A mockupation for sale

The experience of last night on the set of Law and Order’s recreation of an occupy encampment is still sinking in…

I miss having an occupation.  In all it’s chaos there is such overwhelming beauty and potential.  It opens space unlike anything I have ever experienced before.  I’m still shaken by the experience of stepping into a mock version of it last night in the face of the reality that Liberty Plaza was ripped away from us.  I want this messy open space of possibility more than anything, it is the only thing I have ever felt which feels like it truly leans towards revolution.

When will we fucking wake up and rise to the occasion of true resistance?

Sometimes we take the bus [into town]

Sometimes we take the bus.
Amy Goodman in our ears and war and woods on our minds.
It stops at the local VA Medical Center on the outskirts of town.

 Riding with veterans.
Their bodies. Their expressions.
Their tattoos, laughter and limps. 

Whose hidden tracks are found at bus stops and package stores

Riding with veterans
Into town

Town.
A landscape that inspires cynicism and hope.

Town.
home to recreational drinking and peace vigils
chain stores and farmer’s markets
landscape painters and conceptual artists

Town.
devolving alternatives: hippies, hipsters, yuppies
farmers, activists and artists
fantastically liberal and queer

Slipping on the flat-heeled knee-high boots of this season’s capitalism.

long-timers and transplants
professors and immigrants

You must be free.
On your backs we will make you free.

BELLE, GIOVANI e indignate

I’ve been featured in an article in Elle, Italy about the movements in Italy, Spain and the U.S. I can’t read it though because it’s in Italian. Photo of me by the great Leah Mae Dyjak

an eviction, an action, a response

they tell me we lead revolutionary bodies down cobble stone streets, whose jeans and ipods disguise collective discontent as we stream in solidarity to the point of arrival.  how can we know this barricaded truth of impossibility, its forthcoming potentiality, its crude intrusion? we grasp at what organization we can squander from the false leaderless depths whose unbound ties strap us securely to the hull of this unpredictable ship.

what allies exists in the stormy weather and brilliant sun?

the day passes, adorned with edgewise creations, seeking slowing their precursors as the helicopters hang suspended above the precarious plans. doomed by some fortuitous explosion/expansion we unfurl and the shiny bits go splintering headlong into childhood skin, dozens of shiny lights that cast their rosy glow across the cheeks, against the grey-blue sky.

and we inhale another breath, we pass another corner, we take another step.

Grok it.

The following is an article I wrote prior to Occupy Wall Street commissioned by Artists In Context and recently distributed at their conference Connected and Consequential.  It marks the beginning of a series of articles which will be published to Valley Art Share in the coming months. 
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We will attempt to grok at The Kitchen Collaborative as we choreograph the feeding. We are a collective that believes in the power of food to create and sustain connections to one another and our environment.  The Kitchen Collaborative will be a commercially certified shared-use kitchen opening onto an eatery and performance space and integrated with a rooftop garden and building-wide green systems.  It is being designed for a range of creative food projects from cooking and preservation to mentorship and politics.  Most importantly it will be a place that is welcoming and celebratory; that embraces people-driven sustainable approaches to food and community. 

For the past ten years I’ve thought of myself primarily as an artist.  Now this title no longer seems sufficient for the realms in which I want my actions to move.  The conceptual and capitalistic frames of contemporary art have begun to feel limiting; particularly in the face of climate change and a global war on terror, the Art World (with a capital A) feels useless. So I find myself leaning towards actions that have a practical application; that make connections in everyday life, that touch the world and cycle back, that exist beyond the container of artistic practice and hold me accountable to creating the world in which I want to live.

My background in improvisational dance and performance art, particularly in the realm of ecological and environmental philosophy has lead me to think about my actions in terms of how I/we are wrapped up in the world, bound into a reciprocal agreement of impact and exchange. These issues are intimately connected to the ways in which I experience improvisation and it’s set of scores for collective action within the delimited space of a dance.  In this realm our bodies’ impact on each other is explicit, as our movements in response to each other and space send off chain reactions of expression.

By challenging myself to understand my body’s relationship to the world and its agency within a system of repercussive actions it seems logical that I would begin to think it terms of material relations to the world.  What and how I consume becomes instructive to how I move, and how I move shifts the cycle of what I consume, produce and excrete. What responsibility, what response, can we have in a world that mutes our impact? What structures can we build which rekindle a direct connection between impact and effect, production and consumption?

