booklet cover

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.

Listen to the whole interview with me here:

BenPR interview with Daniel Tucker

POWER: ON AND OFF THE GRID (see entire playlist here)

• 1:43   Kanye

• 1:31   Arcattack

• 1:11   Distribution

• 0:52   Grid Compromised

• 0:58   Substation Model

• 0:10   Jacob’s Ladder

• 3:02   Tesla coil

• 1:06   Magnetospheric Substorm

• 1:47   Power Failure

• 1:01 Logistics

• 1:41    LRAD

• 1:46    Hummingbird

• 1:52    What is autonomy?

• 3:22   Three Minute Locke

• 1:21   Social Democracy

• 0:28 Hannah

• 3:22   Milton and the Idealist

• 1:40  It Doesn’t

• 2:31 Dargonaut

• 6:51 Justice vs. Power

• 2:27 Grace Lee Boggs

• 2:04   Emerson

• 4:14   Clean Livin’

• 2:23   Life on the Mesa

• 3:01   Energy Blues

TRT = 57:54

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.]

Taken from Y.L.O. Newspaper May 1969 (DePaul archives)

Since Occupy Wall Street began September 17th similar and interrelated events throughout the country, including on September 24th right here in Chicago, and the energy has been undeniably inspiring world wide. Here in Chicago we have important local histories of occupations like the Young Lord’s takeover of McCormick Seminary at DePaul in 1969 and the Chicago Indian Village in 1970; in recent years, including the Republic Windows Factory Occupation of 2008 and the Whittier School occupation of 2010 along with the longest running hotel labor strike in US history at the Congress Hotel. To celebrate this moment, document this time and some of the cultural shifts happening in politics today, I am starting to make a series of short videos based on my observations.

I made this video on the 2nd night Occupy Chicago tried to move from the temporary home which has been set up at the corner of Jackson and Lasalle in the financial district (a part of Chicago which I have documented before in relation to the activism of Family Farm Defenders who annually protest the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s effects on dairy prices through speculation) to a new home in Grant Park at the corner of Congress and Michigan. This video reveals what I consider to be one of the more interesting aspects of the “occupy” actions, the speaker calls for everyone to look at the new site of encampment as a home, a place to build a care for. This is rhetorically very distinct from your typical protest which is anti-climatic, organized from behind the scenes as a media stunt that dissipates when the cameras go away or people get tired of chanting. Occupy has hit on the necessity for prolonged activism that has the potential to break through the sound-bite culture of media-oriented activism and become integrated into public spaces and the fabric of people’s daily life. Where it goes, we shall all see… and hopefully engage with and contribute to.

Originally published in AREA Chicago online

by Bill Ayers, Alice Kim, Harish Patel, Barbara Ransby and Daniel Tucker

Chicago needs a city-wide center urgently focused on creating, igniting, and sustaining the widest range of social movements capable of rethinking, re-imagining, and rebuilding our city and our nation from the bottom-up. Chicago—the city of neighborhoods, the town where community organizing is front and center—is home to dazzling and diverse examples of spaces that sustain excellent work from cultural centers like Decima Musa (R.I.P.), Mess Hall, Experimental Station, Co-Prosperity Sphere, to meeting and organizing places like the Chicago Freedom School, UE Hall and Jobs with Justice, to shared work spaces like 3411 W. Diversey, Grace Place, Centro Autónomo and In These Times, to event spaces like Heartland Café and Simone’s and institutions like the Jane Addams Hull House Museum and the Chicago Cultural Center. These spaces are constantly under pressure from fluctuating real-estate markets, over-use as well as neglect, and the on-going challenge of building sustained activity and broad community in our segregated city.

The Space Cadets Working Group was initiated in early 2011 to engage in an intentional process to explore how to set up a central gathering space in the city that can become a hub for movement building and supporting neighborhood culture and politics—a place where we can intersect, learn, grow, and build together. We need acentral space centrally engaged in igniting our radical imaginations toward movement-making. We need a creative educational home-base where we can dream big and act intentionally, “preach to the choir” when appropriate, unify neighborhood based activists, hammer out unity on major contradictions, and re-culture the movement and ourselves. And with all this we are mindful of many challenges and contradictions from the start, including the importance of engaging differences, the problem of dynamically defining community, the danger of alternative institutions disappearing, the social and political cost of money, and more. In the face of a city government that has privatized everything, we initiate this process to create a long-term and rooted effort invested in making more and better public spaces.

Research Process:

In order to present as thoughtful of a proposal to our larger communities as we could, we have been engaging in discussions, readings and meetings to generate a clearer vision for what this movement building center might be and what challenges we should anticipate.

