Margaret Kearney - How to Hear More - Booklet 2 - SAIC Gradshow2020

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The Interviews

Though we try to listen attentively we don’t hear all voices the same. I spoke with 13 artists, activists, and cultural workers to talk about power, some of the ways that people are intervening, and the ethics of talking and making together. I’ll dig more into the shared themes, strategies, and suggestions in these conversations in the accompanying analysis booklet.

Below are excerpts from my conversations with Salome Chasnoff, William Estrada, Paul Farber, Marc Fischer, Maria Gaspar, Liza Goodell, Aaron Hughes, Damon Locks, Damon Rich, Aram Han Sifuentes, JJ Tiziou, Jennifer Turnbull, and Ron Whyte. I’ve lightly edited the transcriptions for clarity and length but tried to keep as much as possible unchanged.

Speakers were also offered the opportunity to alter or approve their transcriptions. Each interview was sent I hope that you will find, as I did, surprising connections, delicious contradictions, and deep questions.

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Salome Chasnoff

Salome Chasnoff is an artist, educator, and filmmaker based in Chicago, IL. Some of the things she makes include films performances, installations, and gatherings. In her own words, Salome has consistently “maintained a collaborative social practice and exhibition career embracing and interrogating the indivisibility of the making of art and the making of relationships” (http://www.salomechasnoff. com/bio). Salome is also a founding member of the PO Box Collective in Roger’s Park, Chicago.

I met Salome in my very first class as a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As her student I was persistently struck by her nurturing approach, open heart, and orientation towards community. I was excited to be able to ask her more about her personal work and practice in our conversation for this project. We chatted over soup at Tank Noodle in Uptown, Chicago. Here’s some of what we talked about.

MK: So what does listening look like in your work?

SC: Well it’s kind of an interesting question when I apply it to the different contexts that I work in.

As a filmmaker, I do a lot of documentary work, which is based on listening and discovering the story through where other people lead you rather than coming with a preconceived notion of where you want the story to go. I think that’s kind of how I am in life. I tend to teach that way.

I come in with a very vague idea, purposefully, because I want to be surprised, I want to live provisionally, I don’t want to be a robot, I’d like to learn something.

So, I think in filmmaking I really enjoy being in conversation with people and finding the story afterward. Like just allowing the conversation to flow intuitively guided by their relationship with the topic and how I can understand that.

Recently I did a project with family members of people killed by Chicago police and the conversations were a little more constructed. I was wanting to find out from their perspective who this person was that was lost. Because generally speaking, when people die in a dramatic, noteworthy way, you know, they get known for that, particularly if they had not been widely known prior to their death. And, on top of that, the state, the police, and the media need to reconstruct the story so they won’t look bad, they won’t be culpable. So, the person that gets murdered becomes constructed as somebody that deserved it: they had it coming, they asked for it. So, I’ve been having those conversations with multiple family members about the same person and then editing those conversations

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together to create a continuous story about this person. I put the conversations in a warm living room setting where viewers become listeners, immersed in the setting. When they’re just sitting among people who are having a conversation that they can’t participate in, all they can do is listen. The intention is to work towards radical empathy.

MK: What were the conversations like?

SC: I just asked them questions about the person that was murdered. You know, what were they like, what do you miss about them, what did they do when they were alone, what was their favorite food, what was your relationship like, what’s one thing you don’t want to forget, questions like that. The questions were simple and open-ended. They let people develop rich stories about those people. In each conversation about a person murdered by Chicago police, I spoke to five family members - so it’s five different perspectives, five distinct and yet similar experiences, cut together.

MK: How do you think about that editing process?

SC: Yeah as a documentary filmmaker, after I film an interview, I edit it and that’s a very intimate part of the process. Because I’m looking at the same footage over and over and over. In a short amount of time, I feel like I’m breathing with the person. I’m serious, I know how they blink, I become physically so bonded with them that I fall in love with them and I really want them to look good, to be understood.

Like the story is really important but probably

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equally or maybe even more important is how can I help them to look their best self, to sound like their best self. There are moments when I can hear the same response a thousand times and I never get tired of it, it just keeps opening up for me, and that’s kind of a different form of listening.

Like I had done a documentary many years ago at a mission hospital in Malawi. I was friends with the one doctor in the whole hospital which had a catchment area that served about 125,000 people. And she was the only doctor and so I was doing a documentary about this. I spent a lot of time with them over two years. I went there to do a documentary about maternal child health and the AIDs epidemic in the fourth poorest country in the world. But when I got there, I soon learned that there was corruption in the hospital, like the accountant was stealing and then there was a person that was doing voodoo on other people and there was all kind of shit going on. And I could have made a very exciting documentary. But I was so committed to the people that I was there to represent that I couldn’t even let that in. I mean I could have, and a lot of people would have but I just couldn’t. So yeah, I think it’s connected to trust for me. Like when you’re making a documentary, when somebody agrees to sit down with you, they’re letting you into their life.

And it’s based upon either a verbal or a tacit contract; so unless I have their permission to veer from it, I have to stick to what we agreed on. I can’t come in under the guise of doing one thing and then learn things because they trust me and do something else..

MK: How much of that do you think comes from the practice of filmmaking and how much of it is your personal way of being?

SC: I think it’s both. I mean they co-create each other. Yeah, I have to live with myself. I also think for me the making of work, media, art, anything that we make together and the making of relationships are indivisible and they happen together. That’s kind of like the caduceus, these two threads that are braided, and for me they can’t be separated. I’m not like building a plot, you know? I’m not recording the news, I’m doing something else.

parent, that was a concept I had to evolve for myself, that my seemingly helpless child has agency and I always need to respect that. And that was a concept that has been evolving over the past decades. So I’m curious about that interplay with listening.

MK: Are there questions that I’m not asking that I should be?

SC: Well we talked earlier about different situations that might differently construct listening and the rules around listening. But I think our varying roles come out of those situations in a way, like collaborative artist versus teacher versus even parent. I think it could be of value to know how we see connections and disconnects between how we listen in these various roles and how we promote, encourage, dialogue, in these different roles. I think that’s something I personally might want to reflect on more. Like what are our various responsibilities in these different roles and how that affects, informs, constructs listening.

Because obviously our roles are different, our responsibilities are different, in these different situations. But if we are clear that no matter what our role, everybody in the room has agency, then I think it kind of levels the playing field. It’s hard to explain. When I was a new

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William Estrada

William Estrada is an artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. His projects bring communities together to draw and screenprint on street corners (Mobile Street Art Cart), honor shared stories (Chicago Neighborhood Family Portrait Project), and activate common dreams. In his own words, William’s “teaching and art making practice focus on addressing inequity, migration, historical passivity and cultural recognition in under represented communities” (werdmvmntstudios.com/home).

I met William in early 2019 while installing a show of work from the Prison and Neighborhood Art Project and connected over our shared interests in printmaking, collaboration in public space, and repurposed bike carts. Later in the year I got back in touch to talk in more depth about his work. We chatted on the phone in January 2020 about connection, celebration, and good questions. Here’s some of our conversation.

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MK: So how do you think about listening and storytelling in your work?

WE: I’ve been really interested in the stories that my family has experienced. My parents but also my own experiences as a non English speaker, the stories of my friends and peers and predominantly Black and Latino communities. And when I started becoming an artist, and also started thinking about becoming a teacher, I realized that teaching was one of the only places that gave me permission to talk about those things.

So as the years progressed, I started thinking about the rich conversations that I was having with students that I was teaching predominantly in elementary school. We were addressing race, misrepresentations, lack of representation, themes of injustice, perceptions and biases that we have of others, and what I learned later on were ideas of structural and institutional racism. Through those conversations that I was learning the importance of not necessarily asking “how do you deal with race?” because that might be a different answer. But instead just literally starting with questions like “what’s affecting you right now? What is something that you would want to change in your everyday life?

What is something you would want to change in your community or your neighborhood?” and then also the opposite, “what needs to be celebrated that doesn’t get recognized? What labor is being done around you that doesn’t get recognized as labor?”. And those have become the prompts that guided a lot of the projects that I’ve been doing.

The projects are also very open ended. It’s about me going into neighborhoods that I work in, neighborhoods that I live in, neighborhoods that I visit or that remind me of the neighborhood that I grew up in, and providing an opportunity for me to listen. It’s an opportunity for me to talk to people that I otherwise wouldn’t necessarily get the opportunity to talk to. And even within the communities that I’ve worked in for more than a decade or even two decades, I realized that although I know a lot of people, there’s a lot of engagement missing. I don’t always know what’s really affecting them outside of my very close circle of friends, right? There’s this distance that I personally experience with my neighbors and I think the projects that I’ve been doing have been very much about me having this opportunity and honor and also responsibility of getting to know the people that I don’t teach. Because I’d get to have these really great conversations with young people. And then when I was trying to have them with adults, it was much harder. There wasn’t an easiness, there was a discomfort in experiencing that vulnerability, of me asking these questions and of people answering them.

