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Last fall I interviewed John Kinsman of the Family Farm Defenders in a live talk-show type format at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum (check out the video here). The interview is posted below and the booklet made of that interview along with other articles by and about John that I produced for FFD to use as a fundraiser is available here for download: kinsman booklet-final-singlepage-web. Thanks to Irina Contreras for the transcription.

John Kinsman Interview

Conducted live by Daniel Tucker at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum (Chicago, IL) on September 27th, 2011

Daniel Tucker (DT): Your parents farmed during the Great Depression. You have said it was easier for farmers then than it is for farmers now. Why is that?

John Kinsman (JK): At that time, we were diversified farmers. We had cows, pigs and chickens. We raised wheat, oats and barley. And when we didn’t have enough money to buy wonderful white bread, sliced white bread, my god we had to eat wheat bread, we took it to the mill and ground it, hated it and now we love it. And we are looking for it all over. So that is part of how we lived but it was not a problem. And it was a leisurely life, believe it or not. We never worked on Sunday. Nobody in the family had to work out [off farm] to support the farm. A farm now is almost a hobby for some people. The man and the woman have to get a job to support their hobby. My parents were able to go to the world’s fair Chicago in 1933 and this is during the Depression. And I remember my grandmother came and took care of us. I forgot how old I was but not old enough to run the farm. And they did that, my grandparents went to California. And I have a picture of that, my grandma with goggles on, she and Grandpa went on a flight in an open cockpit plane in California and so on. Well, anyway it was a more leisurely time. We ate berries everyday so we picked berries. Wild berries and a few tame ones. I remember the gooseberries especially because they were prickly. And my mother canned them. And now we know that berries are very healthy. But, we had berries for almost twice a day and we ate them fresh or canned. And so, it was a good life in spite of the so-called Depression.

DT: You’ve said that you agree with a recent UN report saying “supporting low carbon and resource preserving small holder farms” is the only kind of agriculture that will cool the planet – in reference to global warming. You have farmed organically since the 60’s but you didn’t always. Can you talk about your transition to organic farming and what you have learned from this approach to agriculture?

JK: Certainly. The UW Madison, the College of Agriculture was the best friend of my father and myself. And as time went on, it was like things were changing. We were getting into technology that we had questions about but we thought we had to do it. You know the story of the frog? You put the frog in water and you turn up the heat a little bit and a little bit more and pretty soon the frog is boiled and it doesn’t even jump out. And this happened to us. And I started using herbicides thinking “well, this will save me a lot of time”. And I ended up in the University Hospital with some serious burns. They would never say what it was because of the research going on. But the doctors said, “What’s your name? What’s your occupation?” “Farmer.” “When was the last time you used herbicides or pesticides?” And the same with the med students who examined me. Same thing, exactly. So I knew what it was and yet there wasn’t ever anything in the records that said what it was.

DT: And these were herbicides that they had given you? Is that right?

JK: This was what they promoted at the University and then we started looking…and I became organic overnight. That was almost 50 years ago. And I was in that direction but we were led away from it by the research. We didn’t know that these chemical companies were funding the research and the rest so we did a FOIA search one time and found out a lot of things . . .

DT: So can you say a little bit more, just give us a sense of what your farm is like and what your farming practices are like?

JK: My passion is tree planting and farming. Because I am a sustainable tree farmer and my family have planted over a 100,000 trees, but we have no place to plant anymore because every inch that there could be planted a tree is planted already. So, it’s just a joy to see what that does to the environment and becomes the most valuable part of what could have been cleared and so on. That’s part of it. What was the rest of the question?

DT: And tell us a little bit about your dairy operation.

JK: Okay. We have 36 cows; maintain that number and it’s an intensive rotational grazing. My cows get fresh pasture, green grass and clover every 12 hours. And if they don’t get it, they complain. So, but they spread the manure, they spread the fertilizer and they carry the milk in and they carry the fertilizer out. So we have a very low carbon footprint. Many farmers, especially the factory farms think I am not a farmer. In fact, the UW College of Agriculture doesn’t consider me a farmer because I am not running the tractor 12/14 hours a day. But, my cows are doing their work. And that’s where the cheese you will have today and so on. It came from my cows.

DT: I want to step back a little bit in history and talk about some of your civil rights and anti-racist activism throughout the US and in Wisconsin, in particular. Project Self Help and Awareness or PSA is a 40-year-old organization that you became involved in very early on and played a lead role in. You coordinated other white Wisconsin families to host a visiting… hundreds of visiting Black children and teenagers from Mississippi for 3 weeks every summer. And this in an ongoing program. Can you tell us a little about the motivation behind these exchanges, this exchange program and how it related to the Civil Rights Movement?

JK: It was actually 45 years ago. And, a Black woman, Eula Washington who hosted this man, Malcolm Gissen, who was a University student and was one of the freedom riders, and she said “now we can’t end this here. We have to continue in some way because this is the first time my children have ever had a good relationship with white people”. And so, they then patched this plan that was excellent and after about…we were in the 2nd year, and after that it became so difficult, he turned it all over to me. And so it was very difficult. We did 12 round trips with an old school bus that we refurbished to bring these children matched with coordinators in Wisconsin matched with coordinators in Mississippi to give them an experience that would raise their self-esteem. That was the whole part of it was to make them feel good about themselves and to not be a hand out. It was solidarity. It was a way to make them feel that they were equal; they could do anything they wanted. And the poverty was so great the first time I was there. I stayed in a home in Carroll County in the hills. Part of the house had a dirt floor. There weren’t no…no electricity. And this was typical of many of the rural people. And so I learned a lot. I cried a lot too. But you don’t make friends by crying so…they would say why are you laughing? You wanna see me cry? So, it was tremendous. So, these 12 round trips would bring these children up we started taking adults down and college students to do Headstart work and just to immerse themselves. That’s the only way. You can’t explain it of how great it is. I could see the courage and joy that the most poverty stricken state in the union and some of the most poverty stricken counties and some of them still are to see all of these people and celebrate and make you feel good.

DT: You told me a story about how this was kinda transformative for you and an exchange you had with a woman named Rosie, Rosie May Hosey I think her name is. What did Rosie say to you?

JK: Rosie was one of the people that her children came to Wisconsin. She lived a very tough life. Just an example, one of my neighbors hosted her children and so she went and stayed with Rosie for two days. And for breakfast, Rosie borrowed a hot plate from a neighbor and warmed up some fat back. And then for the noon lunch, they went to a local Juniors convenience store and divided a bag of Cheetos. Anyways, Rosie was always a happy person. And just a great person to be with. Wisconsin Public Television interviewed Rosie and I saw the documentary film. And in it, he asked Rosie questions.

“Who are the white people that you got to know?”

She went on and named a few.

“And then there was John Kinsman, naw but he is one of us”.

I will never forget that. That was one of the greatest compliments I have ever had.

DT: Yea, that’s great. When we talked on the phone, you were telling me a little about your ancestry and saying that your ancestors were settlers. And that that was something you were critical about. And since you have done work in Wisconsin to defend Native land and farm sovereignty. Can you give us an example of these experiences?