We started out by reading some recently collected reflections on what this space could and should be, in the AREA Chicago interview, which asked several space-makers, “Why does Chicago need a new community cultural center that will facilitate city-wide networking and community and movement-building? Where would you imagine this place being located, and what are some things that might happen there?” See their replies here.

Readings:

We have also been sharing our own reference points and readings about making such community spaces. Some excerpts of readings that motivate and challenge us are included in the footnotes from the following books: In and Out of the Crisis, Memories of Black Mountain College, Caution! Alternative Space! by Group Material, Transformative Organizing by Movement Strategy Center, and Memoirs of a Dil Pickler (1).

Interviews:

In addition we have been investigating and interviewing folks from a wide range of progressive spaces around the world, and we are mapping what exists both locally and nationally. Thus far our “map” includes Highlander Research and Education Center of Tennessee, the Brecht Forum and 16 Beaver Street (both in NYC), and the Heartland Café in Chicago (2).

These meetings led to significant insights and offer invaluable lessons for any future endeavor. Those include: the central importance of relationships and truly caring for the people you embark on this process with; respecting history without getting stuck in it; the role of the movement center changes with the state of the movement – sometimes attracting more of a generally critical/curious crowd and other times being a center for organizing; being in debt, overworked and underpaid; informal structure may be more efficient at times but can also lead to a small number of people holding power and notoriety while others come in and out and gradually disinvest as the work gets more challenging; mission statements and other trappings of non-profit organizational structures can be important guides and declaration of values but can also stifle development and prescribe audience/constituency/community; importance of approach to external communications (tone of emails, flier design, function of website, etc) to defining how open or closed the project is and where it can go; involving people from different backgrounds only happens through involving people with different backgrounds and not through endless discussion, guilt or processing; long-term engagement, endurance and time determine a lot about what the project will be and what role it will play in peoples lives.

Real Estate Consultation:

In a meeting with representatives from Livingroom Realty we visited five properties for sale located between 18th street on the South, Ashland on the West, Canal on the East, and Chicago Avenue on the North. The properties included an office space, frozen food locker, former Italian restaurant, late 19th century light industry factory, and a former bar. Each space was full of possibility and we were surprised by the prices being lower than expected at $200,000-$750,000 depending on how much work each space required.

Conclusion

After considering past and current models and various options for starting a space from scratch, we have come to the conclusion that it would be most advantageous, practical and symbolically powerful partnering with others already engaged in the maintenance and operation of venues and spaces for the intersection of community and political engagement.

With a new globally networked Mayor who is advancing neoliberal restructuring of schools, neighborhoods and public services as well as playing host to the G8 and NATO conventions next May – we need to take this step together. With our rich history of Labor, community and cultural organizing falling victim to non-profit depoliticization, corruption and budget cuts – we need to take this step together. With neighborhoods simultaneously experiencing land-grabs and disinvestment – we need to take this step together.

Chicago’s movement for the future needs a place to come together. If you agree and want to discuss this further then email us at harishichicago@gmail.com to keep in touch about an upcoming fall potluck dinner to discuss and plot together.

Footnotes:

1) Reading Quotations:

In and Out of Crisis:

“… effective political participation demands the time to do it – the time to read, think, learn, attend meetings and events, debate, take part in strategizing, and engage in organizing others…..How we do this is what the question of alternatives is ultimately about. Crucial to this rebuilding is to get people to think ambitiously again…Educational centers that can cut across current campaigns are absolutely central for developing a deeper and broader understanding of issues, and also for developing the set of skills that people need to become effective organizers and grounded community leaders.”

Memories of Black Mountain College:

“A group of ex-BMC Mountaineers in New York is thinking of making another try of it elsewhere. I sincerely wish them luck. But they should ponder the question whether the defects of BMC and other experimental colleges are all accidental and avoidable or inherent and inevitable. BMC has had many accidental failings. But i do not think the conflict of personalities, for example, can be numbered among them….they overestimate the extent to which we can in these ways escape and surpass our world. Policy is still economically determined, only by the money-getters, not by the money-givers….As a determinant it is weak; it is itself largely determined.”

Caution! Alternative Space! by Group Material, 1982:

“We looked for a space because this was our dream – to find a place that we could rent, control and operate in any manner we saw fit. This pressing desire for a room of our own was strategic on both the political and psychological fronts…. We never considered ourselves an “alternative space.” In fact, it seemed to us that the more prominent alternative spaces were actually, in appearance, character and exhibition policies, the children of the dominant commercial galleries.

