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The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.
While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.
The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures. Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and self-critical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.
( TEXT KAT LOPEZ DESIGN JOLIN CHEN
ILLUSTRATION CATIE WITHERWAX )
c priyanka chopra. kate middleton. ellen degeneres. me, kat lopez. the patrons of the Rhode Island Bridal and Wedding Convention. what do all these luscious and supple beauties have in common (apart from, of course, their luscious and supple beauty)? the answer is that they are all, or have, at some point, been, Brides! beautiful, beautiful Brides in queenly tiaras and shiny shoes. some have been Brides in a gay way, and some are normal! ah, Brides, the white lacy ghosts of the dance floor, the perkiest petals on the roses of maidenhood, the kind look in the eyes of a smiling dog. a Bride is indulgent yet responsible, firm yet ever-giving, and i love to be one. i am so glad that i am a Bride. oh, but i hear it. i hear it loud. you are all screaming to me in my cute little ears, “kat, you’re not a Bride. you have never gotten remotely close to marriage, much less a stable relationship. in fact, you seem completely and utterly alone most of the times i see you. do you feel bad about yourself?” the answer is NOT AT ALL!!! i feel great (probably) and no, you are wrong that i am not a Bride, because i am, in a BIG, SPECIAL way! my Bridehood was cemented this weekend at the Rhode Island Bridal and Wedding Expo, which i attended with gusto and glee. i’d love to tell you all about it, and so i will. the day began as all days do; Ben Flaumenhaft (B’27) and Ilan Brusso (B’27) smacked me on my little butt like a cute bi racehorse and set me aloft on the wet and dusty track to the Rhode Island Convention Center. to conserve my womanly energy, i took an uber (SUE ME!), and was filled with bubbles and oodles of joy that the driver was a GIRL!! perhaps even a married one. i’ll never know, i didn’t ask. she almost t-boned a bicyclist within the first minute of the ride, and said softly to me, “FUCK, THESE ASSHOLES NEVER KNOW WHERE THE FUCK THEY’RE GOING.” oh, how Bridal the day was already! as we swung and swerved and groaned and girled down big ol’ college hill, i couldn’t help but worry. what if the other girls at the convention are mean to me? what if they recognize that i am not yet a big beautiful Bride like they are, at least not in the traditional sense? oh, man, i was worried. i was so worried and worried. “PRESS ON!” said my girl driver, reading my thoughts via womanly intuition. “YOU’LL FIT IN YET!” i hoped she was right.
don’t think she’ll last the night” said i, showing the lady my ticket and breaking away from our Bridely dance. as i spun out of her embrace, the convention center coincidentally spun into view, and readers, you’ve never seen anything grander! stalls upon STALLS of seductive yet appropriately reticent Bridal finery; a one-at-a-time massage parlor run by a bloodsucking life insurance agency, a blooming flower business called “Smell D Roses,” a full-service European Wax Center operating behind an almost translucent plastic curtain, and more! my fellow Brides, all seemingly dressed in the same COFFEE & CONFIDENCE! v-neck sported by the
we reached the convention center, and i was dutifully welcomed by a blonde lady in a black v-neck that said “COFFEE & CONFIDENCE!” in big sparkly letters. taking my hand and spinning me around, she crooned, “hi, hon! are you a Bride?” oh god. i hadn’t even thunk up a backstory. if i tell her i’m a bride, she’ll ask me my fiance’s name, and my wedding date, and oh lord, i can’t come up with anything like THAT! thinking quickly and on my feet, i quickly thought on my feet and responded with “no, i’m here for my sister. she’s sick, so she sent me to check it out.” the lie slipped out of me like in one of those youtube videos of a baby giraffe being born. “her name’s diane.”
“diane! beautiful name,” the COFFEE & CONFIDENCE! lady sang, picking me up and tossing me in the air like a handful of glitter. “i’m sorry to hear that she’s sick. is she ok?”
“her lymph nodes are the size of golf balls. i
event’s host, toted around their meaty fiancés, all of whom i adored. taking in the scenery, my girlish heels (1 square inch each of pure rhinoceros ivory hot-glued to my everyday mary janes just for the occasion!) clacked together with excitement. even in the midst of all the fun, something felt off. yes, i was attending the Bridal convention, but i was not truly integrated with my fellow Brides. i wasn’t getting the full experience, and now that i had dipped my toe into Bridal joy, i yearned for the real thing. thus, i decided it was time to go the full monty. i was no longer diane’s kind sister, nor was i Brown University sophomore kat lopez, no. my only option was to become diane herself. now the whole convention center knew, just as i knew, that i was a real life Bride with Bridal ambitions and Bridal eyes set on Bridal sights. i spent the next 30 minutes in a whirlpool of chiffon, giggles, floral arrangements, and tiny cupcake samples. i, as diane the Bride, traipsed and tittered around the convention center with the grace and elegance of a diamond chandelier, spreading my Bridal joy to all the passers-by. the lies flowed from my mouth like… like… well, like a Bride to the altar! my fiancé’s name changed with every conversation;
sometimes it was Ben, sometimes it was Ilan, sometimes it was Kat! my wedding date was as free as the passing wind; it could be next fall, or it could be tomorrow. the boudoir photoshoot ladies told me i was a “perfect candidate” for a semi-clothed modeling job, the wedding cake ladies told me my taste buds were “as sophisticated as they come,” and the real estate ladies told me it was time to start saving for a future home with my beloved. everything around me pointed to a celebration of love, and while i was far from a traditional partnership, i was beginning to form a love of my own. you see, readers, i had started to fall in love: with diane. as kat, i was nobody. as diane, i was confident, comfortable, and beloved by all. as kat, i had nobody to love. as diane, having a fiancé was as easy as coming up with a fake name. as kat, nothing around me was special. as diane, i found love in all that was simple; when i kicked an iron bolt across the convention center, for a split second it could have been a wedding ring. towards the end of the convention, a man funneled us Brides into a corner and had us fill out a raffle form for a free trip to Disney World. how cool is that??? i ripped a blank form out of his hands with my teeth, pulled out a pencil, and got to writing. first question: name. name! that’s easy. i wrote down a big capital K–wait. K. k for kat. was that even still my name? kat lopez isn’t a Bride, that’s for sure, and they’re definitely not going to gift an all-inclusive Disney vacation to a non-Bride. but could i, in good conscience, tell them that my name was diane? diane, the Bride, the person, the concept, felt so good to have, so good to BE. she was a warm, lazy river in the frigid pool of life, the kind look in the eyes of a smiling dog in a kennel of normal looks in the eyes of normal dogs. but i wasn’t diane. i’m not diane. i can’t possibly say that i’m diane. fuck. i began to feel light-headed. the convention center warped around me like a wedding ring on an unfit finger. i grabbed the shoulder of the Bride next to me to stabilize myself, her COFFEE & CONFIDENCE! shirt staring me right in my beautiful feminine face. i wasn’t like her. i had no COFFEE to speak of, and my CONFIDENCE was at an all time low. i turned to run in fear, and was confronted by a horde of brides and vendors armed with white lacy brass knuckles. “we heard you were lying, DIANE. if that’s even your real NAME,” they crooned in perfect unison.
“no, no, please, you don’t understand! i just wanted to be like you!” i stammered in fear, but they wouldn’t listen. they came at me, ripped the makeshift heels off my mary janes, and prepared to pummel my non-Bridal body into the ground. before they could, however, a crash resonated from the other side of the convention center. “GET IN, SLUT!” boomed a familiar, feminine voice. it was my uber driver! the girl one, from earlier! in the midst of the chaos, i was able to get on my feet and girlishly skibble over to the passenger seat. “YOU OKAY, SWEET BITCH?” she sweetly checked in on me. i wasn’t okay, but… i was going to be. i may not be a bride, but i guess i don’t mind, as long as i get to be someone’s “sweet bitch.” her sweet bitch.
KAT LOPEZ B’27 is engaged to an Uber driver.
c In September, when Mica Maltzman B’25 went to change the laundry in the basement of her Fox Point home, she knew something was wrong. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe,” she says, and remembers thinking: “There is no air in this basement.”
Suspecting a gas leak, Mica and her roommates called their gas company and evacuated the building. About half an hour later, an agent arrived to inspect the basement. He discovered several gas leaks and a missing vent. Without that vent, everytime the building’s residents used the washer and dryer, carbon monoxide poured into the building. Mica remembers the agent telling her housemates: “You’re lucky to be alive.”
Carbon monoxide is often referred to as a “silent killer”—it’s a colorless and odorless gas, and if you’re exposed to high concentrations while sleeping or drunk, it can kill you before you regain consciousness. Long-term exposure to lower concentrations of the gas often produces symptoms similar to a common cold or flu, but can cause heart problems and irreversible damage to the brain.
Rhode Island law requires landlords to install
second floor tenants, says Mica, had discovered another detector “smashed in a closet.” On the first floor, where carbon monoxide rising from the basement would reach earliest, there were no detectors.
By the time you’re reading this article, many of the 26% of Brown undergraduate students who opt to live off campus will have already signed leases for the coming academic year. Apartment tours begin almost as soon as classes start in September, and many students sign leases before the month is through—motivated, as I was, by the suffocating sense of scarcity that comes with touring apartments along with four or five other housing groups, swimming in class-wide housing chatter, and hearing from landlord after landlord: “I have another party interested… Can you sign by the end of the week?”
Jude Farley B’26, who recently signed a lease for next year, described the housing search as a “mad
dash.” “Everyone wanted to lock down a lease as quickly as possible,” he told me. He remembers some landlords texting him daily or even multiple times per day, asking: “‘Where are you on the lease? We have a lot of applicants. We need you to let us know quickly.’
“If you’re moving really fast, you’re willing to cut some corners and take some things that you normally wouldn’t take,” he continued.
Brown’s Office of Residential Life has recently made efforts to equip students for their housing search as part of their new Brunonians Living Off Campus (BLOC) program. Brenda Ice, Assistant Vice President for Residential and Community Living, told me: “If you are truly following what we’ve indicated as steps to consider before you sign a lease, then you will be asking yourself the hard questions: When you did a tour of your property, did you actually see the space you’d be living in? Or was it all photos? Those photos [might have been] taken 10 years ago, and you now move in, and it’s something very different.”
But if students need to be reminded to trust their own eyes over landlord-provided photos, it only reveals the intense pressure of the house hunting process—and how it often makes even the most basic level of investigation (into apartment conditions, landlords, and local housing policy) feel too time-intensive to be ‘worth it.’ That pressure makes students more vulnerable to landlords that want to exploit them.
Renting to Brown students is a great deal for local landlords. That starts with the prices they’re able to charge. Landlords can presume that a household of three to five Brown students will have a much greater spending capacity than the average Providence family: whereas the median household on the East Side brought in $71,736 in 2024, the median family income of a Brown student, as reported by The New York Times in 2017, was over $204,000.
State Representative Cherie Cruz, an organizer for the progressive group Reclaim RI, puts it more succinctly: “Landlords assume the parents have deep pockets.”
Of course, there are students living off campus who don’t have affluent parents—47% of current undergraduates are on financial aid. But Brown allows students receiving financial aid for on-campus housing to put that aid (up to $9940/year or $828/ month) towards a lease. Further, landlords can count on the fact that any listing below Brown’s (notably lofty) price will be attractive to students whose aid package does not include housing. A handful of College Hill landlords have a captive market in students whose families aren’t able, or don’t want to, keep paying Brown’s exorbitant housing fee. That gives them broad leeway to charge high rents and only minimally maintain their properties.
Landlords can also reasonably bank on the assumption that students aren’t familiar with Rhode Island housing laws—including policies meant to protect them. One such laws prohibits landlords from charging rental application fees, except as needed to cover the cost of a background or credit check. But when Jude was touring apartments this fall, one landlord tried to charge his group a fee anyway—of $35 per person, or $140 in total. “I saw that and I wondered why it was so high,” Jude says. He “gave it a quick Google”
and discovered the rental application fee ban. Jude told me that he called his landlord and asked for documentation of the cost of a background check. “He basically yelled at me over the phone,” said Jude—telling him, in effect, that “he didn’t want to rent to people who were so concerned with money, and we were penny pinchers, and if he rented the unit to us, we would be complaining about the cost of laundry.”