So, the mobile street art cart which has been one of the most beautiful experiences that I’ve been able to encounter over the last four years.

The premise for the art cart is you’re making art that’s related to grassroots movements. And my intentions for that were for both myself and for people in the neighborhoods that I’m working in to remember that art is not a luxury; art can be very accessible, art is about organizing, and coming together; art making is about voicing our concerns and addressing them.

It’s very political, and that doesn’t necessarily involve protesting or marching, it’s just giving ourselves permission to make something that addresses something that we’re concerned with and to visibly record it.

And to find other people in our neighborhood through this art making process that maybe also feel the same way that you do about these certain things. It provides this opportunity for us to interrupt our daily lives and to engage with people. Then we can realize like ‘oh i didn’t know that you felt strongly about that, i feel strongly about that too. We should probably talk. Or where are you hanging out that talks about these things? Or we’re organizing over here you should probably come and join us”. The work is about these moments of connecting people. It’s also helped me learn about just the multitude of resources that exist in the city, all the people doing such amazing work. It’s a reminder of how rich and beautiful these neighborhoods really are and how we forget about that. Because often only the bad stuff gets represented.

A big part of what makes the projects successful is both people making the time to stop and learn and talk but also how I show up there. Like obviously I have to be very aware of my body movement, my expressions, my tone, and I think my background in teaching helps but part of it is that I really enjoy the work.

Because you can’t show up in a place and be an asshole and be like “well why aren’t people participating?”. You have to really dedicate the time and ask where you should go so people show up. I’m very much about the idea that just

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because you think you’re doing good doesn’t mean that you’re doing good. You have to ask people what good they want to happen instead of you saying ‘well I’m gonna do this because it’s amazing and you should be really happy that I’m here doing this for you”. Instead, we can be saying “these are my skill sets, this is what I’m good at. Do you find that interesting? Do you think that could help in anything that you’re trying to do?” and then actually following up and doing it, not just making empty promises.

MK: What about sharing those stories?

WE: Well, I mean in the family portrait project originally I really wanted to collect people’s histories and transcribe those stories and put them in an archive along with their pictures. and although I’m still very interested in those conversations, I quickly learned and realized that people want to be listened to. Because there aren’t tons of opportunities for people to release, so a lot of people were sharing very vulnerable stories. So, although I wanted to listen to them and just be present with them, I decided I did not want those stories to be recorded and to be archived. Because I didn’t know who would have access to these stories if I put them out somewhere and I didn’t want that responsibility of curating and representing this particular person in this way. Like I’m not trained as a journalist and this is beyond what I knew how to do well. So, I did not record stories and it was more about the physical image itself and the experience, that moment of conversation and as I was doing the portraits.

And I have a photo release form so people can choose exactly what I can and can’t do

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with the photos. If folks don’t want me to use it, I’ll give them the file and then I usually just destroy my copy on the spot. So, I don’t create temptations for myself, later down the road like let’s just destroy it immediately. Because the purpose is to give people a portrait, like that is the first priority of the project. The second is the opportunity for me to talk to people if they want to talk to me. And I run into people all the time, year and years later and those connections stay. Really, it’s so fulfilling as an artist but also just as a person to see these connections and think ‘oh wow it’s working, the impact this work is having’, not only on the people but on me and my own realization of how do we build relationships based on trust and faith in the people.

Paul Farber

Paul Farber is a curator, historian, and educator based in Philadelphia, PA. In his own words, Paul’s “research and curatorial projects explore transnational urban history, cultural memory, and creative approaches to civic engagement” (www.paulfarber.com/contact). Paul is also the artist director, senior curator, and co-founder of Monument Lab, a public art and history project that “Works with artists, students, activists, municipal agencies, and cultural institutions on exploratory approaches to public engagement and collective memory” (monumentlab.com/ about-monument-lab). This has taken such forms as “citywide art exhibitions, site-specific commissions, participatory research initiatives, a national fellows program, a web bulletin and podcast, and more”.

I met Paul in 2016 while working at Mural Arts Philadelphia and got to know him better as I took on the role of Mobile Research Lab Manager for the 2017 iteration of Monument Lab. I have always experienced him to be well spoken, curious, and visionary. We talked on the phone in October 2018 about power, transparency, and failure. Here is some of our conversation.

MK: How do you think about listening in your work?

PF: Yeah so, I think one thing that comes up in almost every community engagement situation or project that I’m a part of comes down to this: if you have something you want to learn from other people that sets up a more honest form of listening. Whether that be about a question or a topic or a place or what have you. Whereas the opposite is you just want to talk for talking’s sake. Which may lead to the checking off of a box of community engagement or a lack of intentional listening. So, for instance there will be times when I’ve heard someone say “okay we’re going to do this thing and we really want the community’s involvement” and you say “well how can they contribute” and no one knows how. I think what that’s meant in the work of Monument Lab is that there are some things that we are not asking for and there are some things that we are asking for. So we try to be very upfront in a number of ways. And what we have often found is that it’s best to be intentional and you let people know what you’re doing. And to think of it as a form of exchange, not a one way telling and not one way extracting. There has to be mutuality and then you scale it to what’s possible.

MK: I know you work a lot in collaboration with different communities and partners, how do you manage power differentials in those cases?

PF: Oh yeah that’s the one. I think you just cut to the heart of collaboration and when it is possible and when it breaks down. I think that

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there’s a few different kinds of power. One of those kinds of power is financial. And I think that doesn’t always supersede, but it often does, that the people who stand to benefit the most often always also have the most fiscal risk. In all kinds of ways that individuals don’t even know but institutions do. So I tend to say like I love pursuing projects between bigger and smaller entities, but I think if there’s not a transparency about power in a project upfront, some may just suffer and not know why. And there have been times when we’ve had to say to an entity like “hey, I know that we have a big reputation but actually we’re the younger organization without a big backbone and we cannot work without protection”. So that’s one kind of power. Another is the cultural power and sometimes that gets confused financially.

Like who gets the credit and who brings the credibility, who brings their body of work and i think again it’s hard to say on every project but the more transparent you are about this the better. Like if you work with someone and they can’t name for you not only why you want to work together but what you offer them it’s a hard thing. So, I try to always say to organizations initially, I want to work with you for these reasons. It could be because you have the infrastructure, it could be your mailing list, maybe it’s about working closely with them for years, maybe it’s actually just having them be hosts of an event. But I think just the more that you talk about power relationships, the more likely it is you’ll be able to handle not just tough parts between you, but the challenges outside in community contexts. Because you figure out who speaks when and how do you not negotiate against yourselves collectively

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and individually.

MK: It seems like that requires a lot of vulnerability.

PF: Yeah, and self-knowledge. I really like it when someone’s able to say “here’s why we want to work with you” and you can write it down and then you can remember at the end, “oh yeah I didn’t go to you because your communication strategies are great. I went to you because of your ability to talk through intense issues. So, I will not blame you for bad communications”. It’s very rare so when you have a partner who respects you for who you are and who you’re not, it’s worth its weight in gold.

MK: How do you think about voice, authority, and different types of expertise in your work?

PF: Well, we have both a practice and an ideological project where we try to take different kinds of expertise and bring them together in the same room. And we are actively trying to deconstruct rigid forms of expertise. That’s one of the primary goals of Monument Lab. We did that for the first time when we were hiring evaluators for a grant and hired high school students and then had them present to the city hall public art office. That was the main goal. It was just to break down that level of expertise in that room and then to scale that in other ways. And I have seen the moments when that’s really transformative and I’ve seen the moments when there’s pushback. But I think if you’re committed to that as a practice then you put it into practice in all kinds of ways.

If it’s in your budget, you have to figure out how much engagement costs and community engagement costs money. You can’t just say to people “oh you would love the opportunity to be featured”, everyone’s time is valuable. I would never say that to an architect or whoever so what we’re talking about right now is both the vanguard and very hard to do.

But I think it’s really worth it. To me it’s what the payoff of our work is. And that’s not always short term change, it’s long term. And just to break the fourth wall, I love to hear that you’ve taken a lot of experiences you’ve had, not just Monument Lab, and evolved your educational practice and your artistic practice. But you could have called and said you were leading a group of organizers or getting a social work degree or some else. There’s a lot of outcomes so I think that is really important as well. Just to question what success is. And success could be financial, it could be metrics driven but for me success is also bumping into you virtually to keep talking.