Everything had to change. The mistake was obvious. Just like the alternative spaces we had set out to criticize, here were were sitting on 13th street waiting for everyone to rush down and see our shows instead of us taking the initiative of mobilizing into public areas. We had to cease being a space and start becoming a work group once again….”

Movement Strategy Center:

“Transformative movement building has the potential to reshape the vision, values and practice of organizers and organizations. It holds a promise for a long-range cultural shift in the progressive movement through a dynamic process of transformation and change at multiple levels: Individual , Organizational and Societal.

Our goal is not to make everyone into a professional organizer, but to create a movement that is relevant, attractive and accessible to all kinds of people.

This does not mean watering down the politics. Rather, it means watering down the politics with the richness of diversity and an openness to change.”

Memoirs of a Dil Pickler:

“…I thought Greenwich Village was America’s intellectual center. Red argued that it was only the artistic center; when people went to the Village, he said, they went looking for poets, writers, artists, and other longhaired members of the Great Unwashed. But when they came to Chicago’s Near North Side, they were looking for the bums who talked like college professors.

But what was the Pickle? Art center, little theater, indoor Bughouse Square, Bohemian tourist trap, latter-day hangout for country-store solons, or just a dive for nuts? Maybe it was all of these things. How would I know? I was just one of the habitues. Considering myself a young pseudo-intellectual, it was home to me. Home is where the heart is. Home is where you establish rapport with other humans. Or, if you want to be nasty about it, sub-humans. Who cares?”

2) Thank you: to everyone that responded to our interview requests, Pam McMichael @ Highlander, Katy Hogan @ Heartland, Jesal Kapadia, Pedro Lasch, Rene Gabri, and Paige Sarlin at 16 Beaver, Kazembe Balagun, and Max.Uhlenbeck at Brecht Forum; thanks to Kristen Cox, Robin Hewlett, Ryan Lugalia-Hollon, Wishbone, Lauren Cumbia, Experimental Station, Abraham Mwaura, Beth Gutelius, AREA Chicago and Annie and Richard from Living Room Realty.

Then in April at the annual protests against the Chicago Mercantile Echange led by his group Family Farm Defenders:

And most recently in the form of a live lecture/interview at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum:

In the future, look out for some of my writings on John Kinsman’s work.

*Special thanks to John Peck and Joel Greeno from the Family Farm Defenders.

Starting last year at Mess Hall in Chicago we kicked off a slow moving book tour that has included 25 events from Seattle to Louisville to Philadelphia. We’ve had audiences ranging from 7 to 150, though most have been full houses – a testament to the interest in the topic more than anything. The venues have included bookstores, lecture halls, grocery stores, farmer training centers and pie shops. The people who have showed up at these events have been actual farmers, planners, artists and the emerging category of “agri-curious” (thanks to Full and By Farm in Essex, NY for introducing me to this term).

 The book has been used widely as a document and networking tool for this emerging food movement that is gaining strength every day. The National Family Farm Coalition bought copies for their members and farms featured in the book have used the attention to do everything from gain new customers and apply for funding to networking and speaking publicly about their work. City Slicker Farms, Devon Pena, Wild Hive Farm/Bakery, Anarchy Apiaries, God’s Gang, On-The-Fly Farm, AquaRanch, Jim Knopik, Freewheelin’ Farm, and Tryon Life Community Farm have all joined us in person at book lectures. Numerous other farm and food projects have come and shared their news and ideas at the events as well. We hope it continues to be useful to future generations through the classrooms which have expressed interest and already started using it in their food related curriculum.

Thanks for your support, for the wonderful reviews, and for coming out to these events. Thanks to the farmers who we profiled for being so open and generous. And thanks especially to the folks at Bloomingfoods (Bloomington, IN) and Common Ground (Urbana, IL), two food co-ops that uses the viral power of their customer receipts to promote our readings. What a great idea! If there is one lesson to be learned by self-organizing a 25 event national tour its that it is hard work to get a room full of engaged people to discuss food politics and farmers stories.

There are murmurs of doing a sequel book in a few years but until then you will have to keep in touch with us through this irregularly updated blog (we are looking for guest bloggers by the way). As life takes new directions, new projects emerge and the enthusiasm around a book being “new” fade – we go back to life as usual and/or newly imagined. Keep in touch!

This is just a note to give you an update on some of my recent and upcoming Miscellaneous Projects activities so that you can either check them out in person or virtually and share them with folks you think might be interested.