Jude’s housing group ended up choosing a different unit. He attributes his skepticism toward the fee to having been a renter in other cities during the past few summers. But many Brown students don’t share that experience. “[For] a lot of students… this is their first time engaging with a landlord, dealing with the application process, dealing with the leasing process,” Jude said. “They might not know what’s normal or what’s acceptable.” He finds it sad that landlords are “skirting laws”— “Even if it’s not a huge amount of money, not everyone can afford to [pay an application fee]. And people shouldn’t have to, when it’s illegal,” he finished.
Landlords in Rhode Island are also required to keep their units “clean and in good repair.”
Kian Braulik B’24.5 dealt with a persistent leak in their ceiling from the winter of 2023 to the spring of 2024. Starting in December, water would drip on them while they were asleep; not infrequently, plaster would fall too. While the property management company for the apartment made some effort to repair Kian’s ceiling, the problem was never fully resolved.
But they mostly brushed it off. “If I was having a hard time [in my life], it was hard,” they say. “[But] if I was having a fine time, I was like, great, just another moment to test my capacity for change.” A group of their friends recently suggested that Kian should have taken legal action against the landlord, but Kian “bristled” at this. “I was like, we’re not perpetuating carceral violence here,” they told me (with a sardonic edge). “People said, ‘it’s your landlord.’ And I said, yeah, but it’s just gonna escalate [things]… I didn’t have neighbors or even roommates with enough time or organizational capacity to have any kind of leverage in this situation.”
Kian’s story made sense to me. When you’re only living in a place for a year, it seems reasonable to choose to ‘grin and bear it’ in the face of suboptimal conditions—especially when the best route for self-advocacy isn’t clear, and you might be justifiably worried about the risks of pushing for repairs (from landlord retaliation to a lot of lost time, energy, and/or money).
Nathaniel Pettit B’20 wrote his senior thesis about Brown’s housing policy and Providence’s East Side in the 20th century. He summed it up for me. “Students are just willing to take less for more money… For students, it might be their first time as a renter, [or] interfacing with a landlord… So there’s a power differential that, in my experience, landlords were probably happy to take advantage of.”
If most Brown students are anything like me, we’re not used to thinking of ourselves as victims of housing injustice. When I first started thinking about writing a piece about off-campus housing, I cringed: was I really going to write thousands of words about how difficult it was to be an Ivy League student living in Fox Point or the East Side—both neighborhoods that Brown, and Brown students, have helped gentrify?
Brown students occupy a situation of exceptional privilege in the housing market. We often count on our parents’ resources and support. We benefit from our affiliation with the university, which offers money, other resources, and a baseline level of confidence that there will always be somewhere for us to sleep.
As students living in the neighborhoods closest to Brown’s campus, our circumstances are bound up with the harm that the university has historically done to its surrounding communities—its
expansionism surely and steadily pushing poor and working-class residents of color (especially the Black, indigenous, and Cape Verdean populations of Fox Point) out of the places they had long called home. It’s a process that has been thoroughly documented by multiple generations of student journalists at the Brown Daily Herald. Nathaniel, along with urban planner and Westfield State University professor Marijoan Bull, detail this process of “studentification” in a 2020 article. As Brown encouraged students to live off-campus during the 1960s and 70s, residents found themselves “‘unable to compete with students and others who were able to substantially outpay them,’” and rents for 3-bedroom apartments near Brown rose by an average of 50 percent in a single decade.
“But thinking of our situations as categorically different only serves to grant Providence landlords license to keep mistreating not only us, but future tenants too. Even more essentially, it discourages Brown students from taking a good hard look at the systems and policies that keep all Rhode Island tenants— not just students—down.”
During Nathaniel’s time at Brown, he worked an outreach route in the evenings, distributing supplies to unhoused people Downtown, on the South Side, and in Pawtucket. He remembers being told: “Oh, you think you’re part of the solution? You think you’re helping? My family was forced from the East Side by Brown’s expansion.”
Brown has done little to rectify its past harms, and even now, it pays the city of Providence tens of millions of dollars less annually than it would owe in property taxes were it not exempt by virtue of its nonprofit status—starving the city of money that could go to building affordable housing, funding shelters, and more.
“When I was a student, I was often really dismissive,” Nathaniel says. “Like, ah, students, you’re fine. There are people who literally don’t have anything over their head like a ten minute walk down the hill.”
Yet as I went on reporting this piece—because I did go on reporting it, unable to shake the feeling that there was something important and untold underneath all of the landlord horror stories passed colloquially between friends—I realized (as Nathaniel did too, later) that writing about students’ housing struggles and other residents’ housing struggles didn’t have to be an either-or. These circumstances were two sides of the same coin—even if the non-student side of the coin involved higher stakes and more suffering. Acknowledging this reality doesn’t mean disregarding the obvious differences between the experiences of a vulnerable Brown student and a person struggling to stay safely housed in Providence’s Downtown. But thinking of our situations as categorically different only serves to grant Providence landlords license to keep mistreating not only us, but future tenants too. Even more essentially, it discourages Brown students from taking a good hard look at the systems and policies that keep all Rhode Island tenants—not just students—down.
+++
“It’s too easy, and profitable, to be a slumlord in Rhode Island,” says Shana Crandell, another organizer with Reclaim RI. “As in many other states, the power balance is intense [between landlords and tenants]. Landlords can pretty much raise the rent as much as they want. There’s nowhere else for people to go.”
She went on to explain several ways that Rhode Island’s policies enable exploitative landlords—starting with no-fault evictions. “You can pay your rent on time every month and follow the rules and be in full compliance with your lease” and a landlord is still allowed to evict you at the end of your lease term, says Shana. That weakens the power of anti-retaliation laws like §34-18-46 from the Residential Landlord and Tenant Act: if you ask for repairs or try to form a tenants’ union—both of which are protected actions under §34-18-46—a landlord can evict you for purportedly unrelated reasons. Most students (although not all) are in year-long leases, and many (although not all) plan to move out voluntarily at the end of the lease, after graduation. But Shana tells me that most non-student residents are on month-to-month leases— making them vulnerable to frequent rent increases and evictions.
“There’s a huge amount of retaliation,” Shana says. “There’s a kind of impunity for landlords [in the courts], even with existing laws.”
Rep. Cruz emphasized to me that the urgency that students face in their apartment searches can be even more intense for non-students. “If this is happening to students, you wonder what the pressures are for tenants renting year round from the local community—who also may have small children,” she says. And she noted that non-students can’t count on the support of an institution like ResLife in navigating that search.
Finally, tenants in Rhode Island, unlike in states like New York have no legal way to withhold rent from their landlord if house conditions are not up to par—except in small sums, up to $125, if tenants have paid for minor repairs themselves. But an entire month’s rent cannot be used as a lever within an otherwise uneven landlord/tenant relationship.
Reclaim RI is fighting for a just-cause eviction law, a policy protecting tenants’ rights to withhold rent because of subpar conditions, and a slate of other policies meant to protect tenants. These policies would help Brown students, too. “Brown students are also dealing with slumlords,” Shana told me. “[There’s] a real opportunity for solidarity… between tenants in Providence and at Brown, and West Warwick, Pawtucket, and all over Rhode Island.”
The first step of fighting for housing injustice is recognizing it when you see it—and that might be, quite literally, in your backyard.
Once you’ve acknowledged that something’s wrong—whether it’s missing carbon monoxide detectors or falling-apart ceilings or illegal rental application fees or whatever else—the next step is to practice pushing back. You might only be in your apartment for a year, and you might be willing to brush the problem aside. But while students are temporary residents, the wider Providence and Rhode Island communities are permanent ones. And the extent to which we resist or support these practices deeply affects the communities around us.
We all deserve shelter, safety, dignity, and comfort. To join the effort for a more just collective future, email theindy@gmail.com
LILY SELTZ B’25 won’t shut up about carbon monoxide now.
c August 2015. Lublin, Poland. 10-year-old me, bedazzled by the news pouring out of my grandparents’ radio about the resurfaced legend of the Nazi Ghost Train of Gold. Allegedly, it carried over 300 tons of precious metals, gemstones, art, and weapons robbed by the Third Reich troops from all over occupied Poland while fleeing the Red Army during World War II. It disappeared without a trace before ever reaching its destination, the tiny city of Wałbrzych. However, a deathbed confession from one of the perpetrators (who to this day remains unnamed) rekindled the hunt. The Polish Minister of Culture at the time stated he was “99%” sure the train exists and that it would be recovered, even though no documents have been found to confirm its existence (yet). Even today, Piotr Koper1—one of the men responsible for originally reawakening this beast of a myth and the President of the still active Golden Train Foundation—believes in the righteousness of the pursuit of the train and its ever-elusive three to twelve railcars. February 2017. Warsaw, Poland. A 21-year-old Polish law student, Sebastian Kościelnik,2 drives his cherry red Fiat Seicento into the motorcade of his own Prime Minister, Beata Szydło3 (an unforgettable and difficult incident for me especially, as it happened on the day of my 12th birthday). All Polish minds theorized about it. Were the cars of the Prime Minister’s motorcade indeed ‘priority vehicles’? In other words, did they disregard traffic regulations while emitting light signals? Sound signals? Both? Neither? Was it all just the fault of that linden (or oak?) that the armored limousine crashed into while trying to dodge Kościelnik? After all, the tree—this cryptic, all-knowing bystander to a country-level political crisis—emerged unscathed out of the entire debacle. The same couldn’t be said of the student who, given false testimonies from the PM’s bodyguards, was found guilty of causing the accident. His Seicento, however, became a cultural icon. Unjustly battered by the state apparatus, our David to their Goliath, the car was refurbished and then sold in 2024 for over 200,000 złotys during Poland’s biggest charity event, the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (WOŚP) . January 2024. Providence, Rhode Island. I have outgrown the glittering locomotives and rainbow automobiles from the Polish political junkyards of the 2010s. But worry not—this vehicular thread of my life has only thickened. My current subject is subtler, more insidious; an accessory to one of the two greatest vehicle-related conspiracies in Polish politics of this century. +++
January 9th, 2024. Warsaw, Poland. Two officials of the Polish Sejm (the lower house of the Polish Parliament) are arrested on the grounds of the Presidential Palace. Deputy Mariusz Kamiński4 and
1 translation: dill
2 related to “kościół” (church)
3 trans: awl; also associated with cat, from Polish proverb “wyszło szydło z worka” (the cat is out of the bag)
4 trans: of the stone; alternatively, stoner
Deputy Maciej Wąsik5 have been the honored guests of President Andrzej Duda6 in his official residence throughout the day, all three being members of the populist, conservative-nationalist party Law and Justice (PiS). In the evening, the President must leave the Palace and travel to Belvedere (the Polish state guest house) to receive Belarussian opposition leader Sviatlana Cichanouska. This is exactly when the Polish police burst into the Palace and take hold of the oblivious deputies.
According to the President’s Head of Office Grażyna Ignaczak-Bandych,7 upon hearing of this sacrilege, the President wanted to return to the Palace “immediately,” hoping to save the democratically-elected delegates of his motherland and, more importantly, his fellow party members. However, something was in his way: literally. As reported by Ignaczak-Bandych8 to the right-wing news station Telewizja Republika, “the exitway from Belvedere was blocked by a public transportation bus.”In fact, in her opinion, “we were dealing with a coordinated act.” Wojciech Kolarski,9 Secretary of State at the Chancellery of the President, added that he was “convinced this was a deliberate stunt.” Newspaper headlines trumpeting a ‘Bus Conspiracy’ followed suit. The unassuming Warsaw city bus No. 180—a bus that, I must confess, I have taken many times before—was now liable for treason.