And then there’s also figuring out what failure means. Every day you’re given a choice about how to stick to your values and it’s not always clear cut. While there’s always a burden of responsibility I think part of what I try to do is reframe failure and success. You’re setting up people in different ways to succeed or to absorb challenges so that anything that goes well we planned for and anything that didn’t go well we can absorb and learn from. Because there are always things that you learn. As long as it’s not hurting someone, it’s a way to improve and you can bear hug that in.

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Marc Fischer

Marc Fischer is an artist based in Chicago IL. He is the founder of Public Collectors. In his own words Public Collectors “organize exhibitions and events, participates in projects organized by others, and creates exhibition opportunities for collectors and archivists. Public Collectors also teaches, lectures, responds to research inquiries, and makes publications” (www. publiccollectors.org/about). Marc’s recent project, The Courtroom Artist Residency Program, brings artists to observe court proceedings at Cook County Criminal Court followed by a meal and conversation at Taqueria El Milagro.

A professor at SAIC introduced me to Marc after I’d spent hours swooning over his publications at SAIC’s Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection. I was intrigued to hear about his approach to gathering artifacts and information from archives, investigations, and the broader world. We met over brunch at La Nonna Cafe in Avondale, Chicago and talked about witnessing as an artist and the criminal justice system. Here is some of our conversation.

MK: So, you’d been going to watch the Van Dyke trials, but how did you get the idea to start a Courtroom Artist Residency?

MF: Well I’d be sitting there during a recess and there’s other defendants going up so I asked the person next to me why are these people being called up. And then I realized that the hearing wasn’t just for him, it was also for other people and they would just kind of shoehorn in all of these other cases around what was happening for Jason Van Dyke. And sometimes those hearings were long and sometimes they were really short. So, one day I went in and it takes a long time to get there. In between morning rush hour traffic and walking in from where you park, it can be like 45 minutes or an hour to get down to Little Village. I drove all the way down there and then you have to go through a metal detector and all that when you go in and there was a second metal detector just for that court case. And then the whole thing was over in two minutes. Like someone needed more time to get documentation of something or whatever and this happens all the time. So, I thought, I’m already down here and I don’t want to go home yet. There’s 20-something courtrooms in that building so I could just visit some other courtrooms and see what I see. If you go to other courts if there’s not something where there’s some kind of action or press around, the only other people in the courtroom are people who’ve been summoned to be there for their case and they’re out on bond or whatever. Or it’s someone who’s on probation and they have to check in regularly with the judge. Or if it’s family members of someone who’s in custody and then the person who’s

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in custody is brought out by the sheriff to see the judge and then is taken away immediately.

People will set aside the whole morning for their person who they might see for 45 seconds. The defendant in custody might give them a nod and acknowledge their family or whoever is there for them and then within a minute they’re taken back to jail because they just had one of probably 25 hearings before they decide to take the plea deal or go to jury trial. And jury trials are really the extreme minority in those situations. In these rooms you’re probably sitting by yourself and then the person next to you is involved in some way in the system. So, the first time I did that I was sitting next to this young man and his purpose for being there in court was that his sister was being sentenced and he was a character witness for her so he got up to go speak on her behalf and then sat back down. And we both sat there and watched her get 3.5 years in prison. I realized that morning that like this is what the next residency should be. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really hard to hear or moves really quickly or is really subtle so watching it takes practice and it helps to have another person with you to compare what you saw and heard.

intricacies of the case that maybe I wasn’t privy to or just hadn’t been doing that background research on the case like they had, but we were able to talk about other things. So, for instance, Josh Rios and I were at the sentencing hearing and the prosecution introduced five people who’d had encounters with Jason Van Dyke where he had brutalized them in different ways, basically all of which had to do with them being pulled over. One man’s shoulder muscles were totally ripped by the way he was pulled while handcuffed by Van Dyke. And the same day we heard Van Dyke’s daughters’ statements.

One of them is old enough that she read her own statement in support of him in court and the other was too young and her statement was read by the female defense attorney in this case. And in the older daughter’s statement she talked about how her father is not gonna be there to like teach her how to drive, you know? Obviously, I don’t think she knew that other people were going to talk about their experiences of her father in cars but that’s just the kind of observation that we can make that’s probably not gonna show up in the Chicago Sun Times coverage on what happened during the sentencing hearing.

MK: What do you think is different about witnessing that space as an artist observer versus a person who is reporting on it or has a specific role and stance within that place?

MK: Do you know if any of the people represented in some way in the work you’ve done have read these?

MF: I thought about that quite a bit during the Jason Van Dyke trial because that was something that was heavily reported on. Most things that happen are not reported on at all.

So, the journalists could talk about detailed

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MF: Yeah, someone shared the booklets about Gerald Reed’s case with his mother and I think it was actually read to Gerald over the phone.

I’ve attended numerous hearings for Gerald Reed with residents. He has been in prison for twenty-eight years after being tortured into

confession to a crime he didn’t commit. Gerald very clearly acknowledged me in court at the last hearing I attended, in a very pleased kind of way I think. So, I mean I definitely did not plan on that. But that’s always kind of there for you if you want it. Because these people have their hearing and there’s nothing that would stop you from saying something in the hallway to them afterwards if they aren’t in custody. I haven’t done that but you know there’s not a barrier to that. Or there’s another person in a similar kind of coerced confession case where the father of these two brothers was regularly attending Gerald Reed’s hearings and I’ve gone to a couple hearings for his sons so I’ve talked to the father a little bit but not a lot. I haven’t talked to any of the attorneys or anything but that is a direction where potentially it could go.

enough which courts I go to that the judges aren’t probably like “oh there’s that guy who always brings a different person or who’s like furiously taking notes”.

MK: It’s interesting how your frequent presence in the courtroom might change the relationship to the other people there.

MF: Part of also doing very little promo for this project is that I don’t want to be a story in the Tribune about “that guy who brings artists to court”. I really don’t want to be greeted by staff or anything. It was the same thing with the Joong Boo series, I never told them what I was doing, I would just be there twice a month with people that I brought as an artist residency. I go there other times so they obviously know that I like their food but they don’t know that I had an artist residency built around their existence. So, I think I try to fly a little under the radar because I don’t want to be treated differently, I don’t want to be acknowledged.

And I think it’s sporadic enough and irregular

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Maria Gaspar

Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, IL. In her own words, Gaspar’s work “addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures” (www.mariagaspar.com/bio). Her work has taken such forms as sculpture, installation, sound, and performance. Some of her collaborations have included Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall (in collaboration with individuals currently and previously incarcerated at Cook County Jail) and 96 Acres (in collaboration with fellow artists investigating the Cook County Jail site).

I’ve been familiar with Maria’s work through reading and watching and have been consistently impressed by the way she handles political content with a poetic touch.

I was introduced to Maria for this project through a professor at SAIC. We spoke on the phone in January of 2020 about abstraction, collaboration, and networks. Here is some of our conversation.

MK: Can you tell me a little about how you’ve come to the collaborative relationships you’ve built at Cook County Jail?

MG: I’d been working in public art on all these walls and I started to think more about what it meant to not just develop artwork that would go on the wall, but rather to think about the wall itself and specifically to look at dividing walls. I couldn’t help thinking about a major institution in my childhood neighborhood, the Cook County Jail. I started to kind of think about what it would mean to do a project there and over the next 2-3 years I started organizing other artists and community members who cared about issues of incarceration or criminalization.

We started to bring people together and ask them to share their experiences. We asked them to imagine a kind of community-based art project, and asked their perspective on what it would be, what are some of the necessary components, and who would need to be at the table. And that brought together some art people, organizing people, people who were formerly incarcerated, sometimes young people, a variety of people that you might see within any kind of community. Eventually, we developed the 96 Acres Project, which looked at the jail and thought about the impact it had not only on people who lived around the facility, but also the larger impact it had on people of color and poor people in the county.

Then, I started to move my collaborative work inside of the jail, and the relationships inside the jail started to become very important.

These are complex political spaces, and I’ll say that I’ve had the privilege to benefit

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from having access to some of these spaces because I grew up there. I recognize that when I do work in a different city, for example New Haven, Connecticut, I don’t have the same history. In New Haven, I don’t know so and so from high school who now works at the Alderman’s office, or the current commissioner doesn’t come from the same town in Mexico as my mom. I recognize that I come from a certain set of privileges when I work within my own communities. From the very beginning, that gave me a particular kind of access that would be difficult to attain if I didn’t have my own roots in that neighborhood.