JK: My great grandparents came by covered wagon and oxen from the East. And they settled. But when I think about it now, there were people there. They were settlers and that’s not the way it is supposed to be.  And, they took the land. The Native people, now and all over the world are…Landgrabbing is going on. And that was landgrabbing also but it was not named that. And of course, there were savages. In my grandmother’s diary, she and her younger sister who was Jeanette. She was 16 and my grandmother had just married, she was probably 20 or 21. They were going from one area to another and a band of Indians had moved in. And they went down to talk to them twice. They had no fear of these savages, so called. It was interesting. But, they were still settlers.

DT: And what were some of the exchanges or activism you had around Native land in Wisconsin?

JK:  Well, we The Crandon Mine was a big mine about ten years ago proposed by Exxon in Native land in northern Wisconsin. And it would have destroyed their wild rice beds, headwaters of a beautiful river that went through the reservation. It was very destructive so we did a, a sort of a hearing. And I represented farmers of North America. The rest of them didn’t know it but eh…we had Native people, indigenous people from South America where they had a history of mines and all the way into the Southwest. This was on a reservation in northern Wisconsin and all the way to Canada, up to Alaska. Everytime, it was a path of destruction. They did not hire local people. They brought in people. They did not clean up. They just destroyed the community. There was prostitution. There were drugs. There was everything going on after they left. And there is another one we are fighting right now at the headwaters of another river, the Bad River that is on the Bad River Reservation. So, it’s never-ending.

I am going to repeat this. The price of justice is eternal vigilance. And justice is just us. And so it’s something we have to think about. And there will never be peace unless there is justice. So Winona La Duke…Do you know the name? Winona ran for vice president under Ralph Nader at one time. She is a very good friend of the John Peck and myself and the Family Farm Defenders and she invited us to have our annual meeting on the White Oak reservation and it was tremendous. Tremendous to just be able to sit down with the people and help, exchange and do solidarity and do the battles with people.

DT: And there is something else I am wondering . . .You mentioned Family Farm Defenders. I wanna jump off from Wisconsin and talk more about global work that you have done. In 1994, you were part of a group that started Family Farm Defenders. And through that group and the National Family Farm Coalition which is an umbrella coalition, you built international solidarity through another larger international network called Via Campesina, the international network of peasant farmers. And you have started to call yourself a “peasant farmer” and refer to yourself in those terms that Via Campesina has proposed. So I want to ask you about one of the groups that you have interacted with through these travels and that’s the Landless Workers Movement or the MST in Brazil. You have been to Brazil several times, met these organizers in other countries throughout the world. Can you tell me a little bit about your experiences with MST and how they influenced you?

JK: They are a group of people that in Brazil that went through bloodshed to occupy un-used land that big landowners in Brazil took over and most of what was stolen from indigenous people, through landgrabbing. And it lay idle.  And they had so many privileges that they did not produce anything. So these people simply took over and settled on their own land actually. They were so well organized in what they did over the time that they found they were recognized by the government after they went through a year and a half of living in a plastic camp with only dirt for floor.

They’re impressive…The water was hauled in…that was another thing that always sticks in my mind. It was hot. It was under the trees and a man came out and set a chair under the tree and brought me a glass of lukewarm water. It was like giving a million dollars because that was all he had to offer. But, it was so grand to see that. And then we went to where they had built up the communities. Beautiful community centers. Everyone had a plot of land. There was a nice house. They had animals. It was diversified.  And they are doing so well that now it’s moving, I think 300,000 people have been re-settled onto their land and are productive, producing food that the country needed. And now they are going into Africa with the same model.

Via Campesina members have visited us many times [in Wisconsin]. And so we have organized tours of our farms and local entrepreneurs and things that work and some things that don’t work. They have been a big inspiration but I have to say that it started with the Bovine Growth Hormone. How many are aware of the Bovine Growth Hormone? The first genetically engineered product to enter the food chain. Well, it came to us 30, no 27 years ago in the University of Wisconsin had a gathering of scientists and telling us that farmers are not smart enough to understand it. That’s a mistake. Some of em’ aren’t but most of em’ are.

So we could not get attention from the press, because one half of all the dairy products sold even in the University of Wisconsin cafeteria, even in their hospital came from that experimental herd. And the people did not know it. And we could not get press. And so, I had been to all these protests in civil rights era in Mississippi and so I made this crude sign that said “Are you aware that you are all guinea pigs or a product?” And I had handouts that were pretty crude at first and stood in front of the Memorial Union, the biggest concentration of students and faculty and staff. And immediately, we had international attention. There were cameras all over because of this information and the fact that we were standing up to it.

And so within six months, I was invited on a ten month, ten day tour of Europe and speak on this because at the same time the people, the farmers, they had decided not to allow it in Europe. And they said it was so exciting [for them] to see the farmers marching on the university. I said, “Here I am”. All these students and all these other people and this big crowd [gathered on the tour]. And so, sometime if you don’t even know what you are doing, it works. And so, that’s how that got going. And National Family Farm Coalition did not accept it till Family Farm Defenders and myself had to practically drag them kicking and screaming to accept that you need to fight these things and look at what they are doing and who is paying for it? All the money and so that is the way it went.

DT: And just to clear up the names one more time for everyone, Via Campesina is the name of the international network. And that’s how John ended up in Brazil and Europe through this international network of peasant farmers. And the National Family Farm Coalition is the US representatives or chapter of Via Campesina. And they are based in DC. And that is something that John Kinsman has been deeply involved with, networking on a national level. And Family Farm Defenders is the group that John works most consistently with on a regular basis and they are based in Madison, Wisconsin. 

And so through National Family Farm Coalition and Family Farm Defenders, you have done a lot. So you have done a lot of building with people on a national scale. A lot of the direct organizing and solidarity you have done has been on the scale of the US. You have sent farm equipment to farmers in the south after Hurricane Katrina. Most recently, you have been working on sending hay to farmers who have been experiencing drought in Oklahoma and Texas. And so I just want you to say a little bit about your decision to do this kind of direct service and direct action on the national scale. And any thoughts you have about food policy and what we can do here in the United States, on the turf that we exist on?

JK:  Family Farm Defenders became international like I say overnight because people, we had a message that was international because we could see the connections always. I have been to every continent except Antarctica. And these people paid my way and often, John Peck’s way to go these international meetings. I was part of Via Campesina when it was being formed. I have worked with these people for 26, 27 years.

As far as locally just as an example. . .so I started, well myself and my daughter and a few others working locally around food. That was a common denominator: everybody ate food. Otherwise, it just didn’t work, it seemed like.  And so we got to four local churches that were in a cluster. They had a “peace and justice committees” and the biggest thing they could do was a bake sale. They didn’t know what else to do. So, we just went on with that. And I was able to show them the “seven principals of food sovereignty”, which included “justice for workers”, which “organics” does not include. We have formed the fair trade neighborhood…so after these meetings with our local people, the Amish people were a tremendous part of it. And others, we would come home from the meeting and our heads were moving so fast at night, and we can’t sleep at night. But, this is really working.  We are doing a lot of local foods; we did a community meal, last Sunday, in the community.  It’s the biggest crowds we ever get. Monthly meals that we do maybe three or four times a year.  All local.

DT: And recently you had a chance to go to Iowa and you bumped into um, our buddy President Obama and had a chance to talk to him. What happened in Iowa?

