New Digs

I've migrated work over to a new, more comprehensive site: 
http://survivalpostures.weebly.com/

Visit at will!

Newark Creek

Spent this summer and fall having the extraordinary opportunity to work with people in the Cleveland neighborhoods of Stockyards, Buckeye-Shaker-Larchmere, Glenville, Central and Mill Creek to design out how they wanted to make the places they live be more inviting, beautiful, creative, and inspiring. This was a pilot year for a project called City Repair (which originated in Portland, OR) in Cleveland. The dedication people showed over the course of 6 months-- to making meeting after meeting, drawing in new people and putting in a huge amount of hours and brain-power to get projects implemented-- was pretty unbelievable.  The photo above is of Newark Court, an alleyway in Stockyards about 850 feet long.  The long-term plan is to paint the entire length of the alley as a stream (since a stream actually does run underneath the street).  Because the actual painting of the pavement has to wait until City approval comes through, neighbors came up with a Plan B of getting permission of every single property owner on the alley to pain their fences and garages as the streambed.  It came out gorgeously. But more importantly, I have maybe never seen any other project pull together so many people in such a short period of time as new friends, and collaborators in re-envisioning our world together.  I am so excited to see where this goes from here!

Deep in the Heart of Texas: It's Dragon Fort

There is materiality to our lives and our decision-making.  Our traffic patterns, the places we live in, the thoughts we think and the conversations we have all have a real physicality.  Physicality you may not be able to see or to clearly connect to its causes or effects, but that exists and informs our movements, habitats and relationships.  We design this material world, often more through ommission than commission.  It's design then helps conjure things out of us.  And makes other things less likely.  

Christopher Alexander's attempts-- in books like A Pattern Language-- to explicitly name design patterns that make structures alive rather than dead was a real service to anyone trying to build a material world that conjures life out of us. 

For me, building these forts is about putting in practice, learning how to put into material form my desire to be alive, since much of what has been around me structurally since birth is dead space that conjures death from myself and others.  These forts in process and form, for me, question what is worth protecting and preserving, and what behaviors a sane culture would seek to cultivate through all it builds.

 

What attracted me to the thorn bush is how it immediately displaces you in space and time.  It's a surprising thing to come across.  Though its design draws from structures that form themselves naturally from fallen trees and brush, is an improbably cleaned up, human-scale version.  It has barbed, scary edges.  It feels like fairy tales.  It asks the same thing of you that any encounter with intense powers in the universe asks: that you walk into your fear and sit down to have a conversation. 

I think that because this fort asks that of a person, it's innards can have a specific power to re-center energy. It takes you to a different place, where different ways of perceiving and being are possible.  It implicitly asks what of yourself is most worth protecting.

More at: http://wehavetobeerrant.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/habitable-spaces/
and check out Angela's second TX fort at:
http://wehavetobeerrant.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/habitable-spaces-fort-2/

The Thorn Bushes are Bigger in Texas...

Spent a surreal last week building a thorn bush fort in rural Texas with one of my favorite people in the world, one Miss Angela Beallor.  We were in residence at Habitable Spaces, a combination sustainable farm and residency program just getting underway near Kingsbury, Texas.  The remoteness of the land, the hugeness of the sky, the barbedness of just about everything (plant life, animal life, the sharp noon day sun and some sharp cold nights) made for a fascinating awakening.  I loved being in such a foreign topography.  Gathering up simply stunning flint (in blood reds, oranges, browns), and branches from all sorts of thorny things made for a week I won't soon forget.  More pictures on the way soon.

Fort Holmden Lives!

Photos from Full Circle Mirror Image event held this summer

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?

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

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.

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

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

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...

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!

Animal Alphabet Shout

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

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...

---
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

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

Community is Conversation

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)