MK: So what changed when you moved from listening to sharing the work from inside the jail?

MG: Going from the interior of the jail to the exterior of the wall is always a kind of political crossing, and it’s a violent border crossing.

When you’re making public work, you have to consider that the people who see it are not people who have agreed to see it. They’re the passersby, the people driving by, and the kid from down the street that happens to be seeing this image. I think there’s a big responsibility to think about what it means to border cross.

And it’s very much a crossing back and forth. I do, and they do too. I’m thinking of one of the guys in the project whom I absolutely adore, and since we ended the project he’s been in and out four times already, unfortunately. But it is such a complicated back and forth in terms of what you carry in, and what stuff you carry out. When you take stuff out you have to know how you’re going to present it on the exterior

side. You have to think about how you share it with people who may or may not know what they’re looking at. The way that we did it for Radioactive was by inviting other artists and organizations to help realize the project. We brought on Free Write Sound and Vision who works with juvenile detention youth to be part of our sound crew. We invited other artists doing community work in the neighborhood to interact with the public audience through hands on making. William Estrada brought his Mobile Street Art Cart and was making abolition posters and having conversations at his cart with passersby. Having these moments where people can talk and get more context and learn and care together was really important to me and to the ensemble. The ensemble members’ families came, too- their mothers, girlfriends. and siblings. Their presence meant so much because they were mending relationships.

It also meant a lot to the people that were there who maybe didn’t know anything about it but were touched by seeing these families reunited. I’m always thinking spatially, and not just in terms of design or architecture, but also human space, social space, cultural space.

How does one create all these cushions, or sort of warming stations, where we can be transformed?

MK: I’ve been thinking about how collaborative projects work in terms of artistic voice and authority. How do you think about your role as an artist in collaboration?

MG: I think some of the folks who have made the best community-based work are the people who have a very strong artistic vision, that have

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a kind of clarity. Not clarity in the sense that they know exactly what they’re going to do, because I don’t think that’s a good way to go, but a clarity in the sense that they have a vision that one needs to have to help others create a vision. You have to be somebody who can mediate it, who can inspire it. There were moments inside the jail where I’d think ‘man, we are in a weird place.’ It’s that place in art where you’re like, “this is weird, it’s so good, it’s so rich, there’s something funky happening here and I don’t even know- it’s just crazy good and I want more of that”. We have to ask ourselves how we can get there because to me, that’s where we start to push against the narratives that we see about incarceration.

I think we need that weirdness and richness now especially that this type of work has become somewhat of a trend. There are trends that happen all the time in the art world and certainly one hopes that this sticks, one hopes that people care about it for a long time. But you also wonder if it’s just a trend that’s passing through for the next month, so I think a lot about how we can produce something that we haven’t seen yet or that’s getting to some place that’s allowing us to ask ourselves something.

I’m not interested in telling people what to think or making art with others that tells people exactly what they should think or believe. I’m less interested in didactics. I think there’s a purpose for them and I think that’s important but within the work that make and the work I make with others, I try to create as much space as possible to invite moments that are unclear, abstract, and that are asking questions. I think that that has been a strength of mine that I’ve

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been taught to nurture. I’ve learned to tell myself it’s okay that I want those things. I come from an activist background; that’s what I was surrounded by as a kid. And it tends to be very didactic, right? Because that’s what you need, you need a sign with your statement.

So for a long time I felt bad about these things and it felt wrong; how can you be interested in political work yet also interested in abstraction or poetics? I honestly thought for a long time when I was a young person that they didn’t go together. And then I started to read more, to look at Octavia Butler, to look at fiction, to look at Doris Salcedo, and look to these people who paved the way for us to really broaden our thinking about how to talk about really difficult things through really beautiful, inventive ways.

That’s what I gravitate towards, and that’s what I try to implement into my practice.

Aaron Hughes

MK: Can you tell me a little bit about how listening happens in your work?

I briefly met Aaron in early 2019 while helping install a show of work from the Prison and Neighborhood Art Project and was impressed by his strong commitment to community and making. Later in the year I got back in touch to talk in more depth about his work. We chatted on the phone about listening, power, and accountability in January of 2020. Here’s some of what we talked about.

I was really struggling with the fact that our society is perpetually at war and no one talks about it. War is something that I’m obsessively thinking about, trying to understand and to create a space for people to share their relationship to it. And through that process collapse the constructed distance that has been fabricated to isolate American culture from our foreign policy. I don’t think you can just tell somebody they’re impacted by war, I think you have to create space for people to say how they understand the impact. Through that sharing, other people start to hear how they might see that same relationship and therefore build a collective narrative.

Aaron Hughes is a Chicago based artist, activist, veteran, and educator. In his own words he works “collaboratively in diverse spaces and media to seek out and share the poetic connections that bind people together, reveal our shared humanity, and make meaning out of personal and collective trauma” (www. aarhughes.org/about). His work has taken many forms including at times drawings, printmaking, performance, workshops, and creative writing.

Aaron is affiliated with such projects as the emerging Veteran Art Movement, Justseeds Artist Cooperative, Iraq Veterans Against the War (now About Face: Veterans Against the War), Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project, Warrior Writers, and the Center for Artistic Activism.

AH: Well, I got really invested in storytelling and community story sharing through political organizing within the veteran community.

Common things kept coming up that people were going through on an individual basis, but there was very little space for people to share their experiences and see how those relate to a collective problem. So, a lot of my work is trying to create space for people to share their relationship to systemic structural issues so that hopefully others can reflect on their own issues and relationships to structural forms of oppression. And then to be able to build unity and solidarity, and build a collective politics.

MK: So, what does building that collective narrative look like?

AH: It looks different in different contexts.

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Sometimes it has meant creating safe spaces for people to share their stories and to hear each other. Literally just people having time to talk to one another, creating social spaces, creating opportunities for people to publicly share their stories within a small community, and asking other people to do the same.

I think that sometimes when you hear someone else with a similar experience you can start to understand your own experience: it externalizes experiences in a way that you can form language and form relational kind of experiences around. This often happens through verbally sharing. Including everything from people having one on one personal conversational to just little rap sessions with a group of people to speak outs where people are talking publicly about their experiences to a testimony where people are testifying in congress or through public hearings about war crimes and other forms of violence. So that’s one part. But it’s also after hearing all of these stories and witnessing these powerful moments finding ways to process it all and share it back out. So maybe saying like “oh you have this experience, have you talked to this person, they’ve been through something similar, you should talk to them.” And in a community you can do that, but I think when you’re not in a community that part can gets pretty problematic. In that case it’s about ensuring there is an interest in people having their stories shared.

Another consideration is that sometimes people will repeat tropes that become ways for them to articulate a truth that maybe they

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haven’t fully fleshed out to experience in their own unique way. For example, at times within the veteran community, I start to hear people repeat similar things, things that aren’t really based on people’s experiences but are really from the dominant narrative pushed out through popular culture. I think that’s a tricky thing to be able to sit with the dominant narratives and be able to ask questions about them and begin to push back against it in a way that helps people find their own unique expression.

Because these dominant narratives are things that we all live with. In some ways we’re all perpetuating different biases and assumptions and also tropes. I think it’s really important to push on that and not allow those things to be perpetuated in a way that feeds into so many different historically oppressive power structures.

MK: What do you think about mutual benefit in conversations?

AH: Yeah the question of benefit is really complicated. Sometimes, I imagine that the people that might need to hear or listen the most might not understand the benefit for a long time. I think generosity is really important, and appreciation in regards to listening and creating trust. And I imagine at times there also might be spaces where nobody benefits. I just wonder about that frame because it seems so rooted in profit or capital or people making money off of other people. It’s such a dominant thing in our lives that has to be negotiated but at the same time, it might not be how I want to engage in listening. I struggle with that. But I also understand it’s really important because

so many people become tokenized. And a side note, in a lot of ways we tokenize ourselves as we use social media, all our media about our ideas become profit for Facebook and Google and Twitter. So yeah, tough moment to think about these things.

MK: Is there anything more you want to say about generosity and appreciation?

AH: Well in regards to generosity I think that I’ve learned a great deal when I never deserved to learn. There’s been times when I am part of the problem and perpetuate the problem and yet people have shared with me. And that generosity is extremely humbling and I often think about whether it’s something I can pass on. And appreciation at times is about being able to appreciate the generosity of people sharing diverse perspectives and different forms of knowledge and experiences.