To make matters worse, taking bus No. 180 on January 9th, 2024 a few minutes past 7:00 PM was Bartosz Chyż10—an employee of the news station TVN, known for its vocal opposition to PiS’s unconstitutional, anti-abortion, anti-ecological, anti-EU, nepotistic politics. Theories of conspiracy against the Polish President and his elected officials at the hands of TVN and KO (the Civic Coalition, PiS’s more center-leaning, catch-all main political opponent) emerged instantaneously. After all, as the right wing newspaper Niezależna.pl (a name, ironically, translating to ‘The Polish Independent’) reminds us, the person in charge of Warsaw’s public transport— the one responsible for the comings and goings of a bus such as No. 180—is the Mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Trzaskowski,11 a high-ranking member of KO.
With his usual contrived charisma, Mayor Trzaskowski took to X. On the night of the incident, in light of poll results revealing that 89% of Warsaw’s citizens rate the public transportation network ‘well or really well,’ he tweeted: “Warsaw public transport. Always at your service. P.S. A Bus Conspiracy? Really?” Really.
Despite the Warsaw Mayor’s best efforts at clarifying that the entire incident was “a simple breakdown [handled] according to procedure” and that he does not, in fact, “have the authority to drive a public transport bus,” it was too little, too late. Telewizja Republika condemned Mayor
5 trans: little mustache (affectionately)
6 trans: hoopoe
7 no immediate associations
8 on second thought, “Bandych” does echo the Polish word for gang (“banda”)
9 related to “kolarz” (cyclist)
10 related to “chyży” (swift, nimble, eager)
11 related to “trzask” (crack, snap, crash)
( TEXT PAULINA GASIOROWSKA DESIGN ANAÏS REISS
ILLUSTRATION LUNA TOBAR )
Trzaskowski’s “embarrassing ‘joke’” in the face of “substantive” conspiratorial allegations. Especially since, despite assurances that the bus CCTV recorded “everything” from the night of the incident, the Warsaw Public Transport Authority (also under Trzaskowski’s jurisdiction) did not make the footage publicly available. Member of far-right political alliance Konfederacja and Deputy Speaker of the Sejm Krzysztof Bosak12 assessed the situation as follows:
“This is in line with the methodology of the secret services. If the services are secretly carrying out a task at a facility, then they track the movements of the hosts of the facility and prevent them from possibly returning under any seemingly random pretext until the task is completed.”
Inevitably, a menacing picture of Mayor Trzaskowski waving from a city bus window started circulating on the web.
+++
You may wonder, though: why the ‘Bus Conspiracy’? Why did this secret-service task have to be completed? In a word: why bother?
+++
July 2007. Poland. Deputy Kamiński and Deputy Wąsik – leaders of the Central Anticorruption Bureau (CBA) – are exposed for their involvement in the so-called land scandal. The Polish public finds out that the men attempted (and spectacularly failed) to frame their fellow party member and Vice President of a PiS-dominated Parliament Andrzej Lepper13 into taking bribes by means of illegal wiretapping and forgery of legal evidence.
September 2010. The indictment is sent to the District Court.
March 2015. The court sentences Deputy Kamiński and Deputy Wąsik to two years in prison.
November 2015. Freshly elected President Andrzej Duda pardons Kamiński and Wąsik.
To conclude: Kamiński and Wąsik commit a crime, Kamiński and Wąsik are sentenced for that crime, Kamiński and Wąsik are pardoned for the crime. Should anti-corruption officials such as Kamiński and Wąsik, who provoke corruption and break the law (as well as betray their comrade Andrzej Lepper!) hold political power? That’s irrelevant here. What is relevant here is how dare the police arrest Kamiński and Wąsik on January 9th, 2024?
Let’s backtrack a little.
March to November 2015. Poland. The verdict of the District Court on the case of Deputy Kamiński and Deputy Wąsik is inconclusive. In other words, it could be appealed (and it was appealed) by both Kamiński and Wąsik. However, before the appeals were ever considered, the President pardoned them. From a non-final verdict.
October 2023. Poland. PiS loses the
12 related to “bosy” (barefoot)
13 This surname is of German origin, though the English association with leprosy is intriguing.
parliamentary elections to KO. KO revisits the case of Deputy Kamiński’s and Deputy Wąsik’s pardons, which had been nullified by the Supreme Court all the way back in 2017.
January 9th, 2024. Warsaw, Poland. Kamiński and Wąsik refuse to cooperate with the verdict. Evading the Polish police by fleeing their homes into President Duda’s sanctum, they are arrested upon the sacred grounds of the Presidential Palace. All the while, President Duda’s motorcade is stuck in the exitway of Belvedere, striving desperately to evade the city bus No. 180. The poor vehicle, having stopped at a red light, experiences an emergency brake failure in 10 degree weather. It succeeds in its conspiratorial diversion of the President of the Republic of Poland for just under two minutes.
The Office of the President spoke of Kamiński and Wąsik’s time behind bars—which involved the two men hunger-striking and PiS supporters rallying in front of the prison in solidarity with the “political prisoners”—as an issue with “humanitarian, human, and state[-level]” stakes. Deputy Kamiński and Deputy Wąsik were released from prison in under two weeks, after President Duda reaffirmed his belief in the constitutionality of his original pardon by pardoning them. Again.
April 2024. Providence, Rhode Island. Walking back home from the library at 2AM on a Sunday, I cannot help but still be impressed by just how imaginative and rich the stakes of this Bus Debacle were. Political conspiracy? Tampering with evidence? Secret services? The President of Poland threatened? The Civic Coalition against Law and Justice in a battle over humanity and state and truth? All this ruthlessly concentrated into the symbol of a public bus—the ultimate servant of the people, painted with the colors of the city and country that have rejected it? I cannot resist hearing in all this the echoes of a far more sinister creature, dwelling right at the heart of the Polish political imagination.
+++
April 10th, 2010, 10:41 AM. Smoleńsk, Russia. 96 Polish politicians, officials, members of the clergy, and accompanying private persons are on board the Tupolew Tu-154M plane, planning to attend the ceremony of the 70th anniversary of the Katyń massacre—a mass-murdering of 22,000 Polish intellectuals, military officers, and political figures between March and May of 1940. The plane lowers too much, strikes a birch tree, rolls, inverts, and crashes into the ground. All aboard the plane are killed, including the Polish President at the time, Lech Kaczyński—the twin brother of Jarosław Kaczyński,14 the President of PiS for the past 21 years. As the second deadliest catastrophe in the history of Polish aviation and, according to the Polish military, “the greatest national tragedy in the history of post-war Poland,” the Smoleńsk disaster has had fateful, fracturing effects upon this century’s conceptions of Polish 14 related to “kaczor” (male duck or drake)
identity. A 2015 Foreign Policy article has called it “The Plane Crash Conspiracy That Explains Poland.” Yes, conspiracy.
A tragedy of this magnitude, striking perfectly at the intersection of the political and the personal, at the intimate core of patriotic loss, was bound to seek outflow into alternate, more divisive, more meaningful terrain. The combination of thick fog and human mistake—an explanation accepted by the 2011 final report of the Polish Committee for Investigation of National Aviation Accidents (KBWLLP)—was simplistic to the point of offense. Especially since the one person that did make it to Smoleńsk alive, having flown in only three days earlier, was Prime Minister Donald Tusk15—the person that ordered the final report, and who also happened to be the leader of KO (then called PO, the Civic Platform).
Subsequently, particularly for PiS President Jarosław Kaczyński, Prime Minister Tusk16 and his party became the faces of a political assassination and its coverup. Even in 2017, seven years after the disaster and six years after the final report, upon an invocation of his brother’s name by a KO deputy, Kaczyński proclaimed from the Sejm’s lectern:
“I know you’re afraid of the truth, but don’t wipe your treacherous mugs with the name of my late brother. You destroyed, you murdered him! You’re scoundrels!”
The momentum of “the Religion of the Smoleńsk
15 no immediate associations, though I do admire the irony of his first name and initials
16 One of Tusk’s political opponents has also argued his surname translates to pain or affliction in Estonian.
I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know it’s funny.
assassination” polarized Poland into the believers and the non-believers. Immediately becoming a powerful tenet of PiS’s political campaign, it has been linked to KO’s failure and PiS’s victory in the 2015 parliamentary elections (which led to the election of Prime Minister Szydło, the Fiat Seicento Battery Victim) and the 2015 presidential elections (which led to President Duda’s much appreciated pardoning of Deputy Kamiński and Deputy Wąsik). The results of these elections officially legitimized the Smoleńsk mythos, and in February of 2016 enabled the PiS-appointed Minister of National Defense Antoni Macierewicz17 to renounce the 2011 KBWLLP final report and launch his own Subcommittee for Re-Examining the Smolenśk Disaster.
The Subcommittee’s eight years of activity produced a final report of its own in 2020. It provided the conclusion (but not any evidence) that the Smoleńsk air disaster was a political assassination executed by Russia, facilitated and covered up by Prime Minister Tusk and his government. It prompted some to call for the death penalty for the Prime Minister, even though the possibility of such a punishment is not, in fact, foreseen by the Polish Constitution. In 2022, upon the basis of the report, Macierewicz18 went as far as to propose a resolution to the Polish Parliament declaring Russia a terrorist state given Poland’s ‘official’ stance that the Smoleńsk catastrophe was “the first terrorist attack against a NATO member-state.” And, even in April of this year, during the commemorative service for the 14th anniversary of the disaster, Kaczyński declared:
“Yes, it was a tragedy, but it was [also] an assassination. [Macierewicz] presented the evidence [...] This was Putin’s assassination. As for the collaboration of others, well, maybe that is still ahead of us.”
The conspiracy theories considered by Minister Macierewicz, his (consistently quitting) experts, and their most devoted believers included: 1) an internal explosion of the plane, 2) an external explosion of the plane, 3) a multi-point explosion of the plane, 4) a thermobaric bomb, 5) TNT, 6) atomization of helium, 7) artificial fog, 8) in-air disintegration of the aircraft into 30,000 elements, 9) arson, 10) a terrorist attack, 11) a secret-service task force, 12) kidnapping and a twin plane planted by the Russians, 13) tampering with navigation systems by the Russians, 14) an armored birch tree, 15) a nonexistent birch tree. Professor Jacek Trznadel,19 Chairman of the Polish Katyń Foundation, even suggested that “the measuring instruments on board [...] could have been spoiled with a laser weapon beam, which the Russians have been boasting about for several years” and that “the pilot could have been unconscious due to the atomization of an artificial substance in the aircraft by means of an external radio signal.” To quote Minister
17 reminds me of “macierz” (matrix)
18 also, unfortunately, reminds me of my brother’s name (Maciej)
19 trans: yellowhammer; also, a pain to pronounce
Macierewicz: “That there was an explosion, we know. The problem is how to prove it.” One such attempt at ‘proving it’ involved the exhumation of all of the victims’ bodies—of course, without consent from their families. Another ‘problem’ for Minister Macierewicz: those eight years of activity cost from 33 to 100 million złotys, with the remuneration of the Subcommittee’s members and associates alone amounting to over 12 million (i.e. twice as much as the full costs of the original 2011 commission).
But we are not here to talk Money; we are here to talk Myth.
The intertwinement of the tragedy of Smoleńsk with the tragedy of Katyń was inevitable. Not only were the Smoleńsk plane’s passengers traveling to commemorate the anniversary of the Katyń massacre, but also the thread of conspiracy against Polish lives and Polish memory (by none other than by Russia, whose officials initially blamed the Nazis for the mass executions at Katyń in 1940) tied the two disasters together permanently within the Polish political imaginarium. Just like how under the Soviet occupation during World War II there was talk of ‘the Katyń lie,’ now PiS could propagate the thesis of ‘the Smoleńsk lie.’
