HEKLER Assembly Fall 2021: Infrastructures of Care is an online study group that will explore the relationship between civic engagement and collectivity through art practice and pedagogy.
When we hear the word infrastructure, we usually think of the material networks that support our homes and cities. However, there are also less detectable infrastructures such as the systems of control, surveillance, and cultural norms that govern us in private and public space. These frameworks are limiting and mislead our notions of freedom. During Infrastructures of Care, we will focus on the crucial transformative role of the arts in redefining infrastructure within movement building that centers ecologies of care and mutuality.
Over the course of the Assembly, we will critically consider the histories, ethics, and aesthetics of community-centered art practices. We will do this through participatory workshops, presentations, peer-to-peer work, and on-site interventions. Participants will gain knowledge and practice a range of collaborative methodologies, organizing tools, and resources that will be made into a free printed and digital twin publication.
Infrastructures of Care has been developed by Dena Al-Adeeb, Sonja Blum, Eryka Dellenbach, Joshua Nierodzinski, Nataša Prljević, Jelena Prljević, Farideh Sakhaeifar, and Rashmi Viswanathan, through months of convening, collective thinking and crafting the syllabus. Assembly wouldn't be possible without our friends, collaborators, and community members who generously and passionately joined this collective work.
When: October - December, 2021
Who: Anyone from any part of the world, with access to the internet, who cares about role of the arts in building equitable collective futures.
Fee: This program is free to all participants however if you or someone you know would like to support our program, donations are welcome.
Session Hosts:
Rashmi Viswanathan, Caroline Woolard | Hawa Allan, Sonja Blum, Maggie Wong, Amplifier (Vince Carducci, Claude Boullevraye de Passillé, Stephen Zacks) | Mandana Mansouri, Poupeh Missaghi, Farideh Sakhaeifar | Jelena Prljević, Nataša Prljević, Bojana Videkanić | Eryka Dellenbach, Yunuen Rhi | Dena Al-Adeeb, Sara Ihmoud, Jennifer Mogannam (Palestinian Feminist Collective)
Administration, Communication, and Technical Support (Open Call + Assembly Sessions)
Jelena Prljević, Nataša Prljević, Farideh Sakhaeifar
Publication Design Jelena Prljević
Translation from English Ioannis Andronikidis (Greek), Miloš Bojović + Jelena Prljević (Serbian)
Video editing Eryka Dellenbach, Nataša Prljević, Farideh Sakhaeifar
Social Media Jelena Prljević
Website Design Nataša Prljević
ASSEMBLY SESSIONS
01 Solidarity Economy | Rashmi Viswanathan, Caroline Woolard
This session introduces Infrastructures of Care through an exploration of core issues including labor compensation, universal wages, and new collective practices that support waged labor and care in the arts.
02 Fear Ecologies: Limits and Openings of Horizon of Imagination | Sonja Blum, Maggie Wong
In this workshop, dissonance becomes a scaffold for supporting new world building and knowledge production. Participants will engage with collective mapping, questioning, and sound experiments to become introspective researchers of fears that shape our society and our collectivity.
03 World-Making: Imagining a Well-Cared for Planet | Hawa Allan, Amplifier, Sonja Blum
What are the common principles, ideas, and visions that we take for granted are shared universally? What motivations other than self-interest and short-term profit can be encouraged, designed into a system, and used to produce better outcomes? In this workshop we will examine processes, principles, and visions for the planetary as an exercise of writing a constitution, in the effort to begin bringing about a legally binding global community that can preserve and protect life, not just of humanity, but of billions of other species with which we share space.
Image: Design Earth, The Planet After Geoengineering
04 + 05 Intervention in Public Space: Mandana Mansouri, Poupeh Missaghi, and Farideh Sakhaeifar
Over the course of two workshops, we will explore our regency to public space, and the visual representations around us. What do you imagine if you had full power over the neighborhood, city, or the world you live in? Is there anything you like to change, eliminate, or save? Participants will share experiences through writing, visual responses and image-making.
SEE SESSION ARCHIVE
#6 Hosting Conflict: Nataša Prljević, Jelena Prljević, and Bojana Videkanić
In this workshop we will intersect our experiences of conflict born out of fear and confrontation with the various internal and external forces that shape our social sphere and capacity to collectivize. Tensions between capitalism’s emphasis on individuality and atomization of interpersonal and social relationships can only be countered by creation of productive collective bonds towards strengthening friendships and solidarity on the bases of our differences. Using critical and poetic devices we will discuss and activate transformative, mobilizing power of art with fear and conflict as its mediums.