I’ve seen it in multiple groups from the veteran community to the activist art community to collaborations I’ve done that the dynamics can really shift just by creating a space where people are able to be seen and their contributions are acknowledged. I think it just changes the way people interact. Especially with communities that are dealing in some way with trauma.

Trauma can create self-destructive community behaviors and it’s hard to really appreciate everybody, even the people who are perhaps ones that are part of a problem. But it creates another opportunity for learning and growing and transforming.

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Damon Locks

Damon Locks is an artist, musician, and educator based in Chicago, IL. Among many other endeavors, Damon is the creator and founder of the Black Monument Ensemble, a project that started “as a solo sound collage piece (where Locks pulled samples from Civil Rights era speeches and recordings to create an improvisational pallet for performance on his drum machine), over 4 years the project has blossomed into his 15-piece [ensemble]” (intlanthem.bandcamp.com/album/wherefuture-unfolds). Damon is also a Director of Arts and Exhibitions and teaching artist at the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Program (PNAP), “a visual arts and humanities project that connects teaching artists and scholars to men at Stateville Maximum Security Prison through classes, workshops, and guest lectures” (www.p-nap.org). He is also currently an artist-in-residence at Sarah E. Goode High School through the Museum of Contemporary Art’s School Partnership for Art and Civic Engagement (SPACE) program.

Curious about Damon’s broader practice and individual projects, I was introduced to Damon through a professor at SAIC. I was intrigued to learn about the differences in roles he takes on between his various collaborations and the ways that ideas take poetic form in his work. We chatted at his studio in Pilsen about accountability, trust, and leadership. Here is some of our conversation.

MK: How do you think about listening in your work?

DL: Well, let me think. I can start talking about a couple of different things that I do. One of the projects is a continuing project with the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project. We do work with incarcerated artists making artwork that we can exhibit outside [of the prison]. And the important thing about that is getting their work out to people. So that’s an ongoing thing which I think has some of those questions in there.

The other way I work is in connection with a musical project called Black Monument where I work with dancers and musicians. But that has a lot of questions around collaboration and compensation and that sort of thing. As a group leader I have to really try and make sure that I am treating the artists with the most respect and making sure they get compensated and then having to negotiate the ownership of the material. And then I do a lot of collaboration in my projects with high school students, right now at Sarah E Goode High School [...] so that is in the teaching realm but in that case I’m a resident artist. So I also have to negotiate with the teachers and the students how to be a collaborator and when I bring in my skills.

Because from maybe a teacher’s point of view, everything should be student driven and they should do it all but then I have to remember that actually I’m an artist in residence here to collaborate with the students and do work. So I could step in and be the engineer or something else because we don’t have time to teach them how to do sound engineering.

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So in my brain those are kind of the three largest sections where I’m doing the things that you’re talking about and there are concerns with that.

I think the teaching one is probably the easiest one because students help with getting your project done and it’s also easy to forward them in it. People want to hear about it so you’re like oh these students did this thing and people respond well to that. I don’t think I push up against the same things as when I’m like a project leader and I am asking people to do work and then bring their skills to the work and then have to figure out what the compensation is and credit and things like that.

MK: So in all of these projects, how do you think about staying accountable to people who you’ve worked with?

DL: Yeah well you just have to be accountable.

The nice thing with PNAP is that they’re consistently working at stateville so we go back. Well, it’s also not nice that the guys are in there. But I’m gonna go back and see people.

So it’s not like I’ve done this project and then just disappear. We go back and give them updates on where it got shown and what was happening and things like that. So they also have people that they write to and talk on the phone and tell them about the projects so then those people go see the work too so they get reports back. So there’s a trust that has to be there for you to do the work.

MK: And how do you build that trust in relationships with collaborators and let people know that you’re going to be accountable to them?

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DL: I think for me, that’s over time. So I think that in the three different situations, for Black Monument, I was just thinking about Black Monument today because we did two performances two Mondays in a row. The first Monday, there wasn’t a lot of money involved in it but I ignored that and paid them the same amount that they’d had before so I lost money on that gig. But for me it was really important that if i’m asking them to play this thing, just because the gig isn’t paying as much, they shouldn’t suffer for that. So they don’t even know what the gig got paid, they just know what they’re getting paid. And for me it’s important that I can’t be like “Hey so we only got this much money”. Whereas if it was a band with four people and we’re all in it doing equal, you can say “oh it sucks we’re not getting paid more”. But this is me, this is my project and if someone has a child and can’t play for the next thing, the project is still gonna happen. So I need to make sure she gets paid what she’s gonna get paid. So my job is to be responsible in that regard, but also to do everything I can to set up a situation where their work is being respected. They’re not playing in uncomfortable situations and they get what they need to be able to do the job that they have to do. So the fact that several people have stuck with me on the projects and that when they do the projects they find them fulfilling and exciting and they’re happy, then they’re like okay now I think I’ve built up the trust. Where they know that well if Damon’s gonna do it and it seems to be building then they’re gonna be with me.

And bands have always been bands and I feel like I’ve been successful so far in putting together something that doesn’t necessarily feel like a band. It feels like something else, because people are really huggy and happy after the performance. And the audience seems to really enjoy the thing, so I’m trying to stay really very vigilant in making sure people have positive experiences. I mean I’ve been in music and videos and bands for a long time and I know what sucks so I’m gonna try to cut out all the sucky parts so that they can just have a good experience.

MK: Does that make it that you absorb the sucky parts?

DL: Sometimes I do absorb the sucky parts, yeah. But also I think that’s part of being the band leader so that’s why I get to put my name at the top of the thing because I have to do the sucky parts.

done by the end of the school year so we can present it. So when we were doing the audio thing I was up super late editing all the things together, dropping in sound effects. Because they weren’t doing the sound editing, they’d just give me links for the sound effects so I’m downloading and putting it into the files and having trouble with the computer and all that.

So every time there’s a point where I’m just like oh I have to enjoy it and absorb that part that’s super difficult and sucks so that the project can happen and can be good. But I think that at Stateville they have to absorb the suckiest parts, which is being at Stateville so I have no problem if my side is a little difficult and I have no problem not having my name at the front so they’re different situations.

MK: How do you think that relates to your roles as a teaching artist or at Stateville? Is your role similar?

DL: Yeah for example when I’m working with the students on a project, everything is always kind of running behind schedule at school.

And we never quite have the time that we want to to get the projects with the kind of depth in terms of iterations or rough drafts and figuring out how to make it better. We’ve got to be like okay here’s a draft, let’s do it, let’s make it. So inevitably every semester there’s a time period where I’m working insanely to make sure that everything is done. Because we need it

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Spiral Q

Spiral Q is a Philadelphia based arts organization founded in 1996 that educates, organizes, creates, and connects. Some of the things in their bag of tricks include parade making, puppet building, story telling, music, dance and movement, putting on festivals and exhibitions, facilitation, teaching and training. In their words, Spiral Q “builds strong and equitable communities characterized by creativity, joy, can-do attitude, and the courage to act on their convictions” (spiralq. org/company-overview-2).

For this project, I interviewed co-directors Jennifer Turnbull and Liza Goodell, both movers and shakers in their own rights. I first met Jennifer while teaching at a summer camp in 2014 as she helped me learn how to care for a group of brilliant and anxious eight year olds. A few years later I met Liza when I joined the Spiral Q team as an artist and educator.

Together they challenged and guided me to make banners, flags, giant puppets, and parades at Philadelphia public schools, preschools, and senior centers. Throughout my time at the Q they wowed me with their creative dexterity, wide open hearts, deep knowledge, and overall gusto. In our work together, they taught me about story circles, a format for sharing that comes out of lineage of John O’Neal and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). We chatted about this and other aspects of their work over the phone in November of 2019. Here’s some of our conversation.

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MK: What does listening look like in your work?

LG: Well the way we structure is that everyone is listening. So it’s not like ‘we’re here to listen to you in a community’ but more a collective moment of ‘let’s hear each other”. And that’s one of the reasons that the story circle was developed was to build community around an issue. So sometimes we do it to build content for pageantry and other art projects but really when it comes down to it, story circle is about building community and people hearing each other’s experience.

JT: Yes, I’ve been saying more and more often that story circle is really more of a listening activity. The first round is people listening: one person talks, everybody else has to listen. So the majority of the activity that’s happening is listening. And then the second round is just “here I’m proving to you that I heard you and that I listened to you” so it’s a reflection of what you heard, a representation and acknowledgement. Then the cross talk is where people are really asking questions and listening more and making connections that are different and common amongst each other. People in that moment, for the most part, are usually focused more on the things that are bringing them together and what they have in common that they maybe didn’t expect before.