Some Current and Recent Activities

Last year I co-launched a gallery called Art In These Times with my companion Lauren Cumbia and tomorrow night we have the opening of our 2nd exhibition. This one is a collaboration with Nicolas Lampert of Milwaukee and deals with the visual culture of recent protests across Wisconsin through the presentation of placards, posters and photos of placards and posters. See more here and come by the opening if you are in town http://artinthesetimes.wordpress.com/ The attached photo is from a rally Lauren recently organized with her group Stand Up Chicago for which I made a bunch of stenciled signs reading “We Are Driven By Care and Not By Profit” which basically sums up my feelings about the conflicts happening around the public-sector budgets right now.

Also starting tomorrow I embark on a very gradual midwest tour for my book Farm Together Now. The tour starts here in Chicago at the Working Class Studies conference and will wind through Bloomington, Louisville and Urbana in the coming weeks and then conclude in Chicago on August 2nd with an event organized by Slow Food Chicago. For details see the “Events” page of our site and also check out the “Reviews” section to see what folks have been saying http://farmtogethernow.org/. Also, if you want to get the book – you get 20% off plus ground shipping by entering “chroniclelovesyou” at checkout on http://www.chroniclebooks.com.

Those of you in Chicago inevitably know about this public art project I coordinated during the recent election season called Visions for Chicago. Well the documentation was compiled into a catalog which can be purchased from Green Lantern Press the publisher and sponsor of this project here https://thepapercave.com/books/172-visions-for-chicago.html or all the contents of the book are also here http://visionsforchicago.wordpress.com (funding for Visions was provided by the Graham Foundation). Working on this project was a real treat and allowed me to reconnect with a lot of wonderful people and also discuss the super crucial but kind of abstract concept of political vision with a wide range of Chicagoans. Some reflection on that process can be found in this interview on Organizing Upgrade http://www.organizingupgrade.com/2011/06/tucker-thinking-outside-the-ballot-box/ and in Art21 http://blog.art21.org/2011/04/26/center-field-visons-for-chicago-public-art-with-organizer-daniel-tucker/.

Some folks may wonder why it seems like I go to California a lot. Well there are two reasons. One is because my Farm Together Now collaborators Amy Franceschini and Anne Hamersky live out there and the other reason is because since early 2010 I have been working as a consultant for the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. UCIRA is a system-wide arts network and granting agency that serves the University of California system and is based in Santa Barbara. It has been a great experience for me testing out some of my localized experiences from Chicago in another context and with the folks at UCIRA I helped launch SOTA (or “State of the Arts“) a blog about the arts across the UC system: http://ucsota.wordpress.com/. You might not be interested in everything on the blog but it actually has pretty wide relevance outside of CA to anyone working around arts education, what counts as research in the arts, and the transformation of the public educational system. In addition to editing this position has allowed me to work on strategic planning and project documentation with their organization. I will be leaving my post at UCIRA in August but will continue to do interviews and other projects with them periodically.

One last California activity that might be of interest is that last March I had the pleasure of getting to attend a residency program for two weeks at the Headlands Center for the Arts with some wonderful ecologically minded artists from across the country. I conducted interviews with my “Creative Ecologies” co-residents that you can check out here http://miscprojects.com/2011/03/06/creative-ecologies/. The time there allowed me to get some project planning done, writing and edit some interviews I did with members of the National Family Farm Coalition which you can view here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fYGCHoP-HY

I won’t be traveling to CA as much anymore but if you want to invite me out there or anywhere else to do something fun or professional please do so!

Prepping

This summer I am enjoying being in a planning and preparation phase – getting ready to start graduate school in the MFA program at the University of Illinois Chicago in late August. At UIC I am planning to work on several video projects that stem from questions I have been encountering regularly in recent years. I’m spending the summer learning more about the fascinating character Karl Hess who was (he is dead) an “old right” republican who turned into an urban “New Left” ecological anarchist and later turned into a back-to-the-land-survivalist libertarian. This biographical research is totally new territory for me and I am quite excited about trying some new things out and learning more about story-telling. If you know any good resources that would help me better understand the connection between the “old right” and the “new left” then please pass along! If you think that sounds ridiculous then maybe you’ll just have to wait and see if my video is convincing.