JK: This was the “rural economic summit and listening session” about two months ago. And we were [only] able to get another farmer Joel Greeno and I tickets because there were less than 100 people and half the staff of Obama. And somehow, I had a seat in the front, in the middle and Obama’s right there. I don’t know how I got that seat but we had fine seats…maybe he thought I should listen. It was good. They did campaign like we expected, a little bit and then they divided us into workshops sort of and different staff people like secretary of agriculture, secretary of transportation. I was in the one with Ray Lahood, Secretary of Transportation.

DT: So what did you say to Ray Lahood?

JK: So, I got his attention and I said, “I lived through the Great Depression. That was not as bad as this is.” And I told him some of the things I am telling you. And I told him I had lived through a number of these economic problems, downturns and emergencies. And I said they are all politically motivated.  It’s big companies buying the government. . . I also [criticized] the FTA, the Free Trade Agreement you know they are trying to [start] in Korea, Panama and Bolivia and now Columbia. I was invited to South Korea three months ago. And so I could say [to Ray Lahood that] ‘I was in South Korea two months ago talking to these people. It’s going to put 40% of their farms off the land. Don’t you think it’s better that we work to cooperate instead of trying to compete? We’re competing with the whole world. How can we compete with China and India? And I know people from India. . . [like]Vandana Shiva, you know her?  She says “we were self sufficient, and our population was stable before colonization”. And she said these free trade agreements are another form of colonization’.

So I asked the whole group, “isn’t it more important to make friends than to try and compete for the lowest”? And that’s what they do.  It’s a race to the bottom in prices, wages and environmental degradation.  And so, with a big silence. [But] I can take as much time as I want to cuz I have lived through all the things I was talking about.  And there was more of course. And so they didn’t know quite how to stop me. It changed the way this whole conversation went. A woman, a lesser staff person, a Black person said, “my father’s farm is being is in danger of being lost”. [There was] Silence.

And then the Future Farmers of America were invited, the officers of three or four states because that looked good, to have FFA.  And so, I was sitting next to one and I talked to him while we ate and then [someone called on him to speak] and he said, “I want to farm but I can’t because the prices are so low and the conditions are or the expenses are so high”. And he said, “Not one person in my FFA chapter is going to farm”. Of course they didn’t want to hear that. Then the guy next to me spoke out.  He says, “My passion is farming. I want to farm. But, I can’t.” Not only I can’t but I am going to have to move out of the community. And they didn’t want to hear that either. So, there was a lot of good testimony.

Meanwhile, my friend Joel was in another extension where Obama came in and he gave him the whole thing. . . Joel just gave him everything. And Obama stayed there too long. Joel wouldn’t let him go. And the secretary of agriculture [Tom Vilsack] was there and Joel said, “Do you know me?” He said, “I sure do”.  And he took a long detour around me that day too. We confirmed that.

DT: What you said about emphasizing cooperation over competition is pretty essential especially as you are describing the entire disillusion of the farms across the US and the farms across the world. I wonder what note you would like to end on?

JK: So what I am saying is what counts is local foods…if we all demand to know where our food comes from, if you can’t find your farmer that’s producing and know them personally…at least question where your food comes from. And we want to change policies. One woman is on our executive board, an urban woman [from Milwaukee] and they did.  She asked about where does her milk or cheese come from [and if the] cows were injected with Bovine Growth Hormone. Well, the grocers don’t know. She says well, I’m sorry we will just have to go somewhere else and buy our groceries. No, no, no, come back. And so, they came back in a couple of weeks and they changed their policy. It took two people to ask that.

I will just repeat the price of justice is internal vigilance and there will be no peace without justice.  And John Peck and I have both received awards because of what we are doing and we never talked about peace but it is this kind of thing that will bring peace. You are all part of it. And you can all make a difference. It only takes one or two to rattle the whole cage. Thank you.

Extra special thanks to Dave Pabellon who was the designer for the project and the most consistent collaborator. Additional contributions to the catalog and website come from Samuel Barnett, Euan Hague, Jayne Hileman and Rebecca Zorach.

Wicker Park Field House exhibition in January 2009, Photo by Jason Reblando

The overall project has been presented in tons of exhibitions and workshops engaged hundreds of people in dozens of cities including Chicago, IL; Zagreb, Croatia; Syracuse, NY; Greencastle, IN; Portland, OR; Granada, Spain; Waterville, ME; Chisinau, Moldova; New York City, NY; Detroit, MI; Boston, MA; Pilsen; Chicago; Santiago, Chile; London, ON, Canada; Sherbrooke, QC, Canada; Ukraine (Uzhgorod, Donetsk, Kherson, Simferopol, Vinnytsia); Gary, IN; and Valparasio, Chile.

Notes for a People’s Atlas could not have been completed without the help of AREA Chicago, CEC Artslink, Graham Foundation, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Urban Festival, Around the Coyote, and Independent Curators International.

The Bad at Sports interview:

Robby Herbst (RH): I’d like to start our conversation off by asking the two of you about magazine subscriptions and postage. What I find immediately endearing about both of your works is that you’ve both developed projects that ideally rely upon readers asking for, or seeking out, a hard copy of a publication or artist project. I am wondering if you could explain to me why, at this moment when new media appears to make it irrelevant, you are using old media to explore place?

Ryan Griffis (RG):  Both the Temporary Travel Office and Regional Relationships (RR) are small-scale efforts to deal with the tensions between space/place as information as well as lived experience. Personally, I find the complete informationalization of place via electronic devices problematic for a number of reasons. Perhaps we’ll get into some of those reasons, but the short answer is that making a more concerted effort to connect with a smaller number of people in a more sustained manner is more rewarding for me. Our (my collaborator Sarah Ross and myself) initial formulation of Regional Relationships revolved around the creation of a project in a brick and mortar space. We quickly realized that what we really wanted was to get things into people’s hands, where they are. We wanted to materialize the ideas we find important and interesting, and offer them to people in a form that they can sit with and contemplate, but we didn’t want to produce a publication per se.

Particularly for RR, the symbolic and material use of the postal service to deliver the work to people is an interesting layer in our questions about ways people and places are part of overlapping, yet seemingly discrete, systems. Matthew Friday, the first contributor to RR, uses the phrase “entangled collectives” to describe the combination of people, other living things, geology and climate that produce our lived experience. I think this describes our interest in mailing things to people; the project isn’t simply the content of any individual work. It also includes the combination of friends, workers, bureaucracies, dead plants, technologies and chemicals that led to someone receiving the work in the mail. All of that may not be “on the surface” of the project, but at least to me it’s impossible not to perceive that on some level. There’s also something to working within (material and financial) limits, and trying to figure out how to sustain the project through direct engagement with its audience.

Daniel Tucker (DT): I sure love the internet, but one thing I know from observation is that printed matter can get passed around through networks that (in many cases) would not occur with online media. For example, AREA Chicago, the print publication I edited, would get dropped off in bulk at a community center and handed from a teacher to a student with an enthusiastic recommendation and get read on the spot. Or a contributor to the publication would be given a bundle of 50-100 printed copies of the newsprint publication and would stuff them in people’s mailboxes, hand them out at meetings or conferences that were relevant to their contribution to the issue of AREA. This one-on-one sharing is different than being sent a link, which typically would contain content that could be quickly consumed, as so many online media outlets are known for. It also comes along with the enthusiasm of a trusted recommendation from a friend, one that is helpful in determining and discerning what media one will engage with in the vast world of ideas and images circulating in print and online outlets.