LG: The understanding that people don’t have to share is also really important. The structure of the process stresses the equality of every story with each person having the same amount of time to share. For instance, if 2 minutes are allotted for each person’s story,

they must stop at 2 minutes even if they aren’t finished. Because some people might need time to warm up a little bit, they can pass their turn, when it comes back around to them, they have another opportunity to share, or if they still don’t wish to share, their silence is a story and the group sits for 2 minutes in silent reflection.

MK: What do you think about storytelling as a way for different kinds of knowledge and expertise to emerge?

JT: I have a lot of feelings I think about expertise and knowledge because a lot of white culture seems to get to decide what is valuable and what is turned into capital. I think that people’s lived experiences are super valid and that a lot of the surveys or projects that nonprofits, universities, community development world or whoever will do decide that they’re going to look into that experience but it really isn’t for anybody’s benefit except for their own. And they end up mining poor people, people of color, and other oppressed groups for their gain and it never goes back to those communities.

That kind of research says to people “we want to know about your life but we’re not valuing your knowledge in the way that we should be”, which is to both compensate people for their time and acknowledge what’s happening. So we’re really wanting to lift up long, experiential oratory tradition, and to point out that this knowledge is really valuable. And to be clear that those researchers couldn’t be doing the work that they’re doing if they didn’t have all of these “poor” or “oppressed” people that hold that information.

MK: What does art making add here?

LG: Once the stories are told we’re looking at them together to make something. Most of the time, the people who are telling the stories are also going to be involved in the project development and in the creation. We’re not just dipping in for a conversation or whatever but we’re scribing on the paper and the artists and the people in the room are noticing themes and then they might bring a metaphor into the mix. And to bring in that metaphorical thinking can help lend itself towards artmaking. For most people once that’s turned on, they start to come up with other things to build on it. We’re shifting the way of the thinking that’s not just a regular community building meeting but it’s something that works towards storytelling and artistic making.

MK: Any final thoughts about listening?

JT: I think that listening happens with more than just your ears and your brain. You can also listen with your emotions and experience what you’ve heard and with your multiple intelligent body. and I think that deep active intentional listening with your whole self as opposed to just your logical brain is really key to connecting people to one another. The story circle is an open hearted exercise and that we’ve worked to make sure that people are in a little bit more of a trusting space so that they feel comfortable telling the stories and going through this more structured activity.

LG: Sometimes if there’s too few people in the room and too many people or a weird location

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or whatever, people immediately tell their story and keep talking to each other and it really needs to be one person at a time only telling the story. The structure is really important and some people just do not follow it and you can tell that vulnerability just doesn’t happen.

JT: There’s an intimacy in listening for sure especially in this particular structure. And that intimacy and that connection is critical for the project to work because our work is about being a full person and not a cog in a wheel.

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Damon Rich

Damon Rich is a designer and urban planner based in Newark, NJ. He has served as the planning director and chief urban designer for the City of Newark. He is also the founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), an “internationally recognized nonprofit organization that uses art and design to increase meaningful civic engagement” (hectordesignservice.com/about) and has been recognized widely for his work. Currently, Damon is part of the design firm HECTOR along with Jae Shin. In their own words, HECTOR makes “buildings, public spaces, plans, exhibitions & publications that use design to help things happen”.

I met Damon in Philadelphia while working as his assistant teaching artist on an early intervention for the Mifflin Square project.

Working together on this project I was intrigued by his approach towards youth driven research, intergenerational collaboration, and creative power mapping. I learned a lot from Damon about teaching, research, and design. We spoke on the phone in December of 2019 about accountability, organizing, and institutions. Here’s some of what we said.

MK: What are some of the ways that listening comes into play in your work?

DR: Definitely one of the things that I think about very connected to listening is the question of accountability. I feel like for me that’s been really formed under the tutelage of working as a designer specifically alongside people who are trying to organize a community towards a certain goal. So one of the typical questions would be like “maybe I care whether you listen to me but I care much more about what you do about it”. So yeah I think for me this question of listening is very embedded within larger questions of who makes decisions about this place and how it’s built and how it’s maintained and what it looks like.

And I’m wanting to always have this question of accountability connected to the question of listening. So a lot of the playbook stuff there is that you definitely need to learn enough to be able to understand how people see their own self interest. I mean not self interest in a limited “you’re being selfish” way but a very legitimate way. Like as people take in all of the things they take in, how do they do the things that are the highest priority? And what do they really believe is gonna get them closer to those priorities? And having that understanding as a basis for moving into any coalition relationship or what people would call allyship or just always being very straight up about that.

MK: So how do you come into existing dynamics as an outsider and look for new ways of listening to what people want?

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DR: Yeah well I think they’re really connected with one of the main activities that we do in these situations which is kind of a transformation and a translation. I mean I guess like Mifflin Square in Philly is an example where there were all of these mythologies and common wisdoms about the neighborhood and the conflicts in the neighborhood. And as long as the conversations remained on the level of “which street is the border of the black area?” we weren’t going to be able to really talk about the park in very much detail. And so a lot of the things that we did were just different attempts with different people to find different ways to start the conversation. And we knew that a lot of the same things were gonna come up, like for instance talking about anti-asian racism in the form of where there’s gonna be a bathroom, where it should go in the park.

People would be like “oh it shouldn’t go near the sixth street side, cause then it’ll just be the asian bathroom” or all the other things that people said. But just that pretty simple thing of going with having a model or drawing that can take a conversation from these very abstracted dichotomies into like “well what if you move it a little bit this way and a little bit that way and did that to it”, that it becomes a way of listening but also a way of letting a group just listen to itself. I feel like that’s a real ongoing human challenge is to actually have a group listen to itself and listen to each other in a way that people are actually trying to follow a thread. So I think a lot of our hopes are about not centering the art and design activity, but using those art and design activities so that not just that we listen.

But ideally it’s actually something that’s helping to make a more comfortable and engaging

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listening for everybody MK: That seems like a really complicated thing to do when you’re coming into places where people have been existing within a certain dynamic for a long time. How do you come into that and find how to experience it or interrupt it or sit with it?

DR: Well thank goodness it seems to be that there is no space that has humans that doesn’t have people who have some kind of collective agenda. And it might be like a wicked mess of conflict or what have you. But pretty much no matter what thoughts one might have walking through any neighborhood anywhere there’s some institutional formation that claims that or corresponds to it. And I was talking jane mcalevey earlier, she talks a lot about this tradition in labor organizing of doing power analysis or power mapping you know really trying to figure out what’s the lay of the land of this decision and if we’re trying to get something to change from what exists how do we need to line up everyone that we got to line up. So I guess that it’s a way that we can work as outsiders. Or no matter what relationship you have because I feel like “outsider” can become unproductively abstracted as well.

Right? Like it’s definitely not a binary situation and it’s important to have a way of talking about and drawing your own self into the situation, not just as an intervention from beyond. But I think that’s starting to think about it in terms of looking as close as you can and seeing what is already happening here.

MK: Are there other things you’d like to bring

into this conversation?

DR: Well I guess like I one of my main curiosities would be about how you would consider institutional context for what you’re looking at.

Because I feel like in a good way this word of listening really puts us in a body in a specific situation of experience. And I guess for me a big dialectical relationship between that is well you know what has put us in this situation and what is forming this situation. That both puts us in a situation where an institutional context isn’t only prohibiting things, it’s also constraining things and catalyzing things. And so I think it’s really hard to have a solid vocabulary to talk about that, although it’s so important. And I feel like there are often times when I’m in conversations about these kinds of projects, that’s the part that I always wish there was more time for.

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Aram Han Sifuentes

Aram Han Sifuentes is an artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. She works in fiber, performance, and social practice to engage communities and claim space. In her own words, Aram “confronts social and racial injustices against the disenfranchised and riffs off of official institutions and bureaucratic processes to reimagine new, inclusive, and humanized systems of civic engagement and belonging” (www.aramhansifuentes.com/ artist-s-statement).

I was familiar with Aram’s work from seeing it in person at the Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, but more recently found myself hearing her name all around Chicago from peers, professors, and mutual friends. I was intrigued to speak with Aram about her approaches to making together, amplifying a range of ideas in fabric, and playfully protesting. We met up on campus in February of 2020 and chatted about power, joy, and anger. Here’s some of what we talked about.

MK: So what do you think about listening in your work?

AHS: I mean like I started out my projects as a better listener and now I won’t say that I’m a bad listener but to some extent there is just less time to listen. Because now it’s sort of like things are urgent and I’m pissed so I don’t have the sort of capacity to listen to certain people. But of course others I do listen and have that solidarity but people are also more scared so that’s hard. So it’s interesting to talk about listening because it’s becoming maybe less and less a part of my work.