Only, unlike the ‘Katyń lie,’ ‘the Smoleńsk lie’ failed to unite the Polish populace in ritual grief and communal remembrance of a national tragedy. Instead, it polarized the country politically and personally through the internally-directed and self-destructive rhetoric of distrust, betrayal, and
conspiracy. And, the lies propagated around the disaster have turned out to be of PiS’s own making, their effects possible to witness via the state of the aircraft itself. The Russian government refused to let the Smoleńsk wreck return to Polish territory, which should have happened after the conclusion of the investigation by the original Committee back in 2011. Consequently, Minister Macierewicz and PiS President Kaczyński, together with all their devotees, have been able to develop a ‘cult’ surrounding the plane and the few of its fragments, the ‘relics salvaged’ by the Re-Examination Subcommittee. Their mystifying inaccessibility facilitated the rise of many myths surrounding their role in ‘proving’ the assassination plot: the fragments contained evidence of an explosion in the left wing of the plane ahead of the crash, they showed signs of “post-explosion holes” and “ripped-out doors,” they revealed the presence of “trotyl and high-energy materials.” Of those 23 fragments, five have been permanently damaged by this ‘research’ and eighteen have been lost completely, possibly because a couple fragments were stored by one of the Subcommittee members in his own home.
Since 2010, the wreck of the Tupolew TU-154M plane has been stranded on the Smoleńsk airport tarmac. Initially covered by a makeshift hangar of wood and tarpaulin, its home, or grave, was later remade with tin. Stuck seemingly forever at this site of profound national trauma, it is still hidden, still inaccessible, still shattered into a thousand pieces.
September 2024. Providence, Rhode Island. I keep circling back to the etymological origins of the Polish word for ‘conspiracy.’ Spisek. Spisać, as in ‘write down.’ A conspiracy is ultimately a story, a myth of the marginalized that succeeded at remaining. Spisek. Spisać się, as in ‘do well.’ Did we?
It would be ridiculous of me to want to compare the scales and tenors of these tragedies and conspiracies, incidents and narratives. But I did want to trace a lineage for a mythos that has infected Polish politics with an imaginative but damning discourse of conflict, blame, and distrust—a discourse that was as irresistible in 2010 as it is now. I wanted to examine how the rhetoric of uncovering truth can be successfully weaponized into legitimizing a creed of lies, secrecy, corruption, and disdain. I wanted to understand how two ridiculous minutes of the evening of January 9th, 2024 could become charged with lexis and affect traceable to century-long national trauma. I wanted to show you that a simple quadriptych of a train, a car, a bus, and a plane could tell you quite a bit about a country such as mine.
PAULINA GASIOROWSKA 20 B’27 would gladly take a walk with the future President of Poland.
20 related to “gąsior” (male goose or gander)
This week, the Brown Corporation voted against divestment from companies facilitating the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories. They have shown their willingness to enable the horrors of Israel’s ongoing genocide—like the murder of 19-year-old Shaban al-Dalou, who was burned alive after the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) bombed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital complex earlier this week.
This piece, inspired by traditional Palestinian tatreez, portrays a repeated pattern of a Palestinian farmer woman, with one exception—one woman faces in the opposite direction. This deliberate deviation symbolizes the resistance against accepting the status quo. In the context of the Palestinian cause, it speaks to the courage of those who refuse to conform to cycles of oppression and injustice, whether in occupied Palestine, the diaspora, or among allies worldwide.
The work encourages breaking away from systemic patterns, urging both Palestinians and global allies to challenge the institutions—governments, universities, and beyond—that perpetuate genocide, colonialism, and oppression. It is a call for liberation, solidarity, and the power to resist the normalization of injustice.
On our campuses, the struggle continues. On Thursday, five student organizers from RISD presented the case for divestment to the board of trustees. While the road to divestment might be long, the student movement at Brown and RISD won’t abandon the Palestinian people.
WALEED MUSTAFA R’27 won’t rest ’til we all divest.
( TEXT ANGELA LIAN DESIGN SEJAL GUPTA & ANDREW LIU )
c Everyone asks Mindy Seu if she’s a designer, and the answer is yes, but it’s also complicated. In the past year, Mindy has given eighty-nine (89) lectures about internet history in eighteen (18) countries, taught forty-nine (49) design students and twelve (12) art students at three (3) universities, watched eight (8) sports documentaries, written four (4) essays about digital culture, designed four (4) websites, attended four (4) fashion shows, bought three (3) couches and sold two (2), curated two (2) exhibitions, ridden one (1) horse, published one (1) book, purchased one (1) painting, drank zero (0) cups of caffeinated coffee, and lost countless (xn) games of chess. Mindy also really likes spreadsheets — her latest wound up becoming an entire publication unto itself, Cyberfeminism Index (2023).
“With or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.”
Ursula K. Le Guin writes of the basket, not the spear, as the first tool created by humankind. The basket is a container, a holder, a recipient; it is technology that allows us to gather. In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Le Guin dethrones the Hero in favor of the people; she reframes technology as a collective “cultural carrier bag” rather than an individual “weapon of domination.”
The Cyberfeminism Index is an amalgamation of hundreds of digital works relating to cyberfeminism that, when compiled, become something greater than the sum of their parts. It is, in designer, technologist, and authoring editor Mindy Seu’s words, “encyclopedia-ish.” In 2019, she began the process of gathering, or: intentional and reflective collection for the purpose of sharing resources with the community. These works are now held in Seu’s baskets of spreadsheet, website, and book. She often cites “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” in reference to her work, which too emphasizes collectivity. The index invites all to partake in its decades of knowledge, activism, and art. Cyberfeminism is what exists at the intersection of gender and the Internet: a feminist approach to cyberspace, or a cyber-approach to feminism. Seu’s index investigates the term while expanding upon it, complicating it, and contradicting it.
MINDY SEU: Cyberfeminism is a very loose umbrella word. By nature, it was almost encouraged to mutate and expand, depending on the person, the context, the timeline, etc. My definition of cyberfeminism was twofold. It was really about that prefix “cyber-,” so not only did it have to disseminate feminism through online channels, it also needed to be critical of the technology that it was using. For example, it couldn’t just be like #MeToo because while that did disseminate feminism online, it wasn’t necessarily critical of the platform that it was on, like, Twitter or social media. Whereas a hashtag like #Gamergate [a misogynistic right-wing campaign that targeted women in the video game industry and later sparked feminist cyber-resistance projects and discourse] maybe was able to combine those two parts. #Gamergate is a misogynistic, right-wing online campaign that began in 2014 and targeted women in the video game industry through social networks like 4chan, Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit. Notably, it attacked video game developer Zoë Quinn and media critic Anita Sarkeesian, as well as those who defended them online. The cyberviolence and harassment involved in #Gamergate sparked cyberfeminist resistance discourse as well as projects such as Quinn’s organization Crash
Override, a nonprofit providing resources and a helpline for cyberviolence prevention and support, and Sarkeesian’s website Speak up & Stay Safe(r), a guide for marginalized communities against cyberviolence. With and since #Gamergate, digital violence against women and feminism has multiplied, but so have cyberfeminist spaces and conversations. Sadie Plant, a cultural theorist and philosopher often credited with coining “cyberfeminism” in the early 1990s and whose work is featured in the Cyberfeminism Index, called it “an uprising by goods and materials in the patriarchal world; a dispersed, networked rebellion forged through links between women and computers, and between computers, communication systems, and networks.” As long as patriarchy exists, cyberspace will be a powerful tool of resistance against it.
During her time at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), Seu was inspired by Dr. Abby Spinak’s lecture on footnotes as experimental infrastructure. The Cyberfeminism Index was born as a bibliography of sorts: a Google spreadsheet, crowdsourced and curated over time, that went viral on Twitter (now X) in 2019. The spreadsheet is visually bare but informationally dense, detailed in a simple and accessible way—curated with care by one but built from the minds of many.
MS: When I was in grad school, I was taking a course called Experimental Infrastructures by Abby Spinak. And while the GSD does focus on architecture and the built environment, Abby was really trying to expand this idea of infrastructure to different forms of foundations and how we can subvert them. Her example was that of footnotes. So footnotes could be an experimental infrastructure, because [they’re] literally fortifying the text that sits on top. And before this, I’ve long had a practice of list making and curation, and active citation, so it just felt like it was a nice prompt for me to figure out how I could make a bibliography for myself, for things that I was really looking at, but didn’t really see an aggregate of. So I started to bring together examples of my friends’ creative coding projects and media artworks and online activism. During this time, I was also a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for the Internet and Society. And there I was meeting a lot of policymakers and people who are focused more on the legal environments or implications of the law from a digital perspective. So that also made me realize that people were really thinking about very similar topics. It was just manifested in very different ways, whether that was creative or applied, etc. That was probably really the starting point for what this first spreadsheet [looked] like. So when I put it online, it kind of went like mini-viral. And then it just snowballed from there…
I was most surprised by some of the examples other people were submitting because the majority of the index is crowdsourced. So even the submissions allowed for some active mutation of the word [cyberfeminism]. Sometimes, if I didn’t understand why a project was being submitted, I would contact them for them to explain, why they thought it fit in this space, and that was very enlightening for me. It felt like a very dialogic project, and it requires a lot of maintenance and mutation. Even now. In a sense, the index has created itself upon itself: each time the suggestion spreadsheet, curated spreadsheet, website, or book was shared, like a snowball, it grew into and over and through what it would become. Each piece has passed through many hands. With every conversation and update, it resists stasis. Through collaboration, it generates.
to be read page by page. It is to be referenced and used to piece together conversations and histories and connections. In many senses, the Cyberfeminism Index is an archive of and for the future, rhizomatically and horizontally organized, pushing users outward instead of drawing them in. Print seems so disparate from the previous baskets that held the index, yet books too are technology. As a medium, print is useful in its own right as the most tangible and perhaps the longest-standing; in a sense, it can hold even the digital.
MS: I’ve long been interested in this translation between print and digital. Even if you’re showing the same content. The interface of either media really changes the way you surface things. And I do think both are interfaces. We typically have a digital connotation of this word. But a website has various conventions and formats that bring together an interactive environment. And similarly, a book also has conventions and formats and flows that also lend [themselves] to a specific interactive environment. So for me, it just felt like an important way to think about posterity. Think about how to replicate this idea of hyperlinking a hyperlink. Hypertech scholars like Ted Nelson have long described printed examples as an influence for digital environments and hypertext. So I think there’s actually a lot of overlap, even though people kind of assume that they’re quite different… I think ‘rhizomatic’ is important because there’s a lot of hubs, but then those hubs interconnect—so perhaps that’s an example of, like, a distributed network. It’s not completely decentralized because there are groupings. But there’s a lot of overlap between the groupings. This kind of messiness [and] interconnection was a big reference for us. And generally ↓
The Cyberfeminism Index soon metamorphosed into a website. Just as the Internet, https://cyberfeminismindex.com is constantly in flux. It is an anti-canon: never final, never complete, always evolving. When you visit, scroll, and click, a sidebar on the right opens, displaying your locally stored, downloadable “trail” of the works you’ve clicked on. The site, which uses only default web elements, is beautifully simple—not just for aesthetics but also to stand the test of time and technological updates. In 2022, Seu worked with designer Laura Coombs to produce their most recent basket: the book. The print format, however, may be misleading: it is not meant
thinking about different network infrastructure formats was important because the most important thing was we didn’t want it to feel centralized. I think we did a pretty good job of moving away from that. In botany, a rhizome is a plant stem that grows laterally and can produce both shoots and roots. Its strength lies in multiplicity. (Rhizome is also the name of the digital arts nonprofit that commissioned the Cyberfeminism Index in print form.) The index is organized by year and, within each year, alphabetically. It is horizontal and non-hierarchical in structure, further allowing for multiple points of entry, interconnected nodes, and intersecting pathways without a fixed beginning or end. The book
becomes a tangible rhizome. It invites connections across entries, resists linearity, and encourages wandering and diving. The reader leaves their own trail, just as on the Internet. The web expands indefinitely.
What is most immediately striking about the Cyberfeminism Index is its cover design: the brightest green imaginable is overlaid with giant black Arial text (a combination that became ubiquitous in the last few months). Over the title sits tiny text—also black Arial—listing every entry in the book, rotated 90 degrees clockwise. The effect is amaranth on moss, or black paint dripping down a wall of slime.