In most of my projects however I advocate for distributing the content in print as well as online. I recognize the potential of the internet as a way to circulate rich content with relatively few resources. So this allows local print publications like AREA to be read outside of Chicago and for most of the printed issues to be distributed locally.  With Visions for Chicago, I made a website with all of the photos and essays generated by participants, but I still worked with a publisher to produce a print catalog. This was a way of giving something back to the contributors. This affirmed their decision to voluntarily contribute and told them that their ideas were print-worthy and therefore more valuable.

So for me it is all about opening the content up to be circulated to different networks of people, communicating commitment to people who do not take online media seriously, and for the content to be in a format that encourages a deeper time commitment than most people typically allow for with online content.

RH: I’m interested in these notions of distributions in both of your works because of the way that physical objects, especially literature, passed from person become a map of relationships unto themselves and perhaps identify communities; and in terms of both your works, the quality of these communities vis-à-vis conversations regarding strong and weak tie forms of human relationships.

RG: One thing about publications and things like paper zines is that the communities around them operate differently, or at least seem to for me, than internet-enabled networks. That’s a broader conversation, and many people, much more insightful than myself, have written on this… but your delineation of strong and weak social ties is definitely important. This is a central component of the theory of gift economies. To go back to an earlier point, it’s easier to imagine the constellations of forces that bring a package to your mailbox than it is those that bring a website to your computer screen. It’s not that the internet is any less physical or institutional, but the technology and the way we access it, is so completely opaque to most of us.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read John MacPhee’s book “Uncommon Carriers,” but it’s an amazing account of the logistics industry; the transportation networks that get commodities from place to place. It’s told through the stories of people who drive the trucks, barges and trains, and it’s easy to connect yourself to their world.

For Regional Relationships, we’re interested in how we can talk meaningfully about localities in a slow, distributed and asynchronous manner. What does a conversation look like that takes place over long periods of time, amongst people not sharing the same space and where feedback is sporadic? Right now, RR takes the form of a mostly one-way proposition, but we see them as participating in conversations that already exist in many places amongst many different people. It’s not about starting new conversations, but finding new ways to enter discussions already happening. The conversations that we’re interested in involve those working with and thinking about the connections between places.

As I said before, we’re focused on how the idea of place – whether it’s what it means to be “rural”, or how we identify with one geographic region or another — meshes with the kinds of places we create and in some cases destroy. Lots of different people are engaged in different kinds of conversations about this, and we’d like to figure out, for ourselves, how to contribute to them in creative ways. Our thinking is that we can contribute by distributing the creative works of people already participating in some corner of the conversation to others who might be working in other corners.

As Daniel said before, there is something specific about a printed object that some people take more seriously. With RR, we hope that introducing an object that asks for some kind of aesthetic contemplation, into an otherwise mostly rhetorical and informational field, will open up some room for other kinds of engagement. I think we’re trying to find a way to generate intimacy within discussions that are generally alienating or hyper specialized.

DT: I agree with what Ryan is describing – giving form to “hyper specialized” pre-existing conversations . When I started AREA the initial advisory group (for a list of current and past advisors see areachicago.org) discussed this idea of creating a community newsletter for a community that did not yet know itself or could not see itself. This built on the tradition of having a neighborhood or organizational newsletter that described the goings on of a distinct group of people with the complicated concept of community which is all too often not well explained..

AREA was responding to the existence of a very fragmented local Left in Chicago, which had an incredible diversity and complexity, but no real device for people to see themselves in relationship to one another. People were always trying to form coalitions and have email list-serves, and certainly the bigger or more established groups would try to speak louder for everyone. But there was no forum to simply get to know one another and learn from each other’s experiences. Because the vast geography of the city of Chicago was intimidating it seemed more doable to do this through a publication rather than attempting to create a city-wide community center.

Through a slow and consistent process of releasing 11 publications and hosting over a 100 events (many focused intimate discussions amongst people who have much in common but are separated culturally, politically or geographically) AREA has become this connective device over the last 6 years. It is incredible to me the number of people it has touched, and people’s enthusiasm to participate in a hyper-local project, in an era when it is possible to self-organize online with people around increasingly specific and exclusive subcultures. The ongoing engagement with AREA in Chicago illustrates for me some kind of desire to organize around commonality and commitment to a place, rather than subcultural bonds.

RH: Would you briefly and tangibly illustrate ways in which your projects have created intimacy, whether in a specialized group, or within a broader context?

DT: The Visions for Chicago project I organized last spring involved people using blank yard signs to illustrate their long-term visions for the city. It coincided with the recent open mayoral election in Chicago but it had very little to do with elections. It was more connected to using the occasion of the election to talk about ideas that reached far beyond the typical agendas of elections. Part of my role as organizer was to get people to agree to make these yard signs and then put them outside, in front of their homes and in their windows. I had met so many people through years of art/community organizing, but I had not been to many of their homes. Then their home and their portrait were presented, along with the sign, on the website and in a printed catalog. The publicness of what is traditionally private (their home, their visions) It made the project much more personal and vulnerable. It was amazing when the printed book came out, to see how honored and enthusiastic people were. As I said before the website had most of the same content, but the printed catalog gave people both a sense of worth to their ideas as well as a sense that they were part of a community of a hundred other people who really care about working together at making this city better, engaging their political imaginations collectively.

RG: Regional Relationships, being relatively new, has yet to really find what kinds of intimacy and relationships are possible. Many of the ideas that led to us initiating RR came from discussions with people we are close to and trust, like Daniel. It also was largely inspired by our work with a scholar in Urban Planning in Urbana-Champaign whose been engaged in a research project for several years in a small town on the Illinois River called Beardstown. Through our conversations with her, and our own visits to the town and surrounding areas, over the last few years we have made many acquaintances and friends;  from commodity farmers to recent immigrants from West Africa, to community organizers. The work we do there now has a certain responsibility to those people. At least we believe we have a responsibility to them. We hope that RR will somehow become a platform for the sharing of these kinds of long term and sustained relationships between communities of concern (a phrase I like that speaks to the shared concerns that bring people together, as opposed to some abstract idea of “community” that assumes a unified group of people). The objective is to somehow make the stakes apparent and meaningful, not simply assume that we all care about the same things.

RH: Following up on that I’d like to hear some impressions from the both of you about the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor. This is a project both of you were (and still are?) involved with on some level- where you came together with folks to travel together physically through the landscape, by train and bus, foot and car . This off course is a very intimate act – no need to describe the shared sweet, hunger pangs, and soars of a road trip. I am wondering what tangible personal and/or public outcomes came from your conscious act of co-drifting through the Midwest together ?

DT: When the “Continental Drift through the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor” occurred in the summer of 2008 I participated in some of the early discussions of what the thing could become – and then I went on the Chicago stops of the drift. I coordinated the release party of AREA Chicago #6 “City As Lab” to coincide with the drift wandering through town. After the Continental Drift phase, the more open-ended concept of the MRCC was turned into an art collective of sorts called Compass. Since that point, I have continued to loosely engage with building a Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor through participating in personal relationships throughout the region, attending the US Social Forum in Detroit in 2010, profiling midwestern farmers in my book Farm Together Now: A Portrait of People, Places and Ideas for a New Food Movement (Chronicle Books, 2010), and through ongoing collaborations with the Family Farm Defenders and Warehouse Workers For Justice; two economic justice organizations in the region that have very real connections to low-wage workers and international social movements.