When mulling over these ideas I often come back to the word grok and it’s implications for both consumptive and empathetic connections to the world.  In Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land he coined the term grok, which has since entered the lexicon and found it’s way into the Oxford English Dictionary with the following definition: “To understand intuitively or by empathy; to establish rapport with.”  In the context of the novel it also has the connotation of consumption, to drink or to take in, and in the taking in of the other, the two become one, a dispersal of energy, a synthesis that leads to understanding.  Grokking is not reserved for humans (or in the case of the novel, Martians) but also includes objects and other elements of the environment.  Swimming in water produces a mutual agreement or understanding between water and body, in which each have an effect on the other.  To grok is to both understand and become, to fully take in the world into the body, to become the world and the world to becomes you.

Historically this is similar to the way empathy, and more explicitly, kinesthetic empathy has been theorized.  Empathy is a term that is explicitly linked the body.  It is a response to the world that is felt on a neural-muscular level.  Kinesthesia is the proprioceptive awareness of our own body’s movements in time and space. Kinesthetic empathy proposes an embodied connection to the world in which the world is taken into the body through sensory perception and effectively mirrored through kinesthetic response.  Much writing has been done in regards to the ways in which kinesthetic empathy is experienced when watching dance, wherein the act of watching dance evokes a feeling as if we are dancing[i].

Recent research in neurobiology has connected this sensory resonance with the world to the presence of mirror neurons[ii].  These mirror neurons are points in the brain that fire in the same way regardless of whether we are witnessing an action or performing it ourselves.  These findings provide scientific backing to the way kinesthetic empathy has been theorized for many years, a sensory response we enact in which we feel as if we are performing an action which we are witness to.  As one sits on the edge of their seat when watching a tightrope walker or sways side to side with the bowling ball as it rolls down the lane, we feel a kinesthetic connection with the movement of the other as if it were our own.

Neurobiologists are building links between our capacity for empathetic connection and the production of knowledge[iii].  They cite our ability to feel this sensory response as being integral to our capacity to form meaning and understand the world in which we live.  As grok is to take something into the body in a mutual transformation that leads towards understanding, so too is empathy a form of mutual transformation, taking information from the world, processing it through the filter of the body and understanding it through kinesthetic response.  Understanding is based in our ability to mirror, to become a reflection of the world. How is the world taken into the body?  How are we able to synthesize the multitudes of information we receive on a daily basis into a form that enables us take in, become and respond?

In order to kinesthetically empathize with the world, in order to grok it, one must hold an awareness of their own experience in such a way that allows them to simultaneously connect with the experience of the other.  It is a sensory recognition and awareness, which stems from our ability to establish parallel and contradictory patterns of similarity and difference.  It is an inherently relational practice that honors diversity and demands recognition of the intricately layered experiences that constitute our worlds[iv].

Improvisational dance can be this, a fine-tuned response of the body to the world, where sensory perception is closely linked to subsequent action.  Community organizing can be this, beginning with acknowledging the impact people have in co-constructing their worlds, it is a coordination of gathering that influences transformative change, where the environment and beings in it figure the world, leaning form into action and back again. Growing and cooking food can be this, a choreography of feeding and digestion (mutual understanding) that sustains and transforms the body and the land.  An alchemy of beings, plants, animals, coalescing to be taken into our body/world and become our body/world.  We are what we eat.  It becomes part of our cellular make up, where the cells of the plant become the cells of our bodies.

In the summer we slaughter
and there is blood and the chickens and the raspberries
those different shades of red
against the warn wood and thickets

the squawking dying birds
their feathers
their lower bellies sighing
their last breaths

grasping at a connection

we talk about when death begins and ends
when life passes out of a body
when the dying is done
feeding our bodies with their bodies

This is what I am presently interested in, as an artist, as an organizer, as a citizen, as a human. I am interested in how we can be more fully attuned to our environment and the other beings in it and how this awareness can be cultivated to breed actions that honor solidarity and diversity of experience.  I am interested in the attempt to find points of connections across difference and the process of taking the world into the body in ways that sustain and propel creative acts of change.

I am looking for a new context. A new home out of which something vibrant, challenging and curious can grow. Something that incites feeling and action, something that brings people together. In the establishment of a kitchen I am looking for a community that gives a damn. Who are engaged in practices that not only believe in or hope for but also enact radically different modes of operation. My hope is that The Kitchen Collaborative will provide a platform to close the gap between production and consumption, to bring us closer to the world and each other in it. So that we may feel more intimately those lines of production that lead toward the act of consumption and understand the implications of what tracks we leave

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[i] John Martin wrote about the emotional transmission of modern dance through what he called ‘metekinesis’ or ‘inner mimicry’ in the early 1900′s.  Susan Foster has dedicated much of recent research the subject of empathy and it’s implications for communicating across difference

[ii] See Rizzolatti and Gallese

[iii] Foster, “Choreographing Empathy” 178; Gallese, 171-172

[iv] Foster’s work on kinesthetic empathy has been helpful to me in articulating how our capacity for empathy is predicated on social formations, subjective experience and our ability to simultaneously hold similarity and difference.