MS: Arial was important because it was a system font. It’s one of the few system fonts co-designed by a woman. We knew that it would be a system font, which means it’s available on all computers, regardless of whether it’s installed or not. It’s native to the machine. So this felt like a nice nod to the online environment. Neon green, we were really keen on using because it reads as very Internet. There are a lot of references for this, like Y2K Green or terminal green chroma key, like green screens. Even this idea of the unnatural, its reference to nature in an unnatural way, like bright green rhizomes and microscopic bacteria. This idea of slime is also very much hyper-saturated green. It almost reads as radioactive or something. So I think all of that was really helpful for us. It’s also just the tenant of RGB, so our 3 primary colors to consider were red, green, and blue, and we ended up going with green because we just appreciated—it’s just so bright… I think that Charli xcx was kind of a great example of an attitude that was surrounding this color. I think Imogene [Strauss, Charli xcx’s creative director] did a great job of nodding to this hyperpop present. But also, it references Y2K. So all in all, this color combination and this type combination have been around for a really long time. It’s interesting to see how it’s being applied in different media or for different projects.
In building the Cyberfeminism Index, Seu sought non-Western, intersectional work ranging from the first entry, Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” to most recently, “MsGlitch403,” a 2023 collective “exploring the relationship between gender, sexuality, and representation in cyberspace”—and number 860 on the website.
MS: [Picking my favorite piece in the Cyberfeminism Index] is like picking a favorite child… I really like Nahee Kim’s <Daddy Residency>. I talk about that project a lot. Nahee is really trying to examine the conventions of family structures. So they’ve created a “daddy residency” where they will, through artificial insemination, have a child. And then people can basically apply to be the daddy of this child for different time periods. I think the deadline to apply is next July, so there’s still some time—July 2025. It acts as a net art piece. But it’s also very much about these existing family structures. I’m very curious to see who’s applied and how it will happen in physical life. Nahee’s work is really great, and [it] thinks a lot about the cybernetics of sex.
Today, the Cyberfeminism Index continues to grow and mutate, as does cyberfeminism itself.
MS: “I just want to observe how [cyberfeminism] changes… Like, I want to follow the feeling. I want to see what radical, critical, creative projects people are doing in the space, whether they self-identify it as cyberfeminist or not. So I feel like all of that’s quite exciting. I just want to be surprised
ANGELA LIAN B’26 is mutating.
c A thirty-minute drive brings me home.
On a Thursday in June or a Sunday in January, I am in Chinatown. To buy longan and jade or eat hand-drawn noodles, I am in Chinatown. With my family or my friends, I am in Chinatown. After a decade and a half of as many visits as I could manage, I’ve become intimately familiar with the Tianjin tiles of Philadelphia’s Friendship Arch, the seeming dozens of bakeries lining 10th Street, the crisp chatter in languages that sound like silver and laughter.
As a child, I dreaded the car ride into Chinatown. I would press my face against the window as my dad’s minivan stopped and started and stopped again through the clogged Philadelphia intersections. Thirty minutes turned into an hour or more with traffic and the inevitable parking hunt (though my dad was often generous enough to drop us off on Race Street before embarking on the journey alone). But my temper always dissipated after the first soup dumpling. I ate it carefully—bite, drain, deconstruct.
We were creatures of habit: lunch was followed by shopping. I dreaded this too. I turned my nose up at the smell of fish so fresh they could swim and asked my mom, with varying degrees of success, if she could please take me to get 珍珠奶茶 (zhēnzhū nâichá) instead. When we drove back in the evening, I was usually too asleep (or too busy faking sleep) to voice any remaining complaints.
Lately, I’ve been taking the medium-reliable regional rail into Jefferson Station with my friends to revisit the spots our families frequented and to discover new ones. Philadelphia Chinatown is a
portal of sorts. Perhaps it’s that I get to converse in Mandarin with strangers, or that I can get a meal for four dollars, or that for a stretch of seven blocks, I can find myself and my family in everyone I see.
I have followed this feeling to Boston and to Flushing. Each Chinatown is a fraction of a home I barely remember; each Chinatown takes me in.
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On July 21, 2022, the Philadelphia 76ers announced plans to build a second arena, to be called 76Place at Market East, in the heart of Philadelphia, six inches from the southern boundary of Chinatown. Sixers owners and billionaires Josh Harris, David Blitzer, and David Adelman formed 76 DevCo, a development company, for this specific purpose. In a press release, Harris claimed that the project would revitalize Center City, “strengthen ties within the local community,” and “[create] well-paying jobs and economic opportunities for those who need them most.”
This is far from the truth.
Chinatown is an Asian American community that is home to new immigrants, the elderly, low-income families, and other vulnerable populations. As an ethnic neighborhood, it offers cultural and linguistic familiarity, affordable housing, and strong community support networks. It would be irreversibly altered and diminished by the arena. Six years of construction and future sports events drawing large crowds would lead to traffic gridlocks, loss of affordable street parking, a reduction in festivals and other traditional events, higher property values that will force out low-to-moderate income residents and business owners, and other threats to the safe space that is Chinatown. The land in Center City is highly valuable, which likely contributed to Harris, Blitzer, and Adelman’s decision to build the arena there instead of in South Philadelphia, where most of the city’s sports centers are already located alongside pre-existing mass transit connections and parking infrastructure. The developers have proposed gifting the land to the city and then leasing it back, thus avoiding real estate
taxes (which would go toward the School District of Philadelphia and city services) and instead making “payments in lieu of taxes,” or PILOTs. In all but name, this would work as a taxpayer-funded subsidy. Ultimately, the arena is a land grab and a money grab—not for the city and its residents, but for the billionaires and private real estate developers who will be the sole long-term beneficiaries of this project. In a 2023 survey, the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Cooperation found that approximately 94% of Chinatown business owners, residents, and visitors opposed the arena. Following the Sixers’ announcement, local activists organized the Save Chinatown Coalition, led by the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (API PA) and Asian Americans United (AAU). The Coalition includes 19 other organizations, including Philadelphia Jobs with Justice, Philadelphia Tenants Union, and the Racial Justice Organizing Committee. In April 2023, members delivered over four thousand written postcards and a petition with over 15,000 signatures to City Council Members, whose approval is required for 76 DevCo to move forward with construction. (Today, the petition has over 30,000 signatures.) On June 10, 2023, nearly a year after the announcement, a crowd of over 3,000 marched through Center City to protest the arena. On September 7, 2024, over 4,000 protesters showed up to a No Arena rally in the pouring rain, days before the City Council reconvened for its fall session. Throughout the months, the Coalition promoted community polls, petitions, town halls, events, and the contacting of local officials—in particular, the recently-inaugurated Mayor Cherelle Parker. In spite of these efforts, on September 18, Mayor Parker released a video officially endorsing the arena.
Communication with the city government, especially the mayoral office, has been lackluster. Attempts to set up visits or meetings regarding the arena were largely ignored by both Mayor Parker’s office and that of her predecessor, Mayor Kenney; only once did Mayor Parker’s office take the time to even respond to the SCC and decline their request. SCC members felt stonewalled. “It’s like pulling teeth,” said Mohan Seshadri, the Executive Director of the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance and a leader of the Save Chinatown Coalition. “Any information we’ve gleaned, we’ve have to fight for… For the last two years, city government and the administrations have done their best to undercut our communities’ voices and really any access to information whatsoever that we could or should have for this project—while consistently bending over backward to meet with and accommodate the developers.”
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In August 2024, the city released three Sixers-funded, independently conducted studies projecting the arena’s impacts on traffic, culture, and economy. Due to the proposed location on top of major transit station Jefferson Station, the Sixers owners hoped
to increase transit use to 40% of fans and limit travel by car to another 40% of fans. According to the study, any increase in car use above 40%, even if marginal, would cause gridlock at critical intersections. Currently, about 75% of ticketholders drive to games. The developers do not plan to construct any additional parking. Additionally, the 76 DevCo developers plan to entirely close off 10th and 11th Streets on game days, which would block crucial routes for ambulances and other emergency vehicles to and from Jefferson Hospital.
Jefferson is the last remaining major hospital and Level 1 trauma center in the area after 76 DevCo’s Josh Harris’ private equity firm helped shut down Center City’s safety net hospital, Hahnemann Hospital. According to a study in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, each 10-minute increment of out-of-hospital time makes emergency patients 57% more likely to die. In emergency medical situations for those living in Chinatown and surrounding communities, every minute matters; the arena will inevitably cause deaths during its six years of construction and indefinitely thereafter.
The study also admitted the potential for cultural loss by gentrification in Chinatown, which can lead to the losses of community institutions, businesses, and third places from the Holy Redeemer Church and School to Bread Top House (and their subsequent replacement with large chains and corporations), as well as a decline in the use of cultural languages and the mass displacement of residents.
Chinatown is and has always been a safe space for Asian American and Pacific Islander community members, from its late-19th-century roots planted by Chinese immigrants seeking refuge through the 2020s’ rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. The 76Place website promises “state of the art CCTV cameras, lighting, and human resources – namely Safety Ambassadors and extra police coverage.” However, security, policing, and surveillance have historically done little to protect minority communities, and in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, as elsewhere, there already exists a tenuous relationship between people of color—especially nonnative English speakers—and law enforcement. Game results could also lead to property damage in the area. After the Eagles’ first Super Bowl victory in 2018, fans stormed the streets of Philadelphia, climbing poles, smashing windows, flipping cars, and breaking into stores. With the arena, after both major wins and losses, the streets of Chinatown will be vulnerable to similar destruction that small businesses aren’t equipped to recover from.
The Sixers owners and developers originally claimed that the arena would generate nearly $1.5 billion in tax revenue (its construction would cost approximately $1.3 billion, but would be privately funded). The August 2024 study found that the arena would instead generate only $390 million in tax revenue for the city, its school district, and the state over its approximate six years of construction and 30 years of activity. Economists still say this is an overestimate. According to economics professor and sports economics expert John Charles Bradbury, it is well known amongst experts that stadiums and arenas are “poor public investments” and “are not associated with having strong economic impacts on local communities.” The Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., which was built in and decimated D.C.’s Chinatown, fell 80% short of arena consultants’ revenue projections. Similarly, San Francisco’s Chase Center fell 73% short of projections.
Although some local unions have taken pro-arena stances, any jobs created by the arena would be either temporary and likely unprotected (construction) or low-paid and seasonal (ticket or concession vendors and janitorial staff). In fact, it could weaken union power by exploiting temporary, transitory labor and non-union contractors, ultimately threatening long-term bargaining power. This would cause an outward ripple effect on other industries in Chinatown and Center City as a whole, including downward pressure on wages, displacement of local labor, lowered support for vulnerable workers, and a shift toward seasonal employment in sectors like hospitality.
The arena would also cause property values to rise out of reach for Chinatown residents and business owners. Approximately three-fourths of Chinatown small business owners rent their spaces, leaving them vulnerable to inevitable
rent increases; even the remaining one-fourth are susceptible to higher real estate taxes that will cause financial distress and potential mass business closures. Like other Chinatowns, Philadelphia Chinatown fundamentally does not survive on tourism or nonresident patronage. It survives on the local community that already exists and is in immediate danger of being displaced.
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Philadelphia Chinatown is one of the oldest surviving Chinatowns in the nation and, uniquely, one that continues to grow in both size and population. It was born in 1871, when an immigrant named Lee Fong established a laundromat at 913 Race Street. The area was originally Philadelphia’s “skid row,” which is common for Chinatowns. In major cities, these underfunded, working-class neighborhoods were the only places where Chinese immigrants could be relatively safe and accepted. In the 1870s and 1880s, many Chinese immigrants fled rising Sinophobic sentiments in the American West, where they were blamed for economic instability and regarded as unassimilable. Mass violence in the West took the forms of over a hundred massacres, property destruction, prejudice, expulsions, segregation, and racist immigration policy.