RG: The first “drift” in the summer of 2008 speaks to “intimacy” in an interesting way. It was organized by a small but not deliberately exclusive group of folks across Illinois and Wisconsin. In a lot of ways, the goal was to experience a portion of the region called the Midwest while learning something about the cultural, political and economic inventiveness happening there. We wanted to know how people are creating living experiments resisting oppressive tendencies?

For the most part this question was answered through people organizing with those they already knew and worked with within their own communities of interest. As evidenced in the book, those of us involved in conceptualizing the Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor produced Call To Farms, this took us from environmental justice struggles within a black community in Champaign, IL to the Dreamtime Village permaculture-experimental art commune in West Lima, WI to Growing Power in Milwaukee. This trip established an intimacy amongst those of us who took it, It led to our continued working together in the more formal, though still very loosely organized, capacity that Daniel mentioned called the Compass. I think the most tangible or significant thing about the MRCC idea is that it shows the need for (and difficulty of) linking the concerns of people and groups that are not in the same immediate space, but have real stakes in working together and knowing what others are up to. Maybe what I’m trying to get at is the need to think about how conduits between these different efforts and people are made; I think we have been thinking about the logistics of creating intimacy across spaces through interpersonal contact. Therefore people literally as social media!

RH: I began this interview asking about the post office because I wanted to foreground the fleshy nature of your relationships’ with both people and media in your explorations of place. Ryan several years back wrote an article, in Re-public, critical of locative media such as GPS, and their expressions in art, called “Against The Cartography of the Everyday”. You conclude your essay with the following:

“Technology may further mediate power and control, and in many senses physically embody them, but does technology replace ideology? Does perspective collapse under the weight of 24 satellites? Michael Curry suggests that the “view from nowhere” always and already occupies a position of interest, but the interest becomes located further and further from the place of power – in this case, literally in space (p. 52). If the tendency of the control society is to embed ideology into mechanisms of domination, essentially black-boxing oppression, how can the black box be opened and its contents documented?”

I am wondering if at this point either of you has an answer to this question?

DT: Well I never read Ryan’s original text, though it sounds intriguing, but I will take a stab at it.

I am often confused by art projects that attempt to critically engage with science and technology. Often they end up producing more interest in amateur science or gizmology alone. I’ve seen this happening  a lot around new-media and screen-based mapping projects. How do you dissect the embedded ideology of technology without simply presenting cool looking demonstrations of products and techniques for art audiences?  This may mean disengaging from the technology itself, presenting your research, analysis or perspectives in completely other forms.

That is one of the things that I think is so successful about Trevor Paglen’s approach. He documents technological innovation of the Military and its black budgets. But he does this with these elegant, blurry, beautiful photos. Rather than building a phone app tracking spy planes, which would position audiences more as military fans than critical observers  implicated through their tax dollars.

Another example of a project that I’ve worked on that’s engaged this tension is Notes For A People’s Atlas. It has been an initiative to collect handmade personal maps depicting places – it has been reproduced in over 20 locations, including the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, the a college town of Greencastle, Indiana, the large city of Santiago, Chile, the region of Granada, Spain, and the country of Ukraine. In this project of vast scale, people always ask me why we don’t use Google maps or GIS, instead of paper and markers, to present the information. On the outside these technologies would allow the information to be treated as data, opening it up for other realms of interpretation. My answer has always been that online maps and mapping software are great tools for dealing with places as data-sets, but if you really want to encourage people to articulate their knowledge of hidden histories and the emotional character of their connection to places, then the simple paper maps are a bare device. People can take them in surprising odd directions, not easily done with those other tools. Ryan mentioned the problem of the ”complete informationalization of place via electronic devices” earlier and I think that efforts like People’s Atlas bring some critical perspective to more consumer oriented maps of cities and user-rated tools like Yelp that turn cities into geo-tagged consumption data sets in a similar way as indigenous mapping that utilizes GIS technology complicates the military origins.

RG: Daniel’s response is exactly what I was trying to get at with that excerpt and in the whole essay. While I was responding to so-called “locative media” specifically, I was also responding to the larger historical project of pictorial documentary with its relationship to technology.

Another subtext is the effort to use technology against power in “tactical media.” While tactical media practitioners embrace the idea of the “tactic” as inherently the “efforts of the weak” and therefore necessarily insufficient, for exactly the reasons Daniel states I think the limits of this can’t be ignored. What’s at stake in developing responses to power that only deepen one’s reliance on that power?

Likewise, and more historically, what’s at stake in representing place through media that by nature alienates and distances the forms of representation from those it represents? Especially when the viewing of these representations actually doesn’t lead to less abstract relationships? I can say I don’t have any answers, and I’m not sure there is an answer.

In some instances, an appropriate response would be to “unplug” so to speak. But, as I tried to argue in that essay, I think it’s important to look at the continuations and breaks in how technologies function. If it’s the technological novelty (the “wow” factor) that is the problem with “locative media,” then we simply have to wait until that novelty wears off, just as it did with photography. But assuming that photography is inherently a more transparent, and less mediated, form of representation isn’t entirely useful. I would maintain that there are qualitative consistencies and differences between the two media, and it’s important to keep the content/critique central. It’s knowing what that critique is that’s the real work. Documenting oppression doesn’t require using the tools of oppression, but it helps to know what those tools are since they’re part of HOW one is oppressed.

[Read the full text, interviewer bios and introduction here.]

Daniel Tucker works with the journal and event series AREA Chicago and is releasing a book of interviews with activist-farmers in the fall of 2010 on Chronicle Books (co-authored with Amy Franceschini). Nato Thompson is the Chief Curator at Creative Time and has a book about art and activism coming out on Autonomedia later this year. Together they have worked on several exhibitions and events, including “Town Hall Talks” – a massive interview project with socially engaged artists in Baltimore, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City for the “Democracy In America” project by Creative Time in 2008. Here they discuss in general and specific terms some of the challenges and possibilities of curating and facilitating socially and politically engaged art today.

Transcript:

Daniel Tucker (DT): In the early 2000s there was a trend in institutionally sponsored art exhibits to incorporate activism as a subject in and of itself. Activist groups were displayed like artists, artist groups made art that borrowed aesthetically and conceptually from political activism. Some examples include Democracy When? (2002) at LACE in Los Angeles, Hardcore: Towards A New Activism (2003) at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and your own smaller scale example Counter Productive Industries (2000) at 1926 gallery in Chicago and later on The Interventionists (2004) at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. What do you think happened when street protest groups and tactics were activated or put on display in the exhibition space?