Bibliography:

Foster, Susan. “Kinesthetic Empathies and the Politics of Compassion”, Critical Theory and Performance. edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. University of Michigan Press. 2007.

———. “‘Movement’s Contagion: The Kinesthetic Impact of Performance’.” In The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies. edited by Tracy C. Davis, 46-59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

———. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. Routledge, 2001

Gallese, Vittorio “Empathy, Embodied Simulation, and the Brain: Commentary on Aragno and Zepf/Hartman,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 56, 2008.

Heinline, Robert, Stranger in a Strange Land. Putnam Publishing Group, NY, 1961

Oxford English Dictionary. web. http://www.oed.com/

Rizzolatti, Giocomo et al., “From Mirror Neurons to Imitation: Facts and Speculations,” The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution, and Brain Bases, ed. Andrew N. Meltzoff and

Wolfgang Prinz, Cambridge Studies in Cognitive Perceptual Development Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Revolutionary Cooking

The fruits of our labor from cooking for OWS on October 14th.

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photos by Melina Hammer

Victory is Sweet, This Movement is Delicious

I have begun to work with folks in Western Massachusetts to organize ways to support the occupation in NYC.  This has begun as collecting donations from food makers and growers in the area and then driving it down to the city.  Leah and I made our first delivery last week and hope to do this on a weekly basis.  We borrow a pick-up truck and send out an invitation to people to come to the local farmer’s market to drop off donations and then we drive down to the city the following morning.  I was amazed at and so grateful for the abundance that showed up that first day at Tuesday Market!  We brought down a whole truck load full of food which is now in cold-storage at a soup kitchen in Brooklyn where folks from the OWS kitchen prepare hot meals.  There are many labor unions in NYC that are offering support to the movement, one of the ways they help is to send drivers to this kitchen to pick up the prepared food and deliver it to OWS.

breakfast as the sun rose over Liberty Plaza post eviction victory

On Friday I helped to prepare some of the food we brought down, we were able to produce double what they had previously been cooking due to acquiring the use of a donated soup kitchen in East Brooklyn and having so many fresh vegetables to work with.  Earlier that morning starting at 5am people had begun to arrive to Liberty Square en masse to help with eviction defense and an hour or so later we received a notice from the owners of the park that they would postpone the cleaning they had planned and negotiate with us for a way to move forward.  Western Mass: You fed us our victory feast!  Winter greens and broccoli with peanut sauce, roasted beets and carrots with fennel, a cold tomato salad with pickled beans and cabbage, carrot ginger soup, spicy cilantro dip with chips, and a big salad, enough to feed about 600 people.  This movement is delicious!

Cooking that day with a group of people made me so excited for The Kitchen Collaborative.  I know that it is going to be a truly amazing hub for community gathering and delicious food.  There is something magical about the bustle of a kitchen, the alchemy of ingredients, the exchange of tips and tricks, the hurry to meet a deadline, collectively cleaning up and then sitting down to an incredible meal.

Occupied Kitchen regularly feeds about 2000 people a day.  There are people organizing farm and bulk-buying deliveries coming from upstate NY.  Now that OWS has access to a couple of donated kitchens a lot more food can be prepared to feed people at the occupation and we can begin to accept buckets of prepared soups, dairy and meat.  The food made at these kitchens is augmented by people ordering prepared food and having it delivered to the park (there is a list here if you’d like to call in an order), as well as a daily budget the kitchen has to purchase other food (that money comes from donations made through the OWS website).  Meal times are as follows: Breakfast at 8, Lunch at 1, Dinner at 7.  If you are planning a large delivery of farm or catered food I suggest emailing occupiedkitchen@gmail.com to give them a heads up so they can plan ahead.