By World War II, the rest of Philadelphia still considered Chinatown a ‘bad’ area. After World War II, more liberal immigration policies were passed. This allowed Chinese immigrants to bring their families to the United States and create a better-organized, more family- and socioculturally-oriented neighborhood by building churches, schools, and businesses of their own. Chinatown soon became home to not only Chinese immigrants, but also Southeast Asian refugees after the Vietnam War, South Asians, and other East Asians. As the number of residents, homes, and community institutions grew, Chinatown prospered. As Chinatown continued to thrive, government development repeatedly threatened its coherence and community. In 1966, the city proposed a plan for the Vine Street Expressway, which would cut across Chinatown, destroy the Chinese Catholic Holy Redeemer Church and School, and negatively impact other Chinatown establishments. To combat the plan, community members formed a Committee for the Advancement and Preservation of the Chinatown Community (later renamed the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation [PCDC]). The committee succeeded in saving the church and school, but the expressway still cut across Chinatown, seizing over 300 buildings by eminent domain and separating the North Chinatown neighborhood. In the 1970s and 80s, Chinatown was forced to partially relocate due to government development projects. Perhaps the most prominent project, the Pennsylvania Convention Center, opened in 1993, requiring the demolition of several Chinatown buildings on Arch Street and taking the homes of 200 families. In the 1990s, the PCDC successfully competed with the Federal Bureau of Prisons for land just north of Chinatown; there, the PCDC built Hing Wah Yuen, an affordable housing development. In 2000, local Chinatown organizations resisted an attempt to build a Phillies stadium at 11th and Vine Street. In the end, Citizens Bank Park was built in South Philadelphia. In 2008, Foxwoods attempted to open a casino less than 50 feet from Chinatown homes. Asian Americans United asserted that “the casino would hurt local businesses and increase domestic violence, divorce, and child abuse rates” and that it would “exploit Asian vulnerability to gambling” due to the prominence of gambling in East Asian cultures. The proposal was nonetheless endorsed by the mayor and the governor, but it was later shut down when the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board revoked the casino’s license. Chinatowns across the United States are constantly threatened, more recently by COVID-19 and throughout history by gentrification and development projects. Eight years after the Capital One arena was built in Washington, D.C., the last full-service Chinese grocery store in Chinatown shut down. Five years later, in 2010, only one in five Chinatown residents were Asian. Today, few Chinese businesses remain, and only a few hundred Asians and Asian Americans still live there. The arena provoked rapid gentrification, reduced parking, building seizure by
eminent domain, and increasing rents, forcing both residents and businesses out of the community. Although 76Place is to be built next to, not within, Chinatown, D.C.’s history still shapes our understanding of today’s struggle. Philadelphia Chinatown is a cultural hub and a rare haven for Asian immigrants and Asian Americans alike to reconnect with their culture and language. The arena will not, as the billionaire developers claim, ‘revitalize’ and ‘bring prosperity to’ the area, nor will it benefit the people of Chinatown or Philadelphia as a whole. Chinatown is home to many, even those who don’t live there. It is a site of history, culture, and identity that should not and cannot be destroyed by predatory development. The arena is not simply a sports venue. It is a threat to our existence.
Now, I spend my time nearly three hundred miles from Philadelphia. Aside from seeing loved ones, Chinatown is my first priority when I visit—and in a year, or ten, or twenty, that won’t change. The next time I go home, I will pass under the cobalt sign into Nan Zhou Hand Drawn Noodle House for the fiftieth time. I will walk the streets of the 夜市 (yèshì, night market) that reminds me of 贵 阳 (Guiyang). I will exist among strangers who share my language, my culture, and my identity.
I hope to continue returning to Philadelphia Chinatown for the rest of my life. But if the arena is built, there may not be a Chinatown to return to. I am terrified by the possibility of going home to a ghost town in which decades-old, family-owned restaurants are shut down and bought out, where Bai Wei becomes McDonald’s and Ray’s Cafe becomes Dunkin’ (except with the addition of store signs bearing Chinese transliterations in an attempt to mask the fact that they do not belong). Where the location on Google Maps still says “Chinatown” but I’m the only Asian person in sight because rent prices were driven up and residents were driven out. Where only the shadows of a once-vibrant community remain.
Time and time again, from the expressway to the stadium to the casino, activists and community members have fought to maintain Chinatown’s vitality and fundamental existence. Today, resisting the arena is just as crucial, if not more so. The proposed arena prioritizes profit over people, no matter what its billionaire developers claim. Even if Philadelphia Chinatown is not yours, it is a symbol of larger struggles: We must oppose the arena in order to tell legislators that, from Philadelphia to Providence, the people will not stand for projects that displace marginalized communities and erase their histories and livelihoods. We must reject the patterns of predatory development seen in cities across the world. We must save Chinatown.
ANGELA LIAN B’26 不要篮球馆。
Read the extended version on our website.
Resources: @nacsphilly @asianamericansunited @apipennylvania @chinatownpcdc noarenaphl.org
Contact Mayor Parker: 215-6862181, cherelle.parker@phila.gov
Contact Philadelphia Council Members: phlcouncil.com/council-members/
In order to remain on their proposed timeline, 76Place must be approved by the City Council before the end of 2024. (Their last meeting of the year is on December 12). As of Tuesday, three of 17 council members have announced their intention to vote against the arena construction. At least nine—a simple majority—need to vote against the bills authorizing the arena in order to prevent its existence. Most have not announced a public stance since the related legislation has not yet been introduced or reviewed (this may occur as soon as October 24, 2024).
“I kept trying to snip and shape my body and my choices and my thoughts to fit what these directors expected of me based on my outward appearance,” Grindeland confessed. “And then I found clown, and it was like, my too much was just right.”
c When I told my best friend that I spent my evening at a clown party, she exclaimed, “Don’t get killed! And don’t fall in love with one of them either.” I knew what she was picturing: a room full of middle-aged men with faces painted white, bulbous red noses and frizzy, rainbow wigs. This was a fair assumption. It’s pretty much what any search engine will spit out if you look up the word “clown.” I reassured her that these clowns were different from the Ronald McDonald, Pennywise, or Joker-esque characters she was envisioning. After all, they were modern clowns. Certainly freaks, but in a good way.
My invitation to the world of Providence clowns came to me through my summer internship at the Wilbury Theatre Group’s FringePVD Festival. Each summer, the Wilbury hosts dozens of artists from around the country during a two-week festival in Olneyville across various local venues. Fringe festivals are spaces where artists get to test out new work—they serve as a hotbed of the most exciting and adventurous performance pieces you might ever witness. Unsurprisingly, these festivals are the perfect space for up-and-coming clowns. My first clown encounter was Grigori Rasputin, the Russian mystic.
On the third day of the festival, I ushered the audience into the theater for Rasputin, LIVE!, a new show my coworkers could not stop raving about since its opening the previous night. Pacing in circles onstage was a short man with a long black beard, a striped sweatband, and seemingly no pants. With a thick Russian accent, he asked me to usher the audience into the middle of the theater. “Rasputin thanks you,” he barked after me as the crowd began trickling in.
Over the course of the night, Rasputin seductively stripped multiple layers of heavy fur coats to ultimately reveal a microphone dildo, aggressively ridiculed three audience members as they attempted to follow an elaborate Zumba routine, and invited one woman up for a therapy session that delved into her strained relationship with her mother who wished she had become a lawyer. The end of the show had the entire audience dancing onstage along with the almost naked Russian holy man.
Rasputin, LIVE! was my first encounter with modern-day clowning, though, at the time, I wouldn’t have known to use that word. As the Fringe went on, I continued to meet artists doing similarly evocative pieces centered on audience engagement and working through grief with absurd, often sexual, comedy. I was drawn to these shows, but I didn’t understand their connection to one another until a group of Providence-based performers explained that they all attended Embodied Action, a weekly drop-in acting class hosted by the Wilbury Theatre Group. A.K.A., Clown Class. This was the birthplace of Grindeland’s Rasputin.
As with many of their peers, Grindeland found clowning after a series of disappointing stage experiences. As a short, genderqueer, femme-bodied actor, the start of their acting career had been marked by various unsatisfying roles. They recounted the story of having shown up to audition for Juliet and instead being offered the role of Mercutio. Grindeland jokes that even before they started to openly question their gender identity, traditional theater spaces were doing it for them.
Grindeland began their clown training online during the pandemic and ended up in a class taught by Christopher Bayes, one of the leading physical comedy and clown instructors in the world. While the class was composed of mostly cis-gendered performers, Grindeland now describes it as being a sort of waypoint for their experience of clowning as a queer practice.
“What I kept thinking about the entire time was like, wow, this is queer,” Grindeland said. “I was like, what do I do because I feel like I’m inhabiting this weird little territory where cis, straight people are doing this very queer thing, but I don’t know how often they realize it.”
But then, Grindeland found Embodied Action
As it turns out, the Wilbury Theatre Group’s drop-in acting class is a clown course in disguise. The workshops are led by Mycah Hogan, an arts educator in Providence who recently won Providence Journal’s Community Person of the Year Award. Hogan has spent over fifteen years developing his teaching practice by working in the Providence community, including but not limited to teaching at Brown Trinity Rep, leading workshops in various public high schools, and facilitating acting classes at the Wilbury. This was the space in which Grindeland found their new clown home. In this space, to be different was to be successful.
As a total coincidence, this semester I found myself taking a class through the Brown Arts Institute with Hogan as the Teaching Artist. Of course, I used this opportunity to find out more about the Providence clown scene and his own practice. An incredibly generous educator, Hogan lent me an hour of his time to discuss all things clown.
Like Grindeland, Hogan came from a traditional acting background. However, when he found himself in Amsterdam at his first clown class with Bayes in 2006, he was shocked at how difficult clown was to embody successfully.
“I found clowning just to be the actual hardest thing that I’ve ever done on stage,” Hogan admitted. “You know, I was pretty good as an actor, like an interpretive actor, but when it came to creating a moment with the audience in that clown state, I was like, whoa, I suck at this. Most of us suck at this. What is this thing?”
It took Hogan years of practice to pinpoint what made clowning both so addictive and so difficult, and he summarizes it now as a sort of heightened state of presence as a performer.
“It’s a physical, somatic state of being where you’re open in a way that you’re not in normal waking life,”
Hogan explained. “And that sense of openness allows for a deep level of listening with and for the audience.”
Hogan felt the desire to bring this type of active listening through performance back to Providence. In 2021, he began Embodied Action, a class in which he could facilitate the creation of that special vulnerable state of clowning for members of the Providence community who were curious about performance.
I think I know why Hogan felt the need to keep the clown-of-it-all under wraps. Almost every time I mention that I am working on a “clown article,” I get the same response. “You mean clowns with red noses and makeup?” Sometimes I’m met with a simple raised eyebrow and an unsettled look. I’m not entirely sure if it was John Wayne Gacy who began the popular evil clown trope, but I’m sure
Stephen King and The Joker have also had something to do with it. Regardless, it was no surprise to me that Hogan chose a more subtle approach.
Hogan’s workshop began in 2021, when the Wilbury moved into its new home in Olneyville. “The space was completely white and there was insulation coming out of the walls because they were still building it,” he reminisced. “We were just a bunch of nut jobs dancing around and making noises behind masks.”
Masks in the sense of COVID-19 face masks. After an unfortunate year of masked high school improv, I can only imagine how difficult clowning would be with only the top half of the face. Hogan described their first workshop without masks as “dropping acid as a group.”
But when the face masks came off, a different type of mask took their place. The most classic mask in clowning is of course the red nose. “I ran a workshop in the spring called Tiny Bullseye, because I’ve come to think of it as a bullseye for your face,” Hogan said when I asked about the prevalence of the nose in his teaching pedagogy. “We see all the shit that you don’t want to see, and then you have to learn to love that.”
I questioned Hogan further on the red nose in contemporary clowning, where performers create their own characters that usually do not involve traditional clown costumes. He reminded me that masks can take various forms for clowns, and what matters more is what the mask reveals about what is underneath.
“I’ve often talked about how the mask is like a mushroom,” Hogan explained. “It’s another kind of consciousness that exists in the universe that grafts onto your body, and if it’s done right, it takes over in a way that allows complete liberation of the body and the spirit and the voice and the mind.”