Nato Thompson (NT): Well, first of all. I wouldn’t necessarily agree there was a trend. It really depends on how one might measure such a thing and in comparison to what. The exhibitions you mention besides the Interventionists show I curated at MASS MoCA and the exhibition at Palais de Tokyo were all fairly small. There was a lot more movement in Western Europe but that could almost be described as a more prevalent institutional tradition over there. It is important to provide a word of caution in regards to the misleading idea that there was trend, because it assists in answer to your question. In the late 80s, there was a much more asserted trend toward political art that resulted in certain artists and collectives like Group Material, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Hans Haake, Krzystof Wodizko, Tim Rollins and KOS, having more stable art gallery lives. That is to say, the trend resulted in a paid artistic living with a specific type of result. This could not be really said of the intermittent movement of activist art practices at the early part of this decade. I’m not really put much a value judgement on that since lack of commercial success for a movement can provide certain benefits (like limited professional jealousy and divisive behavior) that can be productive. However, we must also bare in mind the trajectory of the alt-globalization movement that certainly motivated, and inspired, the spirit of art activism at the beginning of this decade. Certainly, its dissolution on US soil after 911 and the election of Bush has been absolutely crushing in terms of the prevalence of this kind of work.

So, what happened after some projects were displayed? Well, I would say that hopefully one of the functions of heightened visibility of political practice is a sort of legitimating of that kind of work. Teachers, young artists, older artists, and the curious are able to see a kind of way of participating in civic discourse that exceeds the methods they are familiar with. This type of legitimation across institutions is certainly useful in shaping the range of what people think is possible and acceptable. That type of legitimation can also go toward helping some artists get faculty work and then, perpetuate this type of thinking in their students. I wouldn’t say this happened on a large scale, but more in a limited manner.

DT : So you cite inspiration and artists getting jobs as the things that happen when these hybrid artistic-activist practices were put on display in galleries and museums. But what else happens? Lets dig a little deeper and talk about the transformative power of art. There is sometimes a critique of interventionist-inspired art shows that its just a bunch of “one-liners” when the art is decontextualized. So a project “about sweatshops” becomes the stand-in for “labor; or the third world exploitation which is fueled by first world consumption”. As an artistic project it is curated into fulfilling a distinct topical role, but often fails to be read or activated as a more multi-dimensional work. This is why I mentioned earlier that there was a pattern of talking about activism as a subject in-and-of-itself which seems to encourage this disengagement with the complexity of the work or the context in which it was intended to be shown/used/activated. Five to ten years later after most of these exhibitions I am seeing art institutions taking on much more specific conceptual frameworks such as ecological and economic crisis. Do you see this as a continuum of the counter-globalization movement-inspired interventionist art of the early 2000s? What lessons can curators in this moment learn from the more broadly defined exhibitions of last decade?

NT: So, right, of course I missed the most important part of the impact of these works being shown: that people engage with them! So to what degree is that effective? Well, I think that there are numerous strategies at work under the heading of political art practice. It is almost difficult to discuss in the abstract what any of them do. Some projects are extremely nuanced, such as the works of the group Spurse who present a cloud of information that the viewer must make their way through. Other works are elegantly simple such as Michael Rakowitz’s Parasite project which was a homeless shelter attachable to an HVAC system. I think what one of the major impacts this work can do is to say what issues are worth discussing as well as expanding the manner in which questions are discussed.

Last year in 2009, artist Jeremy Deller worked with me on a project on Iraq titled It is What it Is: Conversations about Iraq. In that work, we traveled across the United States with a car blown up in Baghdad with a US soldier and an Iraqi who had both been through the war. The point was to generate open ended discussions on the road. We had many folks from the left dissatisfied that the project wasn’t taking a side. What people failed to understand is that it isn’t just the position one takes, but sometimes, how positions are produced that has a politics. I think this type of approach can be useful when considering political based work.

In terms of a continuation of the anti-globalization movement in art, I think that a sever burn out and depression set in under Bush. Some managed to retool their work to more community concerns in the vein of what you are doing with AREA, others jumped at a more tightly constrained gallery based practice, and others gave up to get teaching gigs and start families. Ultimately, I think that as opposed to curators learning something, I wish wish wish, artists would challenge the institutions that exist in much the same manner that students have sometimes historically challenged educational institutions. One battle is to challenge the function of art in culture in a more radical way. Curators can push the boundaries, but public pressure (because none really exists anymore) would really go a long way.

DT : That’s a fascinating point about the politics of how sides or perspectives are produced. I actually think that would explain some of the interest I’ve been observing from socially engaged artists in the theories and practices of popular education and critical pedagogy from recent histories of Paulo Freire (“pedagogy of the oppressed”) and the Highlander Folk School. The field of education has given a lot more attention to the ethics associated with exchanging ideas than any art school I’ve visited. That said, I think that some of the education-inspired art works I’ve seen and heard about in recent years and even the How We Learn/Pedagogical Factory series I organized in 2007 at the Hyde Park Art Center with AREA Chicago and the Stockyard Institute veer very close to an aestheticization of the learning space and experience. Its like “learning for learning’s sake” – which is cool as a life choice, but can be odd as an institutionally-sponsored art piece. Sometimes I think, lets get over performing education and lets actually just participate in educational spaces that allow us to develop our ideas further. If there were really dynamic and low-cost educational spaces for adults to develop new skills, learn history, and practice their creative and critical thinking then I bet we would see less inspiring people feel like the only choice they have is to enter expensive universities. Of course that doesn’t address the economic motivations for going to school, but it does start to get at the cultural motives.

Related to your “making demands” comment, I was reminded of an experience I had recently representing AREA Chicago at a meeting of Chicago-area non-profits organized by the Crossroads Fund about “Non-Profits and the Economic Crisis.” After a fun popular-education role-playing style skit about foreclosures and about wealth disparity in the US, there was a panel of foundation representatives talking about how their funding was changing either related to cuts or cut-backs of their support of Chicago area culture and activism. Since I had little professional stake in the conversation I asked a representative from the MacArthur Foundation if it would be strategic for fundees (or MacArthur Foundation grant recipients) to hold a rally, do a mass call-in, or some kind of classic direct-action on their offices to demand that they maintain funding levels at all costs. Now this felt a bit absurd to me because I would be the first one to criticize non-profits for being overly dependent on this foundation money which is amazingly interdependent with the health of the financial sector. How people from cultural and political non-profits have managed to convince themselves that was a stable ground to build organizations on is beyond me. But I asked the question out of genuine curiosity and also because I felt there were people in the room who were at risk of loosing their jobs because of the elimination of certain grant programs by foundations that were in the room. I had no idea what they would say, but the representative simply said that any kind of direct action would be ineffective and that that’s simply not how foundations work. He went on to say that anyone worried about the impact of cuts to grant programs on their organizations should try to set up a meeting with him personally. This reminded me of another reason its crazy that so much culture and politics from the Left is wrapped up in financialized foundation money – that its totally undemocratic.

To the same extent, I would argue that most museums and arts organizations are too. They are not designed internally or externally to respond to the demands of constituencies except funders. Non-profits just don’t work that way for the most part, unless they have affordable and democratic membership structure. But even museums that have members are not designed internally to respond to member demands about the direction of the institution. Which makes me think that its a bit pointless to encourage people to go knocking on the door of museums or art institutions making demands. It would be more appropriate if substantial percentages of their funding is public or if they are entirely public – because then everyone has a stake in the distribution of those public resources. In most cases art institutions are more beholden to their board and their funders than their audiences. Sure we could do boycotts to withhold admission fees in some cases, which might make a difference – but if we are talking about just getting them to make more relevant programming then it might seem questionable to try to shut them down and prevent them from doing any programming.