Image: HEKLER Anti-Fear Workbook, Common Language: Youth Biennial, Belgrade.
#7 Imagination is Revolutionary: Nataša Prljević and Bojana Videkanić
In this workshop we will think about the ways in which imagination and cultural work continue to be a force for building revolutionary movements. What systems determine the limits of imagination and occupy our right to dream, imagine, and create? We will think how revolutionary imagination can help contribute to the struggle against the destruction of capitalism.
When: Sat. November 13, 2021 12-3pm ET
Where: ZOOM
Image: Dušan Džamonja, Monument to the Revolution, Kozara Bosnia & Herzegovina Yugoslavia, 1972 Photo credit: Roberto Conte
#8 + #9 Contracts and Constellations: Eryka Dellenbach and Yunuen Rhi
Contracts and Constellations is a participatory workshop co-facilitated by Yunuen Rhi and Eryka Dellenbach exploring multifarious contracts. Participants will have the opportunity to collaboratively propose alternative contracts and work within a Huarache Constellation, Yunuen’s collective healing and performance methodology, following presentations of documents and media dealing in power and consent.
10 Love Letter to Palestine: Palestinian Feminist Collective (Dena Al-Adeeb, Sarah Ihmoud, and Jennifer Mogannam)
This workshop “engages the force of the love letter as a decolonial method and praxis to consider how love can be a radical and infrastructural modality of social change inspiring the reemergence of feminist solidarities between Palestinians and other indigenous communities (Ihmoud forthcoming).” It invites participants to reflect on themes of love, intimacy, care, rebellion and solidarity in envisioning how to cultivate artistic, scholarly and other social praxes to reactivate the PFC's love letter and action toolkit. These offerings illustrate a broader vision for “a radically different future based on life-affirming interconnectedness, empowering the working classes, and love for each other, land, life and the planet itself.”
ABOUT HOSTS & ORGANIZERS
(Session 1)
Rashmi Viswanathan is the Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Hartford, a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Senior Fellow with the American Institute of Indian Studies. Her curation and scholarship focus on transnational movements in Modern and Contemporary Art.
Caroline Woolard is the Director of Research and Programs at Open Collective Foundation, a member of the think tank for the Creatives Rebuild New York guaranteed income program, an Assistant Professor at Pratt, a member of the and co-organizer of http://art.coop with Nati Linares. Since the financial crisis of 2007-8, Woolard has catalyzed barter communities, minted local currencies, founded an arts-policy think tank, and created sculptural interventions in office spaces. Woolard is the co-author of three books: Making and Being (Pioneer Works, 2019), a book for educators about interdisciplinary collaboration, co-authored with Susan Jahoda; Art, Engagement, Economy (onomatopee, 2020) a book about managing socially-engaged and public art projects; and TRADE SCHOOL: 2009-2019, a book about peer learning that Woolard catalyzed in thirty cities internationally over a decade. Woolard’s work has been featured twice on New York Close Up (2014, 2016), a digital film series produced by Art21 and broadcast on PBS. IG: @carolinewoolard
(Session 2 & 3)
Hawa Allan writes cultural criticism, fiction and poetry. Her book INSURRECTION, a weaving of personal narrative and legal history, is forthcoming in January 2022 from W.W. Norton.
Amplifier Inc. is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation founded in 2013. Its mission is to employ emerging ideas, media, design, and aesthetic strategies to alter the terms of political debate, influence public policy, reconceive theoretical frameworks, promote proven tools and methods to improve local and global governance, and advance systemic reform and formation of new institutions. It produces events, public forums, white papers, media, reporting, and architecture and design projects, and participates in political and community advocacy to accomplish these goals.
Sonja Blum is a neurologist and an artist. She explores a space between intuition, memory, and social politics, and contemplates how collective identity and modes of knowledge production are intertwined, and how modes of knowledge production are legitimized. The work takes form through multiple media including video, installation, writing and performance, and collective experiments stretching the imagination of knowledge production and collective study.
Maggie Wong is an artist, educator, and writer. She studies by playing with objects' affective edges in order to create social and sculptural forms of collective world-building amidst conditions of sentimentality. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she now works as a lecturer. Additionally, she is the Associate Director of Iceberg Projects in Rogers Park, Chicago.