While Rasputin doesn’t wear the traditional red nose, perhaps the three layers of fur coats or the luscious beard would be considered this specific clown’s mask. Grindeland got these items from Party City in response to a five-minute clowning assignment that Hogan gave in Forest of Fools, a course he has recently created to respond to growing interest in clown performance. This was the birthplace of Rasputin.
“We needed to put together a five-minute bit for this thing,” Grindeland explained. “So I bought a beard from Party City and a little mustache and these ‘70s clothes, and I was like, okay, I’m just gonna be ‘70s Rasputin and teach people how to party.”
Through their creation of Rasputin, Grindeland was able to find and embody a part of themselves they had never had room to express before. A loud, obnoxious, sexually explicit yet deeply caring Russian man with a microphone dildo and cross pasties. Not only that, but this new version of themselves was met with an outpouring of love from an audience that found immense joy in Rasputin’s explosive personality and brutal honesty. If Grindeland had felt that they had to shrink or shape themselves to fit traditional acting roles in the past, developing Rasputin was the complete opposite process. Grindeland suggested that there were more similarities between their embodiment of Rasputin and a drag performance versus a traditional acting role.
“Rasputin is both like a clown and not like a clown, because although I used clowning to get there, he’s also a drag character. But drag is also clowning. It’s all mixed together and clown is a jumping-off point to access just a genuinely stupid, earnest character.”
Grindeland is not the first to make this connection between clown and drag, and it makes a lot of sense. The two performance arts share both style and content. Clowns and drag performers are often both found in layers of makeup and campy costumes
performing sexualized characters that combine deep self-exploration with political and social commentary.
“I have a big theory that clowning, drag, and wrestling are kind of all the same because they all ask you to accentuate, exaggerate, or minimize parts of yourself, often related to gender, to create a character and to have a couple of physical and spoken actions that define who you are as a character.”
As it turns out, one of the lead clown instructors in Los Angeles is a former wrestler. But that’s a story for another time.
When I asked Grindeland about how Rasputin went from a five-minute character bit to an hourlength show, they described drawing inspiration from Natalie Palamides. The name instantly rang a bell, and when I looked her up, I realized why. Without knowing it, I had already watched one of the most prominent clowns of our time and written it off as a bizarre but incredibly entertaining one-person play.
After interning at FringePVD, I spent the final month of my summer working at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the largest Fringe festival in the world. On my days off, I would watch as many shows as I could, often seeing five or six performances back-to-back. Of the 35 shows I was lucky enough to attend, Natalie Palamides’ WEER has stuck with me the most, and I’m not the only one. This solo performance—in which Palamides plays both the leading man and leading woman in a satire of a ‘90s romantic comedy—has received an overwhelming amount of positive critical attention. For a Fringe show competing against literally a thousand other performances, this is a nearly impossible feat. A writer from the Telegraph admitted: “Palamides is probably the world’s most talented and boundary-pushing purveyor of this type of comedy.”
This type of comedy, meaning, of course, clowning.
But this was not Palamides’ first rodeo. In 2018, she brought Nate - A One Man Show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In what was described as both a drag king and clown show, Palamides embodied Nate, a hairy-chested, middle-aged man in a red flannel coat and combat boots. The piece explored masculinity and issues of consent, often directly involving blatantly sexual physical interactions with members of the audience.
Nate received the Total Theatre Award for Innovation and Experimentation at the Fringe and was soon adapted by Amy Poehler for Netflix. The elevation of a clown show to a national streaming service brought clowning in its new form to mainstream audiences. In some ways, this adaptation appears to be an echo in the digital era of the traditional clown as street performer. As per usual, Palamides was met with rave reviews.
Palamides’ career exemplifies the modern state of clowning. While she has gained popularity through her provocative comedic performances, she is also a recurring character in Progressive Insurance commercials. Palamides has been able to enter the commercial world of entertainment while entirely preserving her effortless spunk and incisive social commentary through clowning. While not all critics are so fast to use the C-word, Palamides has been very clear about
the significance of clowning in her practice.
Since the origin of clowning, social commentary has remained central to the form. Perhaps this is why the clown as an archetype inspires both fascination and dread in modern culture. In medieval France, clowns were an important aspect of religious commentary. As John Towsen explores in his comprehensive clown history fittingly entitled Clowns, The Feast of Fools was a New Year’s tradition in France where minor religious figures would wear masks or dress up like women in order to satirize religious rituals. Eventually, the Protestant Reformation put an end to this tradition.
The Feast of Fools functioned in similar ways to contemporary clowning. Through outrageous and satirical ceremonies, these performers shed light on issues that might be taboo outside of a theatrical setting. Towsen writes that when the church eventually banned The Feast of Fools, it became a secular tradition, shifting the satirical focus to government officials and others in positions of power.
The tradition of the clown in classical theater plays a similar role. Towsen chronicles how the
beginning of Western theater was characterized by clowns and acrobats performing short sketches in Ancient Greece that mocked aspects of everyday life. In Shakespearean dramas, clowns often play the role of a commentator who can exist both inside and outside the actions of the play. Historically, the role of the clown has consistently been to critique society by embodying absurdity and foolishness.
Towsen points out similar trends in the Americas, where various Indigenous communities used clowning to satirize both their own leaders as well as colonizers. He mentions specific spiritual ceremonies in which clown characters would routinely interrupt the proceedings. “In all of these performances, the clown’s role is officially sanctioned by culture,” Towsen writes. “The clown keeps the people in touch with everyday reality while fulfilling the need for a connection with the sacred.”
Historically, the clown has messed with conven tions from within—not too far off from Palamides’ use of a male character to explore gender dynamics through exaggerated representations. Towsen writes how Pueblo clown performances often involved the wearing of false genitals, a central costume component of Palamides’ work as well.
However, the contemporary mainstream image of a clown doesn’t look like any of these traditional characters. The eerie clown with white face paint and rainbow clothes is more closely tied to the American circus tradition in which injured or retired acrobats would turn to clowning to enhance the rest of the circus performance. Jacques Lecoq was the most prominent clown trainer of the 20th century, and his practice emphasized the relationship between character and physicality.
If Palamides’ clown personas are representative of popular contemporary clowning, then it seems the return of clowning as a performance art corresponds to a return to the initial purpose of clowns channeled through modern acting technique and solo-performance style.
While this type of contemporary clown work is taking off in major American creative capitals like Los Angeles and New York, Hogan
believes that Providence could be the perfect space for a budding clown community.
Hogan loves his home state. “The clown scene in Providence exists because there is this really great, weird, offbeat vibe in the city,” he said. “We’re choosing to live in a small city because we like it in a small city, and actually, we don’t need to go to these predetermined pockets of commerce and wealth in order to see cool shit on stage or look at cool paintings or listen to good music. We can do that all here.”
Hogan sees the Wilbury’s Fringe Festival as central to establishing this scene.
“We had three people from the training who did Fringe shows here this summer, and that’s a huge foothold,” Hogan said. “It means that they consider this their home. Then they go out and they learn and they tour and they come back. It’s that experience of getting in touch with the broader community of performers and teachers, and then just staying present and staying put and allowing the thing to transform.”
The Wilbury is only one of many theaters in Providence including The Trinity Repertory Theatre, The Gamm Theatre, and Providence Performing Arts Center. On any given weekend, there is a high likelihood that somewhere in Providence at least two live theater pieces are being performed. Hogan sees clowning as an opportunity for the larger Providence community to get involved and see themselves reflected onstage.
“Live theater is supposed to reflect the community that we’re in,” Hogan said. “It should really hold up the mirror to nature and be like, this is what you’re doing. This is what it looks like. And for me, that’s what this work is. It’s like, community-supported clowning, community-supported acting, community-supported training. Who else are we making theater for, if not for the people that we live with?”
For Hogan, a good clown is true to their community as well as to themselves. They’re able to vibrate on a frequency that is internally and externally honest and unselfconscious. This is the kind of work he hopes to do with anyone who has a couple of free hours on a Monday evening and a curiosity about performance.
“This deep desire that we have to not just stand up and make people laugh, but to do so in a way that demands this immediate surrendering of the self, which is hard and beautiful, is definitely at the core of what makes a good clown,” Hogan said.
When I asked Hogan why Providence might be a good spot for a clown scene, he left out half of the answer; Hogan and other arts educators in Providence work tirelessly to build communities around authenticity and joy. Through outrageous silliness and heartrending vulnerability, these spaces are vital in helping new voices explore what exactly
( TEXT DANIELLA POZO DESIGN RACHEL SHIN ILLUSTRATION DANIELLA POZO )
On days when concrete roads heat the feet and the sun rises high in the sky to warm the head
You find your body pressed against strange warmths
Hands grazing each other in motion
As the train cars weave through bodies and sewage
Feet shuffle and escape onto the platform
As languid trees fold into city streets, the shoulders turn down and inward, shading the stomach
Waiting for the concrete jungle to give way to marble entryways
With a squeak and a turn the water begins to spill
Legs guide you to a familiar hollow in your home
A promise found settling on your skin:
Perch on the porcelain toilet seat
Feet dangling off the ground
Elbows pressed against the window’s bottom Linger here and notice the water.
c Three stories above ground, hovering between the garbage disposal and a small mechanic’s garage, this window turns away from the noise of the street and gazes at the building across from you where a puddle of rainwater has grown over the years. From this position, kneeling on the toilet seat with your head looking out of the window, the air tickles your nose as it passes through twin metal bars. Here, the cars and people mingle at all hours of the day, their music and warm chatter rising from the street into the bathroom window. El Indio clicks and clunks as he gathers glass and plastic bottles to recycle for 5 cents each. A natural conversationalist, he waits outside the building for tenants to salute, quietly warding off complaints and repair needs with pieces of chisme or bottles of Heineiken.
The ripples of the wind whisper through the mirrored sky, and the edges of the water collect and relax on the roof. The puddle never retreats from the landscape, only allowing itself to be changed, shifted, and accepted with each turn of the season. In the distortions of its water are glimpses of other windows on Webster Avenue, 5th floors stacked on 4th floors stacked on 3rd floors. . . a sequence echoing around you in red brick apartment buildings where life is refracted above and below, crossing over itself in a constant cycle of entrances and exits.
The bathroom is nestled in the corner of apartment 3C, touching the kitchen sink on its side. Brick and wood mark the boundaries between inside and outside, while the locked door guards your body with its brass knob. Knowing that you stand behind this locked door, in a space designated for this purpose, you can release your nakedness. Climb down from the toilet seat and let the people glide by, unperturbed by your observance in the window. Your spit travels from inside you and into the bowels of the sink, passing through channels of curved pipes, collecting the dregs of moments spent briskly putting city blocks behind you or pensively waiting on toilet seats. The water is finished heating up, and
you are alone to hang your towel, open the curtains, and step into the bathtub. The water reigns hot and the pitter-patter against the plastic curtain recedes into quiet, murmuring streams as your body makes contact. First, the fingers probe the open air and find a warm embrace. Then, the arm, next, the chest, knees, face, back–all gathered to take turns underneath the flood. Drop your neck low with the weight of the water, allow your body to sway as the shower head sings on your back. Rub the soap between your hands and reach back into yourself to lather again and again. After the writhing and the cleaning, bend your back and allow little fingers to explore the crevices between your eyes and your ears, washing away traces of outside air that puncture the skin with the streets’ recycled breaths. When the moment demands action, brace yourself with both hands against the faucets and turn. Step outside of the bathtub and look to the left where strands of steam gently wave goodbye and escape through the window. Others cling to the bathroom mirror and form a tablet, a blank space, tempting you to glide your finger across the surface and find yourself poking out from beneath the glass. Your excess water collects itself between the fibers of a towel and down the throat of metallic drains. In the isolation of your home, the bathroom reveals its intimate control over you.
The spout, shrouded in white porcelain and stainless steel, suspends its water before mixing begins. Once released, the highways of domesticated iron pipes empty into the gorging sewer tunnels carrying waste and water into tanks for processing, cleaning, and sludge-ing. In this built-in infrastructure, you divulge the weight of bodily fluids down different basins. There, all that you have scrubbed, flushed, and poured washes into each other. Reunion.
deep conditions her hair twice a month.
