Arts of Resistance (brief)

Arts of Resistance A collaborative zine supporting criminalized survivors of domestic violence

A Note This is a collaborative zine.

Uncredited words in this zine are written by Carolyn Chernoff, a Philly area educator, activist, and media artist.

Uncredited images are courtesy of the amazing participants of Arts of Resistance, a series of workshops held between 2018-2019.

Some participants include Madison Gray, Silvia C., RK, Aiden Gibbs, Erica Siegel, Mari Flamm, and many others.

Until we are all free.

Arts of Resistance Arts of Resistance began in October 2018 in response to a curriculum activist and abolitionist Mariame Kaba created. With Survived & Punished, Mariame compiled a comprehensive curriculum for supporting criminalized survivors of domestic violence and released the curriculum during October 2018— domestic violence awareness month. She asked that her friends and comrades help her workshop and publicize this resource. As a fellow at the Soapbox in Philly, I thought maybe I could do that while emphasizing the role of print media in resistance.

So I held a one-time workshop at the Soapbox using Mariame’s curriculum.

Participants were particularly moved by the timeline showing how even before the United States became the U.S., there was a clear pattern of laws created and enforced to protect the powerful. In terms of domestic violence and sexual assault, this amounts to criminalizing survivors of violence for the crime of self-defense.

Participants were also moved by the opportunity to make art, especially collage. In a digital age, to sit in a mostly-quiet room with others and hearing only the sounds of scissors and gluesticks, pen on paper, and the deliberate ripping of magazine pages is a balm.

So we continued workshops at the Soapbox. A feminist law school club invited a workshop. And so on.

The plan was always to make a collaborative zine in response to Mariame’s curriculum and our workshops. After some months, I had a pile of amazing collages and drawings. How to print the zine, though? The striking color images would be the heart of the zine—but color is expensive to print.

In Philly, the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation in conjunction with Small But Mighty Arts announced grants for teaching artists. I applied on behalf of the collaborative zine. Thank you, Stockton Rush Bartol and Small but Mighty Arts, for funding our zine.

Thank you all for reading. Thank you for working and fighting until we are all free.

Art as Self-Care

by Jane Ball

Jane Ball is a school-based social worker by day, art teacher by night.

She enjoys making things with her family. You can find her on instagram @frankensteincurottos

Personal/Political

by Lauren Jade Martin

Lauren Jade Martin is a feminist sociologist and old-school zinester.

Her collection of zines and riot grrrl ephemera are archived at Barnard College. Find her at dandyprof.com.

In the women’s and gender studies courses that I teach, I usually bring up the origins of the feminist slogan “the personal is political” in relation to political education and consciousness-raising groups of the Women’s Liberation movement. We read “A Black Feminist Statement” by the Combahee River Collective, and other primary texts, for their discussions about how people who gather in a room together to share their experiences produce and reveal something about the nature of oppression. Individual plights and slights (“the personal”) take up new structural significance (“the political”) when stories of bias, violence, dirty looks, shame, police harassment, criminalization, silencing, and denial are repeated and echoed and affirmed by person after person after person.

diagram from workshop

I became witness to such moments of consciousnessraising while facilitating support groups for survivors of domestic violence in Portland, OR and Brooklyn, NY in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. On both coasts, the organizations I worked at were some of the oldest domestic violence shelters in the country, beginning as explicitly grassroots feminist programs. Although the shelters had both since professionalized to some extent, “empowerment” rather than “therapy” continued to be the goal of our support groups. As survivors shared their experiences with one another, asked questions, offered advice, vented, complained, cried, or argued, they also recognized themselves in each other. Each had different stories of abuse, experienced different kinds of violence (including verbal and emotional), but also realized that they were not alone, that they were not the only person to have experienced this, that the “problem” was not them or just a matter of one or two “bad relationships,” but that in fact intimate and gender-based violence was a larger political issue. It’s not a coincidence that many of the volunteers and staff of DV programs are themselves survivors. Survivors created this movement, and still sustain it.

participant artwork

While I was merely the facilitator, not a participant, in those support groups, consciousness-raising and the personal-as-political ethos were part of my experiences as a former riot grrrl and zine maker. Riot grrrl more formally replicated the CR-groups of the ‘70s at their meetings and conventions, giving space and time for grrrls to, yes, share their stories and experiences and gain collective knowledge about the issues that affected them: sexual violence, racism, eating disorders, homophobia, body image, disrespect at punk shows, mental illness, and so on.