What kind of public pressure would be strategic given these conditions I describe if an audience really wanted an arts institution to direct its energies in new or different ways?

NT: While I agree with some of you of what you say Daniel, I think it is important to bare in in mind the Machiavellian nature of producing social change in the country. How did arts organizations become dependent on foundation money? Because people and organizations become dependent on the forms of cash that allow them to survive. The ones that tend to survive longest and at times, have impact, are the ones that are at the same times, most regressively dependent on their cash. It is a paradox of operating in a system of unequal distribution of power and resources. It is of course hardly ideal. Nonetheless, non-profits still have a mission statement and while you might think they are solely responsible to their board and funders, they are also dependent on the validity of their mission. You might think that challenging organizations based on their mission is a naive approach, but I am convinced that it would raise the stakes of debate. We must take seriously the material infrastructures that produce the conditions of perception. They are not just pointless cultural spaces, but massive shapers of what people perceive as valid concerns and aesthetics.

I too have been very interested in Paolo Freire and the idea of radical pedagogy as a model for considering the power of aesthetic gestures. There is room for lots of models of participation. You call it “performing” education which has the ring of a sort of inauthentic education. There are certainly no shortage of artists approaching the world in a sort of manner in which they arrive at something that already has a long history. They could say, “I have this art process that is non-hierarchical and people share their experiences in the world and we learn based on each others knowledge sets.” And then, you can’t help by reacting that what the artist has arrived at is people talking to each other. Not particularly ground breaking but I suppose a nice thing overall.

Nonetheless, this basic form of personal exchange can feel fetishized and alienated when placed in an art context particularly if you feel that the placing in this context denotes a certain underlying social capital generating intention. This skepticism doesn’t exist solely in the realm of art but in all the fields of cultural production which leads to the gut instinct in grounding everything in long=term “real” forms. The fact is, this desire to ground things stems from a national paranoia of social capital and in-authenticity that permeates our perception of all things ambiguous.

DT: How can curators support the creation of authentic and grounded culture that truly aspires to transform social relations?

NT: It feels awkward to single out the curatorial role doesn’t it. It is such a team effort so I guess one would have to caution that curatorial projects must be enacted within a multi-front production of meaning. In the curatorial field, one operates in the field of legitimizing certain projects as well as introducing people to new methods of cultural production. Supporting artists with an active critique as well as methods that produce possibilities is clearly a good idea. I would suggest operating with an analysis of capital and its effects on aesthetics in mind and not being afraid to deploy that is useful as well.
DT: Since part of the role of the curator is to introduce audiences to culture and ideas they find meaningful, lets conclude by mentioning a few projects we think do exactly what you describe: operate with an analysis of how capitalism structures social, economic and political life and explore ideas that point towards other futures.

The most inspiring work I’ve seen is the work of the Croatian curatorial collective What, how and for Whom? This group really strategically uses the exhibition format (and the standard accompanying lecture series and exhibition catalog) to really pursue ambitious and rigorous research questions at the intersections of art and politics. As opposed to some of the relational art that I was criticizing earlier for being insincere, they actually tend to focus on presenting work that was made for exhibition (as opposed to participation). Their larger group exhibitions “What, How and for Whom, on the occasion of the 152nd Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto”, “Collective Creativity” and “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” have all used the exhibition format to strategically address the history and culture and possible overcoming of capitalism.

What have you seen that has really stirred you or informed your work?

NT: Lately, I am really inspired by specific practices by artists and collectives whose work really pushes into the realm of reality. That is, they take their task seriously. The ARTWORK newspaper that Temporary Services put out was really quite inspiring. I am also enjoying the productivity of the group FEAST based in Brooklyn who basically produce artist grants through dinners. Recently, the artist Tania Bruguera said something to me that really inspired me. She said, “I don’t like a political art that points at things. I want to be the thing.” I think this movement toward the production of models and actual existing phenomena, is an incredible opportunity to think about cultural production. Working with Paul Chan in New Orleans certainly inspired how I think about community based work and the power of ambiguous gestures coupled with basic grassroots organizing. They can be quite inspiring together.

The Myth of School Choice: Interview with Chicago Public School teachers Jesse Senechal and Maura Nugent

AREA Dialogue: Artists Working on Prison Issues
a discussion between Dan S. Wang, Daniel Tucker, Laurie Jo Reynolds, and Marc Fischer

When Art Scenes Say We: Interview with Pilsen Open Studios

Interview with Jamie Kalven/The View from the Ground 

A short version originally published in Clamor Magazine Issue #31 in 2005, and then in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #4, Manifesta, and CASAzine.

Imagine a three story media production studio that appears for one weekend, brings hundreds of queer and feminist independent media producers together for the video taping and staging of their own “television shows,” talk shows, historical reenactments and skill-sharing workshops. In October, Pilot TV did just this by creating a unique space for collaboration, asking questions and building community in a wonderful and experimental temporary autonomous television studio.

PILOT TV is a hybrid activist convergence taking the form of a do-it-yourself television studio. We invite you to take part in 4 days and nights of participatory, creative problem-solving to rethink how we “stage” protest. Help us turn this three-story Chicago building into a fully functioning Hollywood studio, replete with fantastical sets, collaborative crews, and improvised madness.

Stage a panel discussion as a talk show, lead a workshop as a cooking show, get behind a camera, sew a costume, party all night, or just show up and get involved in the conversation. PILOT will be an open-ended space for those of us involved in the global anticapitalist movement to come together in sweat-space, build momentum, and strategize our biopolitical resistance on (and off) camera.

As the last vestiges of public space, natural resources, and community-control are bought-off, our bodies will continue to be the final line in the struggle for autonomy. Join us at the PILOT laboratory for 4 days of fleshy resistance, aesthetic experiments and tactical performance! Trespass the corporate control of media with nomadic TV, pirate radio broadcasts, and guerrilla drive-in screenings! Enjoy parties, community meals, and do things on camera that you could never do legally in real life!

–From the call for participation disseminated last summer.

Daniel- So where did the idea for Pilot come from?

Emily- Well, in initial conversations between another organizer, James Tsang, and I, we kept throwing around this word, this idea of “Transfeminism.” We were excited that it had no set definition and thought it might have some possibility in terms of encompassing a wide variety of new feminist concerns (and old concerns as well, like the idea that biology shouldn’t control your destiny…) Our conversations about defining transfeminism quickly multiplied into all these other slogans and exclamations of our desires for “Body Flight!” and “Feminist Trespass!” against biopolitical control and capitalism. Our basic idea was that we should work out these questions with our peers in a productive, performative, open-ended space. It eventually was settled that we would call people from across the continent to come and take part in a weekend of collaborations producing feminist television ‘pilots’, which would then be edited, compiled, and redistributed back to all participants so they could distribute them on their local public access channels, schools, or microcinemas wherever they live. This would also have the effect of building a new network of anticapitalist transexuals, queers, and feminist media producers for possible future action.

D- Can you mention some of the models, other events and projects that Pilot was inspired by?