I am interested in food as a catalyst to bring people together. This should involve all parts of the food chain from it’s relation to the land and production by farmers, to its preparation, consumption and process by which we deal with surplus and waste that cycles it back into a healthy organic cycle.  Occupy Wall Street is a suggestion in action to create the world in which we want to live.  It does not rely on state-based forms of change, but rather sets in motion systems which allow and encourage taking power into our own hands in order to make change that is truly by and for the people.  At Liberty Plaza you can see this in action through the many working groups which make up the community of OWS, from food to sanitation, media to legal, safe spaces to labor, these are just some of the many facets of the new society that is percolating in Liberty Plaza.  So it makes sense that healthy and sustainable food systems would be part of this envisioning and enacting the world in which we want to live.  We’ve all got to eat and particularly amidst the tiring activities of organizing mass mobilizations around the clock it’s important that the organizers, occupiers and visitors to OWS are well fed.

FEED THE MOVEMENT!

Thank you so much to everyone who showed up on Tuesday with donations. We are overflowing with joy and gratitude for the bounty that Western Mass is bringing to Occupy Wall Street!

We dropped off the vegetables yesterday afternoon with Heather at a soup kitchen in East NYC where they will hold everything in cold-storage until we prepare it later today for tonight’s dinner.  They loaded us up with chips and cookies and we drove into Wall St and dropped off the snacks, bread, carrots and apples at Liberty Plaza.

I’ll be helping to prepare the food this afternoon starting at two.  Liberty Plaza is packed and on any given day they are feeding a couple thousand people.  Heather is working to coordinate off-site kitchens to store and prepare food.  If you’re thinking about donating or delivering a shipment of food to OWS give the Occupied Kitchen a heads up so they can prepare for its arrival.  email them at: occupiedkitchen@gmail.com

We will be continuing to work with food growers and makers in western mass to organize regular deliveries down to Wall St. If you want to help out with that let me know.

*most photos by Leah Mae Dyjak

Establishing Disorder

Claudia and I

Many of the cops are pions in this, workers whose rights have been stripped to a hierarchized paramilitary status.  Claudia, my arresting officer, was a sweetheart, committed to the job at hand with a light-handed and even touch.  There is a certain danger in the congenial nature of our actions as this serves to diffuse the hidden boarders of the police state in which we all live.  I was in the custody of a friendly officer yet any infraction on my part or hers would be met by an officer of greater strength.  In the clutches of order, grasping at control, resisting ambiguity.

I met many officers on Saturday who seemed to understand the occupation, or show a sincere curiosity at what is brewing.  Spending nine hours with these people revealed the mundane qualities of police task force positions, whose commanding officers wield and abuse power in subtle and overt ways.  These officers, because of their paramilitary status, are both part of the 99% and separate from it. Claudia explained to me that they face harsher penalties than civilians were they to break rank (or come when off-duty) to participate in the occupation.

holding cell food: peanut butter sandwhiches on whole wheat

In many ways being arrested was a mundane experience once beyond the stage of its public performance.  I would settle into the banality of the process: the conflicting orders from management, the slow and un-precise parking of a bus, the comments about overtime, the jokes exchanged, the sexism, texting and long periods of waiting, the vending machines and fluorescent lights, normal really, could have been any day, any job, in middle America.

This succession of daily nothings were punctuated by harsh reminders of police control and my sudden and clear lack of power: the way a certain officer’s fingers dug into my upper arm leading me into the precinct, the closing of a cell door, the labeling of “male” and “female” for each prisoner and the way “female” would slide out of male officer’s lips in a particularly offensive manner.  These are subtle moments that remind, not so much of the control under which I was immediately treated but rather a reminder of the ever-present possibility of escalation.

There is a barometer in the moment of conflict; who will escalate the situation?  What actions and speech in a given instant are assumed antagonistic?  Whose gender and skin tone evoke respect, alarm or offense?  We so rarely test the bounds of our privileged zones of comfort, while others face antagonisms on a daily basis, who are assumed guilty until proven innocent.  We were not criminals on the bridge that day, rabble rousers maybe, and treated as such, given the innocuous charge of “disorderly conduct” and “obstructing traffic”.

And yet disorderly conduct and obstructing traffic are interesting things to be charged with as it reveals the investment that authority has in maintaining the fine details of a certain status quo.  Must we remain in order?  And to whose order would we like to remain?  Occupy Wall Street presents a situation in which there is an abundance of creative confusion, in which there is a proliferation of voices and demands, in which there are rumblings for a new order, the parameter’s of which are being defined daily in the general assemblies and on the grounds of Liberty Square.

Harlem River Wanderings with iLAND

poo deluxe
pigeon shit.

globs and yellow stripes
a blue cascade of steely beams

we bend and pick
and capture
twirling spineney mass

a bone and a feather
some blood

we could walk along that line in the sky

a clear blue tangle

we hang flags

eating without hands