Zines for me functioned in a similar way. Although we were not typically in the same physical place as others, zines could act as a virtual and asynchronous space for consciousness-raising: writing and publishing about your life, reading about other people’s experiences, and then responding and dialoguing through letters and emails and follow-up essays back and forth. The very act of making and creating zines feels empowering because it gives you the ability to structure YOUR story in YOUR way. The other side of this is the joy and intellectual and emotional growth you can experience when reading someone else’s words, giving you insights into another person’s world. Even just re-reading this description that I just wrote makes me think about the SLOWNESS of this process, unlike the instant feedback of meeting in a room together with others.

Zines allow us to take a breather, to pause and reflect, to reconsider, to edit. And, because they are physical objects, not just words spoken within a group in a specific time and place, zines and the messages they contain can travel, can pass into other people’s hands, can reach those who were not privileged to be there for the initial conversation, but who can still reap the knowledge days, weeks, years, decades afterwards. Years before I ever began volunteering as a rape crisis counselor in college, I had already heard firstperson stories about abuse and assault from the zines I received in the mail from strangers, which shaped my own consciousness and dedication to fighting gender-based violence.

participant artwork

“Consciousness-raising” sounds old fashioned today, and “the personal is political” as a slogan has been corrupted to the point of meaninglessness, but these tools of political education have persisted, albeit in different forms, in various feminist and progressive spaces. My students point to hashtags like #MeToo on social media functioning as a more contemporary example that allows people to contribute to and follow the stories of survivors. Thousands of iterations of the phrase #MeToo point to the structural roots of violence and the patterns of impunity. But, while st virtual and digital space may be the 21 century version of second-wave CR groups, there is still something exciting about gathering locally, within one’s own community, to teach and learn, to listen and share, to make and create.

And there is also something compelling about collaborating on a project that results in a physical object—a zine— that is both a memento of a group’s collective efforts, and a pedagogical tool that can be passed on, hand to hand, like a game of Hot-ConsciousnessRaising-Potato. We need to carve out more spaces like Arts of Resistance—in both real-time and virtually —to nurture this impulse for connection, solidarity, justice, and education.

People and Places This is not a hagiography, and I am not name-dropping—but one of the ways that activism works and social movements win is through networks.

We learn from those we come in contact with. We learn from history.

We learn from other people’s work.

And sometimes we get lucky.

I met Mariame Kaba in 2000 in Chicago, when she was the director of education and prevention at a local domestic violence agency, among many other project. I was very lucky to learn from Mariame. Then and now, she was an inspiring and skilled leader, working with others to make change, using art and culture and poetry and all the tools we have at our disposal.

When I left Chicago a few years later to move to Philadelphia for grad school, Jane Ball had just arrived to work at the same organization. She was from Virginia. I liked her right away, and wished we could be in the same geographic space together for more than a few weeks. Her zine was Koyanyi; Jane was a talented artist, musician, and activist.

Years after moving to Philly, I got involved with the Soapbox, a community print shop and zine library. Zines are important here. Mariame makes zines and publications. Jane does too. So do I. I met Lauren Jade Martin, a professor and old-school zinester, through our mutual involvement at the Soapbox. At our first coffee, we discussed late ‘90s and early 2000s activism, including domestic violence work, punk rock, and zines.

So the work you see here is inspired by Mariame and articulated by me, Jane, and Lauren, as well as about 40 people throughout the Philly area who attended workshops and study groups inspired by the 2018 Survived & Punished Criminalizing Survivors curriculum.

Who inspires you? Who will you inspire?

What accident, intention, or fate will bring you to your next project, campaign, or calling?

MK

Survived & Punished

LJM

New York Chicago

Project NIA

Friends of Battered Women & Their Children

CC

Philadelphia The Soapbox

JB Virginia

#FreeMarissa

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#MarcelaRodriguez

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#FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll #FreeThemAll

Thank you, Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation and Small But Mighty Arts, for funding color copies of our zine.

Thank you, Mariame Kaba and Survived & Punished, for leading the way, for inspiration, for resources, and for showing us how to make a better future.

Thank you, Soapbox Community Print Shop & Zine Library, for hosting events and for ongoing support. Extra special thanks to Mary Tasillo.

Thank you, Tony, Food Not Bombs, and Green Line for catering our party.

For more information: https://survivedandpunished.org/

This zine and the expanded Arts of Resistance zine including full-color artwork from workshop participants will be available online: On Issuu.com https://issuu.com/carolyn.chernoff/docs/AoRbrief https://issuu.com/carolyn.chernoff/docs/AoRcolor Digital download https://drive.google.com/open? id=13EMNlHMws0sHAA_BGYOZM-V8iVKE6bAT For hard copies of zines, to schedule workshops, to learn more about the project, etc., email ArtsOfResistancePhilly@gmail.com

#FreeThemAll ArtsOfResistancePhilly@gmail.com 2019