E- Pilot was moved to build a horizontal production space that could feed into, and in some ways differ, from the incredible horizontal distribution networks created by the global Indymedia movement. We were inspired by projects like DIVA TV, Deep Dish and Paper Tiger, as well as lesser known histories of queer, feminist, and collective media activism such as the Videofreex and Raindance Corporation. In addition to those influences, we decided that Pilot should take the best aspects of a protest convergence center and a Hollywood tv studio.

The thing which is so exciting about these convergence/hub spaces that develop during large protests is that they become these participatory sweat-spaces where all sorts of interactions are possible and are activated just by filling a room with people, resources, and passions. We imagined that this potential for collective self-realization would be multiplied if we threw the variables of a TV studio (sets, props, cameras) into the mix. I find often that the experience of engaging in a convergence center is a lot more meaningful, both personally and politically, than the foregrounded “protest” itself. These are places where people are coming together, teaching each other, sharing workshops and food, housing each other and practicing direct democracy..

D- Another element in the Call for Participation mentioned that Pilot
was an event to rethink how we (as activists) “stage protest.” How do
we stage protest? How can an experimental event format like Pilot inform how we protest?

E- Looking at protest as something that is “staged” as opposed to natural allows you to be strategic in how you interrogate the meaning and effectiveness of a collective action. Consider that “demonstrations” are just that; mass performances where we demonstrate this fairly scripted scenario where people march, hold signs, reach catharsis, scuffle with police, hold candles, etc. In fact, this performance is so well-scripted that police agencies often ‘rehearse’ it, casting undercovers in our roles, and compensating for any ‘improvising’ we may try to do. [For web version, this could link to this great mpeg video of Chicago Police performing protesters on the news]

Clearly what needs to happen is total rethinking of the project of social protest.. and what we do with the agency of collectives. The premise during Pilot was to make this performative nature transparent in order to open it up for poetic, aesthetic, and practical restaging. We shared a really wide array of possibilities with each other, from direct political interventions like the Women on Waves pirate abortion ship to the intimate performance of John and Yoko’s “Bed-In” against the war in Vietnam.

D- There were more than 35 different “shows” that were taped during the weekend including a talk show called “Feeling good about feeling bad” which focused on the experience of political depression, a performative lecture by the Society for Biological Insurgents, and a genderqueer erotic remake of the 1925 Eisenstein film “Battleship Potemkin.” Considering all of the kinds of shows that happened during the weekend, what were people trying to figure out?

E- We were trying to educate each other about the incredibly rich history of feminist media activism, and some of the early utopian proposals for what video and television might be. The popular meaning of feminism has been whittled down to these very narrow clichés, but in fact it is a set of essential tools for ethical social practice and resistance to patriarchy, hierarchy, and capitalism. As far as trans-feminism relating to media democratization, we didn’t privilege either one as a concern. We saw them as coextensive and interdependent struggles. I guess it is on this level that feminism most strongly informs anticapitalist movement today. Our concern during the weekend was about doing activism from the level of the body up. Starting with how we meet our basic needs for food or healthcare, up to things like how we resist oppressions based on race, citizenship, gender, or sexuality, our position as laborers and consumers in the global economy, the importance of feelings, the bodies made up by our families, communities, and cities.

D- The founding document that you sent out read, “Calling all
trans-activists, women, queers, male feminists, media activists,
intersexed hackers, radical educators, genderchangers, direct-actors,
performance artists, anti-racists, mothers, documentarians, prop
collectors, youth video collectives, squatters, fence-climbers,
cyber-feminists, urban farmers, prison abolitionists, women’s
health-care providers, all-girl graffiti crews, resistant bodies and
trespassers of all kinds !!! Did that happen?

E- Well I am not sure if there were actually any intersexed
individuals who were also “hackers”, but basically yes. It felt unlike
any other activist convergence or media context I’ve ever been in, in
the sense that the majority of people participating and coordinating
technology were all women, or had at one point been a woman, or were
becoming women!

D- So you have talked about the ways in which Pilot responded to the
conference and protest models of social space, but what about the
Hollywood influence? When I rode my bike down to Bridgeport (the
neighborhood in Chicago where Pilot took place), I came across a huge
sign on the hill by the highway reading “PILOTWOOD.” Hollywood is a
pretty messed up place in a lot of ways, how did it serve as
inspiration?

E- Well, it’s inspiring in the sense that there is so much symbolic
wealth there! As a LA native I really think people need to be
fucking with the spatial referents remaining in Hollywood, you know,
like staging takeovers and sit-ins at news stations, or doing direct
actions in the guise of a movie shoot. In terms of Pilot, the main
thing we were appropriating was the Fordist vertical-integration
model of media production, where everything happens “in-house”.
While production has been decentralized incredibly, there is still this
phenomena where tons of skilled individuals with cameras, lights, scripts,
and makeup will come together into one building in the morning and
at the end of the day a television show will come out. For Pilot we
borrowed this myth of the Hollywood studio and got rid of the
unnecessary hierarchical divisions between producers, directors,
actors, and audience members.

One of the problems we encountered was that there just wasn’t enough set up and breakdown time for people to shoot 9 TV shows a day, even with the three sets we had. Because of this there wasn’t enough time for the education of people with less technical expertise, so hierarchies of knowledge were set up due to a sped-up production schedule. Some of the problems at Pilot can be worked out in future events. And there did seem to be a big interest on the part of participants at making that happen. Maybe it will turn into a more permanent studio, or possibly a mobile production house like the soviet cinema trains.

D- In terms of the actual productive capabilities of Pilot, it would be helpful if you could elaborate on the different ways in which resources were pooled and technology was acquired. Did Pilot have fundraisers or grants?

E- No, we didn’t have any grants but we raised maybe a hundred bucks and built community prior to the event with a call-out zine and CD, conversations, show-and-tells, and a weekly speakeasy restaurant that we ran out of various apartments called the Secret Café. Quite a bit of the A/V equipment was acquired through a parasitic technique where individuals with access privileges at jobs or art schools worked together to leverage large chunks of equipment for everyone during the weekend. Meanwhile, everyone who came contributed some kind of resource to the pool, weather it was their construction skills or their DV camera or their wig collection.

D- And in the end?

E- Pilot proved that it is possible build a TV studio without ANY money whatsoever, that with self-organization and collective resource sharing we can build alternative infrastructures that are equally as fantastic and sustainable as anything made for the traditional capitalist economy! All in all, the weekend was an incredibly packed and complex experience. It was marked by lots of improvisation, pleasure, dialogue, public sex, failure, creative television production, skill sharing, and countless new relationships. I can’t speak for the rest of the Pilot participants, but I know I experienced community the way I would like it to be everyday; queer as fuck, and experimenting together …for all the trespassing to come.

Please see www.pilotchicago.org for more information or to get involved in the post-production efforts.

About the authors:
Emily Forman was one of 25 Pilot co-plotters and has been deeply involved in collaborations and other organizing efforts ranging from the Department of Space and Land Reclamation campaigns to the Autonomous Territories of Chicago. She is always down to work on projects that sound excessive and impossible! emily@counterproductiveindustries.com

Daniel Tucker is an artist and activist living in Chicago who is generally interested in art that happens in streets. He was one of over 100 participants in the Pilot TV project last October. Tucker is also initiating an independent research project about “self organized” group process and organizational structures. daniel@counterproductiveindustries.com