I’m also working on interviews with a bunch of artists and curators for a new endeavor called “Never the Same: Conversations About Art Transforming Politics & Community in Chicago & Beyond” that is being co-developed with Rebecca Zorach. Rebecca and I are looking at this as an ongoing effort that will last several years and be a repository for oral histories about important events in Chicago’s political art history as well as a collection of resources and ephemera in a physical archive by the same name. If you have relevant books, catalogs, dvds or other materials you would like to donate to the archive just email me directly to discuss a drop-off/pick-up. Seed funding to get this effort started was provided by the Propeller Fund, a new grant for self-organized art in Chicago. The first 10 interviews should be up at the end of the summer and I am having a blast conducting them so far! A bit of info is available here http://never-the-same.org/about/ and the first appearance of the archive will be at the October “Hand In Glove: Alliance for Independent Arts Organizers” conference happening in Chicago that you should consider coming to or telling your friends about: http://www.three-walls.org/programs/conferences-symposiums/

The last effort that I am hoping to wrap up this summer is to finally properly document the “Notes for a People’s Atlas” community mapping project that I launched with AREA Chicago members  (in particular Dave Pabellon) over 5 years ago. It is a mapping project that has been expanded to nearly 20 cities in the US, Europe and Latin America and has really been a central project of mine for that whole time. I am looking to wrap it up for myself and pass it onto some other folks with the launch of a website and printed catalog in lat summer or early fall.

Ending

I know this was long, but I’ve been making some notes for it for a while and wanted to get it into the world. This is the first year I have been a free-agent in a longtime in that I havent been primarily working with AREA Chicago (the organization I worked for since 2005 and left in late 2010). And so it has become a bit more important for me to keep folks in the loop about my activities this way. For the next two years I will be in school and not doing as much travel nor as much updates, but I hope you’ll all keep in touch, let me know how you are doing. Also, consider emailing me with your own definition of the term “self sufficiency“, because it is something that is confusing me a lot lately.

in cahoots,

dt

Book Review: “Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution” by Heather Rogers (Scribner – April 20, 2010)

Heather Rogers does it again. She writes the book that deals with the topic everyone concerned with ecology knows they should be talking about but doesn’t know how to talk about. Her first book, Gone Tomorrow, dealt with garbage and the uncritical ways we approach recycling and waste creation and “management.” Green Gone Wrong addresses the greening of capitalism and  the implications that trying to sell and buy and trade our way through ecological crisis ignores that the logic of our economy is what got us into this mess in the first place (and it is not going to get us out).

The book is structured around case-studies of new so-called “green industries” like natural building, electric cars and organic agriculture. In each case we are presented with contradictions about labor, regulatory and environmental abuses too blatant to ignore. The pattern seems to suggest that the green-capitalist mantra that eco-friendly practices can still be competitive and successful business practices.

As Rogers concludes towards the end of the book “Meaningful transformation requires not just unconventional products, but the creation of an alternative logic, where consuming less would improve the standard of living and where success was defined quite differently.” She continues, “So we can vote with our wallets all we want, but the people with the most money – precisely those who lavishly benefit from a system built on ransacking nature – will inevitably control the most votes. Only when we rethink how and what we value – so that we no longer bas well-being and quality of life on excess production, consumption and wasting – will we truly be able to address global warming and other forms of ecological ruin.”

This book is highly recommended to anyone hoping to make money and do good in the world as well as those who think that is an impossibility.

For more information see heatherrogers.info

Book Review: Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
by Nick Redding (Bloomsbury USA – June 9, 2009)

http://www.methlandbook.com/

When I saw Methland listed as a top food book of 2010 on grist.org I was surprised and intrigued. I didn’t know squat about meth or small town life, but I knew from traveling the country to work on Farm Together Now that there was a huge difference between thriving boutique-ish small towns that could support high-end sustainably produced food and those still dominated by industrially cultivated commodities which usually supported a few fat-cat landowners and otherwise desperate and failed local economies. Methland describes the latter kind of town. With richly developed characters not often seen in non-fiction, author Nick Redding tells the story of the consolidation of the food industry through the lens of the rise of Meth use, production and circulation in Oelwein, Iowa (and other midwestern towns like it). The analysis is that Meth is a working-person’s drug made by people coerced into long hours in tractor-trailers and meat-packing plants and abandoned farm houses that all reveal once and for all that small towns are quite depressed and no longer able to be ignorantly romanticized. While the author criticizes ag-industry giants like Cargill and Monsanto, he awkwardly acknowledges towards the end of the book that his father is an Iowa farmer who worked his way up the ranks of the Monsanto agricultural biotechnology company based in St. Louis. While this personal history does nothing to discredit the research and facts in the book, it does reveal how real people with real life stories are implicated in destroying our food system. I highly recommend reading Methland for anyone who wants to try-out (or return to) rural life from the city or suburbs. It is a good reminder that whatever you think you are looking for will have to concede to a new rural reality that is hard to change and hard to ignore.