Stephen Zacks is an advocacy journalist, architecture critic, urbanist, and organizer based in New York City. He serves as president of the nonprofit Amplifier Inc., which promotes new conceptual frameworks and proven strategies to influence public policy and improve local and global governance. His projects have received awards from ArtPlace, Creative Capital, Warhol Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Graham Foundation, MacDowell Colony, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
(Session 4 & 5)
Mandana Mansouri is an interdisciplinary artist working with still and moving images, language, performance and site-specific installations. Her work is concerned with image making, language, space, displacement, power and visibility. Mansouri has collaborated with art collectives such as Hekler, Photocopy, New Media Society and Architecture Urbanism Circle in Tehran. Prior to her work as an artist, Mansouri worked as an architect, urban designer, community organizer, translator and writer.
Poupeh Missaghi is a writer, a translator into and out of Persian, and an editor. She holds a PhD in English and literary arts from the University of Denver and teaches at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. Her debut novel trans(re)lating house one was released in 2020.
Farideh Sakhaeifar is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in New York City. Sakhaeifar’s work investigates the politics of conflict, collective history, and personal accounts.
(Session 6 & 7)
Jelena Prljević is an artist from Serbia whose practice explores the field of drawing, moving image and installation. Her work suggests an understanding of fear and the healing process necessary to overcome both internal and external unrest. She participated in many national and international group exhibitions, film festivals, and collaborative projects. Jelena is one of the founders of HEKLER, a platform and transnational collective that focuses on examination of hospitality and conflict. In 2020 she joins the Youth in the 60s collective. Currently, she spends time in her countryside Ljubanje, Serbia, where, together with her family and artist Miloš Bojović, she works on transformation and restoration of the old family houses with the intention to celebrate hospitality and further collaborations. IG @jprljevic
Nataša Prljević is an artist and cultural worker whose collaborative and collective practice focus on displacement, conflict, and transnational feminist ecologies. Starting from collages and assemblages as conceptual frameworks, Prljević focuses on the healing potential of polyvocality and diasporic intimacy that arise in the collision of media, dialogue and community. Initiator of the HEKLER platform and collective.
Bojana Videkanic is an artist and an art historian. She is an Associate Professor of contemporary art and visual culture in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on the 20th-century socialist art in Yugoslavia and its contributions to the rise of global modernisms, socialist art, and anti-imperialist cultural work in the 20th century. Her book Nonaligned Modernism: Socialist Postcolonial Aesthetics in Yugoslavia, 1945-1985 was published in 2020 by McGill-Queens University Press. Bojana is also a practicing multidisciplinary artist.
(Session 8 & 9)
Eryka Dellenbach is a genderfluid, nomadic filmmaker, performance artist and teaching-artist from Chicago. Their embodied films and performances are rites of passage for themselves and collaborators driven by consent practices, inquisitive hedonisms, cross-cultural correspondence and a belief in the capacity for mutual transformation through collaboration and art-as-life process.
Yunuen Rhi is a Xicanx-Korean non-binary martial art instructor, performance artist, anthropologist, and healer. We have cultivated ourselves in western, eastern and native medicine pathways to expand our multidimensional consciousness. Our performance interest lies in its capacity as a social practice to build community bridges beyond decolonizing work. IG: @yunuen_rhi
(Session 10)
Dena Al-Adeeb is an Iraqi born transnational artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker, and a mother. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of American Studies at the University of California, Davis and Mellon Artist and Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Dena investigates the relationship between the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of social and organizational processes of militarization, forced displacement, and globalization, as they manifest through collective memory. She creates performative, relational works, dedicated to participatory art, socially engaged projects, and collaborative engagement.
Jennifer Mogannam is a UC President’s postdoctoral fellow in the departments of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies at UC Davis and earned her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego. Jennifer is a critical, cross-disciplinary scholar and educator of Palestinian and Arab transnational movements, third world solidarities, gendered power in anti-colonial struggle, and violence and revolution. She has organized in Palestinian and Arab American community spaces for over 15 years, most recently with the Palestinian Feminist Collective.
Sara Ihmoud is a Chicana-Palestinian anthropologist whose work takes Palestine and Palestinian diaspora as sites from which to explore questions of race and ethnicity, gender violence, colonialism, Indigenous politics and borders/borderlands in comparative and transnational perspectives. She is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the College of the Holy Cross. She is currently working on her first book, "Almaqdasiyya: Palestinian Feminism and the Decolonial Imaginary".
(Study group)
Joshua Nierodzinski is an artist and curator working at the intersection of material studies, food and history. Joshua creates figurative oil paintings that are designed to be photographed with X-ray, infrared, and ultraviolet light. The result are forensic photographs that reveal layers and stories hidden beneath the surface. Initiator of the HEKLER platform and collective.