love most about a DIY approach to life (in art-making, in organizing, etc...) is how it forces critical thought. Not being able to depend on an institution to provide blueprints for getting something done, or tech support along the way, DIY means you react to each new stage of a project and the demands it makes on you. You do this with whatever resources you have, the biggest ones usually being ingenuity, passion and adaptability.

Cash and time tend to be the resources most out of reach for DIY projects. There's a lot of us scrapping out here. It's one reason I really like Cleveland. There are a lot of people out here carving out lives for themselves by pitching in as much energy as they possibly can for their art or social vision and not demanding anything in return.

Where it gets difficult is in striking a healthy balance: how do we sustain energy over lengthy projects? How do we start new projects without jeopardizing the always precarious DIY ecosystems we already belong to?

I've been confronting the reality of my limited energy lately, and am a little sad about how there are bounds to how much can be accomplished-- that certain visions will fail if the people involved get distracted by new visions. That's an energetic economy hard to grapple with.

Several weeks have passed since the book release, and despite much list-making and a couple of readings, I am far behind on getting books into the hands of the many people and stores they are intended for. Just another illustration of how when you do it on your own, all the work is also your own, and each task take its allotted time, and that time may take up time allotted for something else.

It's becoming more and more crucial to me that people working as artists and visionaries of the ground-up variety pool our resources innovatively, lend hands to each other's efforts, live together, feed each other, raise each other's kids, and take turns taking out the trash. Each of those things take time, so each of them, whether little or big means so much to how well our visions take shape.

For a great forum on striking the balance between making a life and making a living, check out: www.passionsandsurvival.blogspot.com.

A Beautiful Night....

2008-01-15T08:07:00.000-08:00

This past Saturday was the book release and dance party. Turned out to be a gorgeous night--- I was basically overwhelmed by the warmth and receptivity of those who came to the reading and the way people opened up in discussion afterward. It seems like there is something in the air lately: a larger willingness in people to stand exposed to each other and talk about the things we want to transform in ourselves and the world around us. At least, that has been my experience, and I'm happy to feel the opening. It bodes well for things.

I'd like to thank the very large group of people who made Saturday so amazing, including all those who came out for both events, plus the remarkable readers Carmen Tracy, Angela Beallor and Katie Daley and super-host deb. Everyone who carted things around, cleaned, played host, worked the table, THANK YOU!

"Stewards of the Lost Lands" can be found online at: www.alternaqueerbooks.com/stoflolakaso.html or in the flesh at Suspect Thoughts Books (Clark & West 50th.) New locations TBA soon.

Book Release This Weekend

2008-01-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

'Stewards of the Lost Lands' will have its official release Saturday, January 12 at a reading at C-Space (4323 Clark Avenue.) With poets Carmen Tracy, Angela Beallor, Katie Daley and host deb~:, it's shaping up to be an amazing night of words and discussion. The reading starts at 8:00 PM, and is followed by a DIY dance party at Tremont's Language Foundry.