MK: It’s interesting because the current moment also pushes people to listen more to first hand experiences and I’m wondering about the ethics around doing that in a way that’s actually helpful.

AHS: Yeah because in the past few years with Trump and all, there’s this thing of people being like “oh we need to listen” and even that sort of statement I sometimes find is a racist one too. In terms of questions like who’s doing the talking and who are we listening to?

Because we’re here, we’ve been talking so you know, why is that new? So what does that even look like as a society to listen? I mean it implies in a lot of situations listening to those who are marginalised or disenfranchised and it sort of rubs me the wrong way because of that.

Because we’ve been talking and then now you want to listen to us? I guess it’s just inherently my distrust of everyone and society in terms of saying “okay, you don’t make it safe for us to talk so why are you saying we need to listen?”. I

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feel like a lot of POC, we’ve got all the answers, man. I mean I teach a class on women of color feminism and there’s clear answers here so you know it would be great if people actually listened, if power actually listened.

MK: Do you think there’s a way to change the conditions of the world for it to work that way more?

AHS: No. I think we’re just fucked. Haha yeah really though. There’s a quote where they talk about how race is at a point where it will never be undoable and I totally believe that it’s just like spiraled or these sort of structures of power and whiteness have just been come so pervasive in everything that I don’t think we can ever undo it.

MK: Yeah, hopefully that doesn’t mean that we stop trying though.

AHS: Yeah of course. But I think that’s why there’s a lot of anger in my work. It’s like the Audre Lorde quote in terms of we were never meant to survive so we might as well like not be silent, we’re fucked anyways so we might as well go out screaming. So yeah, that’s how i feel and that’s how i make art is just like let’s be angry, let’s call it out and let’s have space to do it together, you know? And party it out.

And of course it isn’t without humor or fun, you know?

And I mean our own stories also get so weaponized against us. I feel like being a person of color in parts of the art world that are particularly white, I’m exhausted. Cause I’m so

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fucking exhausted of telling my own story over and over again. So now I just don’t go in certain circles because I’m like “ya’ll don’t do anything to support me or make me feel safe, I’m on repeat and this is not good for my anything, and so I’m tired of it”. And you know with the stories that people tell me during workshops and stuff, I also don’t want to share those.

They shared that with me in a safe space, in confidence, I’m not gonna go out there and share it with people because I’m not going to create this trauma porn for them. And I think that’s also why I use so much humor in my work because I’m also tired of people being like “ohh immigrants of color, oh their life must have been so hard, they’re undocumented”. I was just on a panel about immigrant artists and one of the questions that kept coming about was how surprising it is that these artists are using play and humor in their work when the conditions are so traumatic for immigrants of color. And it’s like come on we’re fucking people. We dance, we laugh, you know? Just because you know that we’re having a bad time doesn’t mean that we’re going to be like crying in the corner. You know what I mean?

It’s like clear that the way that certain people get depicted is that their life is a tragedy 24/7 and it’s literally trauma porn. Like we have the capacity to laugh and make jokes and talk back and it just baffles me that some of these mindsets are so far behind. I feel like that all of the time. Like stuff is so fucking far behind.

And art spaces perpetuate a lot of this. I think art in particular is really behind.

MK: Do you think it’s true that art could be a way of shaking up power dynamics and rigid

hierarchies of expertise?

AHS: No I don’t think that’s true at all. Because art is so elite. So I don’t think art has the structure or capacity to undo some of that. Like I try in my work to create these participatory projects and stuff but at the end of the day I’m the artist, and I’m the expert, right? I don’t think art has that capacity. I mean maybe certain types, maybe I’m not thinking through it but I don’t think so. Because even what sort of art is valued, it’s still the same thing. L I’m educated in art and have a degree in art and therefore I get to be an artist. And I do these community based participatory projects that other people do but I function very well and get a lot of opportunities in the art world for that very reason, so I don’t know.

Really though the power of art is that even though it has these terrible hierarchies and stuff, it does have a different power to shake things up. and I’m able in art to do what I do and I don’t know if I could do it in other places.

Maybe writing? I’m able to be like, “you say voting is for all? Then fine I’m going to make it available for all”. So I’m able to create that in my own vision where I don’t know if i could do that in a different field. And my hope is through doing that sort of stuff that other people can see that in art and do it themselves as well.

Because once you know that 92 million people can’t legally vote, you can’t undo that. And then it’s like your decision to actively forget that. So yeah I do think art is powerful in those ways even though it’s still fucked.

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JJ Tiziou

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MK: So, how do you think about listening in your work?

JJ Tiziou is a Philadelphia based artist, community organizer, and experiencemaker. Some of his endeavors have included photographing Philadelphians who love to dance (How Philly Moves), annually walking the 102 mile perimeter of Philadelphia, creating spaces for interfaith dialogue (Paths of Understanding), and opening his home to the public for house concerts. In JJ’s words, his work “is about paying attention—looking & listening, noticing the beauty that is already present in the community and shining a light on it. I strive to create safe spaces and compelling frameworks to bring people in and to facilitate new connections” (website).

JT: I mean there are many things to listen to.

So I think the thing to recognize is that there are some things that come to the foreground because they are louder, and some things drown out the other things. There are some projects that like to say that they’re giving someone a voice but that’s not true. Everyone has a voice but some of them are drowned out by differences in power. So the question is “what am i not hearing just because it doesn’t have the same amplification that other things are getting?” or there maybe “what am i not hearing because of social structures and implicit biases?” or “where are there different opportunities for listening?”

I met JJ in 2013 when I responded to his Craigslist ad seeking a new roommate. Living together we bonded over Buffy the Vampire Slayer, bad puns, and pea-shoots. I’ve gotten to know his work well through assisting on various projects (How Philly Moves, Paths of Understanding, The Image of Yoga) and through collaborating on a workshop series at a Philadelphia senior center. Never have I met someone like JJ who genuinely wants to give you a 5am ride to the airport, who will go to great lengths both to prank his friends and care for his neighbors, and who will show up with three quiches when you ask him to make one. We talked on the phone about framing, anxiety, and solitude in December 2019. Here’s some of our conversation.

MK: How does your voice and authority as an artist come into play?

JT: As a photographer there’s a power and control because I’m setting the scene, I’m creating the framework, the aesthetics, the space, I’m creating the images, and I’m selecting the things. And then there’s this invitation component and this outreach component. I have to think how it’s being framed and how are people being invited into it who’s being invited into it.

I’ve intentionally framed projects to be very open ended and inclusive but there are also some parameters and constraints around How Philly Moves. For instance, I wouldn’t go photograph site specific things, I would only photograph people who came to the sessions.

That added a burden in some way but also provided an equalizing ground. Because it means the difference between a dance company that has a nice venue with fancy lights so they have a prettier picture and a person dancing in a crummily lit space that makes for not as nice photos. There’s also recognizing that there is a lot of work to be done to get that invitation out through broader networks and then there’s still sorting through who signs up for it and knowing that there’s questions of representation there. So while every single person who signs up for the project would be perfect for it, I have to put in some sort of triage and curation and individual choice to sort of counteract for the fact that some groups might be overrepresented.

MK: What do you think about when sharing back the photos you’ve made?

JT: So I made all of the images of everyone available to everyone involved in the project and that allowed people to curate their own selection. But the ask that I gave to people was: to do whatever they want with the images of themselves. And with the images of other participants to always share them in groups (not individually), to avoid commenting directly on people or their performance, and to speak from their experience in the project. Because there’s something special in seeing the images side by side that have a certain sensibility and a lot of common humanity but are also super diverse. If you just see the one picture maybe it’s just an okay photograph. But when you start to see a bunch of them side by side of different participants in the same light, there’s

something special. So I let people do what they please with the photos but also try to put some like good citizen guidelines around it. And I think just by the nature of the project it’s not like there would be a situation where someone would share a photo of someone else and say like “this dancing is stupid”.

MK: That makes sense since you’re not just taking pictures of people, you’re taking time to build relationships and shared values.

JT: Yeah and it’s also a pile of admin work keeping up with all the random emails. I mean nobody that I sold a mocha to when I worked in a coffee shop has ever reached out years later for a moment of my time, right? Like that’s a different type of relationship but so many people that I’ve photographed reach out in so many ways with different asks or offers or just different pings. Doing that kind of project means somehow establishing relationships and being a part of the community in a way that requires a lot more headspace and time and energy for years to come.

MK: Definitely, so much energy goes into this type of work!