Picture this: The day was cloudy, rainy, even. There is gloom in the air, and you have a PSET and a paper due tomorrow. You’ve trapped yourself in the SciLi stacks and watch out its windows as the day’s obscured sun sets on the miserable day. Your to-go box from the Ratty has started smelling weird, and the letters from your reading on Rousseau’s Social Contract are swimming, not even blue light glasses can help anymore. It’s time to go home.
So you pack up your laptop, notebook, and loose pen into your stupid shoulder bag (because who does Indie look like submitting to the practicality of a backpack?) and as you wait for the elevator to come and take you out of that brutalist prison, you imagine the crisp cold air that will invigorate you on the walk home. Then you step outside, and as you walk, you crane your neck upwards, seeking a north star to guide you home.
And what are you met with? Gray.
Not just any gray. A two-dimensional, purplish void made manifest by the evil exchange between a cloudy sky and industrial city lights pointed heavensward come nightfall. What’s worse is that the reflected light prevents the night from coming to
What some may consider the prime air sign. My best friend from home is the gauge by which I define an Aries. As soft and kind as an autumn breeze. As destructive as storm-force winds. In this early fall season leaves are dancing in the air, I am chilled. Do not let the cold take from you the power that wrests brush from the earth, that breathes life into us all. Aries, you are alive with vigor this week. Let it move you, and consider the fallout afterward. There is always time, but right now, you should know the certainty and urge you may have to act is justified.
No one told me that Cancer was an astrological sign divorced from the disease?! I grew up feeling a deep distress whenever I’d see that medical term nested among the other Zodiac jewelry in Claire’s, but it was a hushed topic, so I never uttered my concern for the souls born under that unfortunate sign. Now that I am older and wiser, I know better (as it goes), and I know Cancers to be, as my good friend puts it, “Moonfaced and bright-eyed.” Cancers know love, love like water. Dive deep. Immerse. It’s all around you.
Happy Birthday chat! You’ve cycled the sun one more time, and maybe you’re weird like Indie and get sad on your birthday. Maybe you’re normal and love the attention and joy it brings. Either way, now is the time for retrospection and appreciation. Every decision you’ve made, every word said, every night out, every choice to stay in, they’ve all accumulated into where you are now. All that wisdom is yours, and isn’t that a gift? Life is hard, and strange, sometimes it’s miraculous, and it’s so so long. There is so much more of it ahead of you. Shape it how you wish. Let it shape you. Sleep easy, Libra, the best is yet to come.
This is the time in which Capricorns thrive. The constant march of deadlines make the Capricorn’s actions feel like they are in service of some greater mission. A life of happiness is not one hedonistic moment singly linked to the next, but the sum of its parts, easy and hard. But hard work needs a mission. Do not forget yours, Capricorn. This is all for something.
As a Taurus, you may feel that you have a deserved, unique appreciation for that which is worldly. The touch of a lover, the aromas of spice and heat, pretense to a well-prepared meal. You know what things are is not only their materiality, but their implication, and it is easy to take that for granted. Do not forget that beauty is not birthright. I implore you to think about the pleasure in your life, whatever it may be, and imagine its reciprocity. This world exists, at times, for us to delight in, but that means it deserves kindness in return. Return to balance, and embrace gratitude this week.
My father is one, and nothing makes more sense. One time, my family and I went on vacation, and we ran into not one but two of my father’s friends, states away from home. Not that coincidence is miraculous or anything, but I do subscribe to the textbook magnetism of a Leo. And the ego-centrism… That is not to be mean, or to discount the fact that it is often justified, but as an important reminder—one I’d give no matter the orientation of the planets—correct and right are two different things. Do not let your vehement belief in accuracy eclipse a moral responsibility to what is kind, and what is good.
Fixed water, still and deep. So much life begins and ends under the algae-ridden surface of a pond, the SeaMonkeys are rejoicing! Scorpio knows how much they can hold, it is why they are so adept at understanding others, and they do not resent it. Allow yourself to extend that curiosity inwards, and let the light break through. While gray matter is infuriating in its indefinity, there is value to be gained from its murkiness. Beginnings and endings will come with time, but they are most fruitful when you know how they transformed from one thing to another. Nothing is the same forever.
The Aquarius’ understanding of the world is often misinterpreted. Be that for the dream-like fervor with which they approach life, or their fixation on what is possible, it is common for an Aquarius to be mistaken as idealistic, when they really just see things for what could be, not always what is. Do not approach the world from a place of the here and now, but rather a miraculous later. While unique in this approach, it may often lead to indecision. Right now is the time to make a choice, and stick to it, because deliberating forever is agonizing. That is the only way to move forward.
a true dark, and so from sunrise to sunset the world seems to hang in a strange limbo, a false sun god illuminating just enough of the world to make rest seem untimely. So you walk home, forced to follow the streets and not the stars, and accept and that is just how the world is sometimes.
Don’t let Indie get you down, I have something to offer. As winter draws closer and the cold, cloudy, abysmal days become more numerous, Indie understands the importance of believing in something. Be they holes poked in the black velvet, allowing us to breathe, distant cores to distant galaxies home to distant people, or a gift from God, the stars are telling us something. And Indie is going to interpret them for you.*
I’ve always thought that the cliche of Geminis as two-faced was unfair. They may be represented by twins, but have you ever met twins? Rather than two-faced, they are some of the most empathetic, understanding people you will ever meet. Maybe it’s their sublime connection to another person that allows them the perspective so many of us lack. For a Gemini, all that knowledge is contained in a single person. Do not let your empathy blind you to reality. Knowing why something is, and knowing how you should interpret it are two different things. Be mindful of the grace you are extending, it will serve you well, and there is respect to be gained.
*This is where I admit that I know very little about astrology and that this was formed with the guiding arm of astrology.com. However, one thing I know is that Virgos are the ever. Amy Winehouse and Fiona Apple for the fun crowd, Beyonce for the sad ones, Ron DeSantis for the wild cards. I’ve always found being an earth sign resoundingly true, and as of late I feel grounded in a new, special kind of way. But if you, Reader, have any wisdom to impart upon the Virgo, let Indie know (please my email gets so lonely)—dearindyemail@gmail.com.
My friends and I held a bonfire the other night. I sat on sand so cold I thought it might be wet, and watched as flames flickered towards us, as they followed the wind, as they swallowed darkness only to relinquish it back to us in a perpetual dance. This is you, Saggitarius, seeking, exploring, learning only to learn more. The rigidity of the mid-semester, coupled with the stiffness of an early chill, can inspire a false permanence of circumstance. This is mere illusion. Now is the time to try something new, to explore, and start again, and find something newly fulfilling.
My mother, my mother. Fluid and feeling. She taught me the wisdom in emotion, the strength it takes. I also know how soft its depths are, how easy it is to let them swallow you whole. As the world picks up and the future looms, remember that feeling and decision are dual actors in life, and emotion alone cannot spark change. You must decide to live the life you want, not only feel it.
Saturday 10/29 @9:30AM-1:30PM
Location: Mt. Pleasant Library, 315 Academy Ave, Providence, RI 02908
Bargain Basement Thrift Store and Book Sale
The Friends of Mt. Pleasant Library is hosting the Bargain Basement Thrift Store and Book Sale this year. There will be a large selection of fall and winter clothing, kitchen appliances, various home decor, and a large assortment of fabrics at the thrift store. In addition, YA books can be bought for 25 cents with the second one free. Hardcovers, paperbacks, DVDs, and CDS will also be discounted. All proceeds benefit the Mt. Pleasant Library, so come thrift for a good cause.
Monday 10/21 @7-8:30PM
Location: Friedman Hall Rm. 201, Providence, RI 02912
The Campus Does Not Exist Film Screening
Join the Brown Center for Students of Color for a screening of The Campus Does Not Exist: Envisioning Student Activism and a Q&A with the filmmaker Martin X. Trujillo! There will be a discussion of organizing on a college campus and a creative vision board activity following the film. RSVP through the @brown.mpc Instagram! `
Monday 10/21 @6PM-7PM
Location: 150 Empire St, Providence, RI 02903
The Dark Academia Book Club
If you’re interested in romantic Greek history, learning different languages, or reading and discussing written works with others, The Dark Academia Book Club is the book club for you. The book for October is Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas, followed by a new book each month. Come meet new people while reading from a large selection of books.
Friday 10/25 @10AM-11AM
Location: Roger Williams Park, 1000 Elmwood Ave, Providence, RI 02907
Plant Walks in Roger Williams Park
Presented by the Museum of Natural History and Planetarium, come learn about the various plants on a walk around Roger Williams Park. With the walk being about a mile long, be sure to wear comfortable shoes when exploring the area. There will be many different plants to see, so come get your steps in while expanding your knowledge about different plant varieties.
Wednesday 10/23
Location: Rochambeau Library – Community Room, 708 Hope St, Providence, RI 02906
MahJong Club
Want to learn how to play Mahjong? Come be a part of Mahjong Club, a weekly club that meets every Wednesday. Whether a beginner or having played before, people with all levels of experience are welcome to join the weekly game. No registration is required, but opt-in to join a weekly mailing list for reminders of new events.
( TEXT QIAOYING CHEN & GABRIELLE YUAN DESIGN APRIL S. LIM )
Friday 10/18 @2PM-4PM
Collage Drop-In
Location: Rochambeau Library – Cafe, 708 Hope St, Providence, RI 02906
Starting in the summer, Rochambeau Library is providing a relaxing and innovative way to work with different recycled materials. They will be providing various collage materials, but also feel free to bring any magazines, photos, comics, wrapping paper, string, scraps of fabrics, and more. Come enjoy free coffee and conversation while crafting away.
Friday 10/18
@4:30PM-6:30PM
Location: 195 District Park, Providence, RI 02903
DESIGNxRI Sweater Social
Join the DESIGNxRI community for a festive fall social. Put on your favorite, go-to fall sweater and come enjoy a live jazz set by Leland Baker Quartet, along with a DJ set from DJ Analog Underground. This event is a great way to reconnect with friends made during DESIGN WEEK RI, learn more about the DESIGN Catalyst program, and enjoy the fall season. Registration is free.
Sunday 10/20 @12PM-3PM
Location: 400 Harris St. Suite F, Providence, Rhode Island 02909
Open Library Hours
Binch Press is collaborating with Queer Archive Work (QAW) to hold Open Library Hours! During this time, people are welcome to browse and read various book selections available at the library, eat refreshments, or just hang out with new people. These Library Hours will be held every other Sunday until December 15th.
Tuesday 10/22 @4PM-5PM
Location: Washington Park Library, 1316 Broad St, Providence, RI 02905
Fall Book Crafts
During October, the Washington Public Library is holding a craft event, centered around books and the fall season. The theme of Recycled Book Pumpkins, come learn how to turn old books into beautiful fall decorations. Open to both children and adults, all age groups all welcome to try a new craft to take home.
*Mutual aid is “survival pending revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.
Wednesday 10/23@6PM
Location: 32 East Ave, Pawtucket RI LIHEAP Clinic
The George Wiley Center is hosting a LIHEAP (Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program) clinic. Swing by if you need assistance with applying! Please review and gather all documents required for filing prior to attending this event.
Sundays @2-4PM and Thursdays 9:30-11AM
Location: Kennedy Plaza, Providence, RI 02903 Food Not Bombs
Help out with the Brown and Providence chapter of Food Not Bombs! Check out the link in their Instagram @brown.foodnotbombs to get involved in helping serve hot meals, pastries, and more to the Providence community.
Volunteer with FarmFreshRI’s Winter Market
Help out with FarmFreshRI’s Winter Market on Saturday mornings from November 2nd through April 27th! Assist with welcoming customers, answering questions, and handling transactions at the heart of this event. If you are interested in supporting local food systems and fostering community, email Natalie Faragon at natalief@farmfreshri.org to learn more.
Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!
Use this QR code to sign HOPE’s petition to urge Ward 1 city councilor John Goncalves to show and express public support for rent stabilization in Providence.
