Here's What Happened at Survival Postures

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

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...

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

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...

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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