JT: Yeah and for these big projects I definitely take time to think through how we’re welcoming people, here’s what we’re doing, what we’re not doing, in terms of just general values to make sure that everyone feels totally welcome and comfortable and safe and celebrated. I mean to me one of the ironies is that the work is about creating safe and welcoming space for everyone else and in so doing I am often a

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frazzled mess. Like if I listen deeply to myself I realize I’m often trying to do too many things or without enough people on staff or whatever.

I’m in super anxious host mode or I’m trying to make it really easy for you to just dance but I’m also trying to get all these technical variables right in the pictures so I’m in adrenalized frantic mode. Because I haven’t rehearsed this and I don’t know which way you’re moving next so that might send me flinging in a different direction.

With all of that I can get easily overwhelmed and frazzled. So I’m realizing that maybe I listen more easily to the part of me that gets affirmation from people for putting on a cool event or making a big fancy project. You know, people pat me on the back and tell me I’m great and I get excited about that but a lot of times I do those projects in ways that aren’t always super great for me. So there’s other things to listen to internally in terms of motivation, balance, structure, and care for the whole project including myself over time.

MK: That’s a great point, how do you balance that?

JT: You know I think that for every dose of social/ crowds/hosting/outreach/correspondence there also needs to be attention to solitude, seclusion, personal processing, and that can take different shapes. Sometimes that might be a vacation and sometimes that might be a retreat and sometimes that might be a massage or a yoga class or a walk in the woods. I think that I’m paying a little more attention to that now. I’ve realized that seeking that affirmation

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from doing too much at once can come at the expense of a more balanced thing or that can lead other things to not be tended to.

And that’s where I have to stop for a longer uninterrupted chunk of time to settle down and realize “oh what’s the other voice that I haven’t been listening to, what is the other thing that I’ve been saying I needed to do but haven’t made progress on in three years?”.

MK: Does that impact how you relate to other people too?

JT: For sure, for sure. When I’m better listening to myself I’m able to better listen to others because I’m giving myself what I need and feel more balanced and settled. So then I’ll ask better questions or I won’t rush to fill empty space and I’ll let more that needs to be said get said. Whereas when I’m an anxious, frantic mess then I don’t always listen as gracefully as I’d like to.

Ron Whyte

Ron Whyte is an environmental activist, blogger, and educator in Philadelphia, PA. He writes under the name Deep Green Philly, offering “environmental and social commentary from a progressive perspective” (twitter.com/ deepgreenphilly). Ron is a member and project organizer of Trash Academy. Trash Academy, a project of Mural Arts Philadelphia, “uses art and creativity as a vehicle to change both our communities and how they are perceived”. The project mission further states that “our program is based on the philosophy of collaboration; the research and initiative of community members fuels a shared process of education, reflection, advocacy and intervention. Trash Academy embraces the values of environmental justice, believing that those who are most impacted by environmental challenges are the ones who must be at the forefront of crafting solutions.

Trash Academy also encourages youth leadership, positioning young people to take the lead in educating and transforming their own communities” (www.trashacademy.org/ about).

I met Ron in 2016 when we both got involved towards the beginning of Trash Academy, teaching a research class at South Philadelphia High School about resident rights and responsibilities related to litter.

Through the past several years of working together, I’ve gotten to know Ron’s dry wit, vast knowledge, and humble approach. We spoke on the phone in October 2019 about expertise, professionalism, and mentorship.

MK: So I’ve been talking with folks about listening as a part of community oriented work.

I’m excited to talk to you because I’ve been thinking about Trash Academy as part of that.

You know, in our projects we’ve often thought about expertise and who’s an expert on different things and why it’s important to listen to different types of people and what they think about various issues. But I’m curious if you see that too, and what you think about Trash Academy and listening?

RW: Yeah I think just the decisions we’re dealing with for the bag bill is a good example of that.

On one hand the professionals say, “oh we can’t pass this bill without the fee” and “according to our research this is the most effective way to get change in the city around plastic bags and litter” and then you have regular people in the city growing up here. And they’re not as concerned about the fee. They just want the ban on plastic bags because they want something to happen, they want some change to happen in their neighborhood because they’re living in littered and dirty neighborhoods. So their biggest concern is getting the momentum going to change things, and they know it’s not gonna happen right away that every available option is not a perfect one but they just want something to happen. And then meanwhile you have the professional activists who are saying they wanna hold out to have the best thing possible. And they’re looking at more of the research angle and not the personal angle. So I think that a lot of people’s expertise is based on their experience: it’s based on their lived experience over decades and years of living in a certain situation and at least from the outside

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you’re not really gonna get the whole picture.

And that’s especially true if you’re trying to tell like “oh we’ve done all this research about your situation and we know what’s best for you because this is what the research says”.

Well does the research include the opinions of the people who are living in that situation or dealing with that particular thing? Not usually.

MK: Yes and I think in my experience of Trash Academy, the project is sort of in between those two things. Certainly we’ve been interested in the research and wanting to read it and think about it but also interested in people’s lived experiences and trying to live between those two worlds. Would you say that’s true?

RW: I think that is true. I think we do want to have the professionalism aspect of things but also we want to be sure that we’re not saying that only the “professional voices” are the ones that matter. I think that’s kind of the reason why things aren’t really changing as fast as they should be because there are a lot of people who are just not being brought to the table. There are a lot of people who are being left out of the conversation or the conversation is happening like over their heads. So I think Trash Academy actually talks to the people who are dealing with litter day to day and actually asks for their input. And sees that there are citizen scientists and people who study the issue based on their observations and observation is a big part of the scientific method. So how do you just discount people’s observations because they didn’t go through a graduate program or they didn’t go to whatever college that the scientists went to? I mean there’s a lot of reasons why

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people aren’t in the professional or academic world, right? There’s not like a lot of equity in our society so maybe it wasn’t an option for them to go into that. But you shouldn’t just discount their opinions and their observations.

I think that’s kind of what happens a lot of times when you talk to people and they don’t even ask you directly but they’re talking to you and trying to find out if they should take you seriously or not based on where you went to school or where you’re working right now. And if you don’t check the right boxes they’ll kind of like pat you on the head and say like “okay, there there, your opinion is cute but it’s not really that important’’. I think in Trash Academy we’re trying to get away from that and to say that people have a variety of different levels of expertise depending on their situation. If you’re trying to go into it and work on community issues, you have to take into account the expertise of the people who live there and you can’t just overlook them or say “oh it doesn’t really matter or it’s not that important”.

MK: Yes exactly! So I’m trying to find out how people who say that hearing different types of input is important are actually doing that. I see that happening in Trash Academy through going out and working with people on these projects, through working with the Trash Mobile and going to events. And I think in a more intensive and long term way through the conversations with the Trash Academy leaders.

How do you think Trash Academy is showing that we actually value residents’ expertise?

RW: I think that we use the Trash Academy leaders model as a way because they’re coming

into a situation where they can be educated but they can also talk to you about their own observations and what they think. Like when we say we want to have a certain intervention or a certain project that we’re working on, it’s not just the project organizers making all the decisions. It’s basically everybody talking about it and saying “what do you think we should do, what makes the most sense based on your own experiences”, or like “we’re going to go to this community, how do we think we should talk to this community”. I think another example of this is the artist that we just worked with, Ms. Davis from Southwest Philadelphia.

She had just been accepted to this program at a local arts college but she wasn’t formally trained as an artist. She’d always been interested in doing it but she had to take care of her family and work and now she just recently, I think her kids are sixteen, so she went back to school for art training. So anyways we wanted to work with her on this game, and needed some visuals for this matching game that we were doing based on this project in Southwest Philly. And we went into knowing that it would be more difficult to work with a budding, new artist from the community than someone who’s already been trained and has expertise. But we wanted the process to reflect the neighborhood so we were more willing to sort of mentor this person through the process, knowing that it might be a bit more hands on. Like she would draw something and then one of us would say “you know this isn’t really what we’re looking for, can I explain to you what we’re looking for” and there would be some back and forth.

But eventually it did work because I think everyone was committed to having someone

from the community express their viewpoint and that was the most important thing. The most important thing wasn’t just wanting to be able to finish this quickly or to have it be totally perfect or professional. I think the main thing was allowing community members to express themselves through art and having it come organically from the situation. I think what we do in Trash Academy is try to have a way where the people who have more knowledge are able to steward and work with the people who are still learning so we can have a cross pollination and not just one-way learning.

MK: Yeah it seems like also acknowledging mutual learning where maybe this person has more of this type of knowledge but another person has a different type of knowledge and we can learn from each other, right?

RW: Yes, I think that’s exactly what we’re talking about.

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