Loomed

Anya Liftig

Loomed

Performed at Mess Hall, 5/13/07

I use my body as a loom to weave environments together using movement. Each performance is as attempt to incorporate the artist and the viewer into the fabric of the moment. Working like a photograph, I use the knotting motion of textile production to capture a moment in time.

Lian Sifuentes, Corpus Projecti

Performed at Midway Studios at the University of Chicago, May 11

WEEDS: Political Emotion Leads to the Resurrection of War

travis

Every time I see you naked I offer my death bed but you won’t take it. Strange, my flower bed cannot hold you. In my prime I tried to burn away my winter weeds but I breed and then I decay. Strange, my flower bed cannot hold you.

Don’t be a bystander!

The Tamms Poetry Committee will be holding a letter-writing event for the 286 prisoners housed in the Tamms Supermax prison in Tamms, IL. These men are in solitary confinement 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They have no human contact. They have no library, no classes, no enrichment programs, no religious congregation, no group activities, no communal space. Food is served in the cell. They are not allowed phone calls. Visitation, which is done from behind glass, is rare or non-existent. Tamms is 250 miles from Chicago, with no access via public transportation, and it is generally prohibitive for families to make the journey. The inmates suffer from extreme sensory deprivation, loneliness, depression. These conditions constitute torture, a fact recognized by both the U.N. and by Amnesty International. In spite of their situation, the men are trying to hold up. It means a lot to them to know that people are concerned about their situation. Come, read some of their letters, meet members of their families, and be part of a group mailing experience.

pretty, pretty... pretty over there too

Joan Dickinson

I was assigned a tiny office in a building on Michigan Avenue in the south loop two years ago. Although the office itself is small, there is a large, wall-sized window which opens the wall in an easterly direction, affording me a view of such magnificence as I have ever known in Chicago.

During the first year in my tiny office I stared: at Grant Park, its seasons, its usages, its statuary; at Lake Shore Drive, its poignancy, motion, the push and pull of it, the stops and starts; at our lake, our great lake, Lake Michigan, its weathers, flows, mists, the birds that blow atop it like paper, the sky above it, the paper in the sky above it.

During the second year I began to take pictures. Almost everyday. Almost everyday at the same time. I send them to my friends, colleagues, and students. Some send me messages in return in the form of e-mail and in the form of pictures. One friend sent me a picture of her child, a daughter.

Feel Kit

Feel Tank and others

Feel Tank Chicago presents the Feel Kit, a wiki of keywords on political emotion.

All are welcome to participate in writing the Feel Kit. To receive a registration passcode to participate in the site, send a request to bodypolitic@gmail.com.

This Dream, This Frequency

Mary Walling Blackburn

Dreams are a kind of suitcase. The historian Mechal Sobel claims that dreams provide an ethical reckoning ground where citizens work out potential reactions to political situations. Charlotte Beradt, in her collection of German dreaming during the Nazi era, found that those who resisted in dreams also resisted in waking life.

For the past year I have been collecting and recording fragments of dreams of soldiers stationed in Iraq. This Dream, This Frequency will use hand-built micro radio transmitters to send the recordings out into several different Chicago neighborhoods. As walkers or drivers navigate a pre-ordained route, they will be able to tune into the station and listen to the dream until they move out of range. What had previously coagulated in the dreaming mind of a soldier is mechanically fed into the ether, the causeway of the public consciousness.

Workshops

BLW

BLW develops public recitations (re-enactments) of significant recordings in the history of radical media – speeches, interviews and so on.

We consider the role of media in radical practices: how do video recordings, or other new media, act as repository for memory and/or vehicle for interjection? How does the act of re-playing activist video recordings both instill the current moment with the spirit of resistance and possibility while, simultaneously, elucidating the impossibility of such optimism now? Can we, through an embodied recitation of radical speech, give this act of “play back” a different outcome?

BLW will conduct workshops to re-enact the 1969 recording of the final interview of Fred Hampton, conducted by the Videofreex in his apartment in Chicago, where he was subsequently assassinated.

Corpus Projecti

Lián Sifuentes

An interactive performance installation for an audience of one. Users enter a small space one at a time and encounter the live, physically present body of a woman. They touch the performer's body on illuminated points and she tells them a short story inspired by that body part. To hear a story, a user must make continuous physical contact with the performing body; the performer only vocalizes while the user’s hand is touching her. The user sees animated cellular growth projected before him or her, directly caused by the transmission of the story.

A Case for Feeling Insecure

The Institute for Infinitely Small Things

The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, a performance research collaborative based in Cambridge, MA, will produce “Unmarked Package: A Case for Feeling Insecure” at locations in Chicago characterized by excessive security. Having observed that the Unmarked Package appears frequently in the literature on security and emergency preparedness and in actual reported events that evoke fear and insecurity around the nation, the Institute seeks to use “Unmarked Packages” to test for insecurity in Chicago's public places.

Graffiti workshop and Hip-Hop education

Lavie Raven

Two workshops with Lavie Raven, Prime Minister of Education of the University of Hip-Hop, at Midway Studios. The morning workshop introduces basic skills involved in graffiti writing for community murals; you will produce a mural by the end of the session. In the afternoon, an urban farmer and political organizer present strategies for incorporating the hip-hop arts into education and media production. Both events meet Saturday, May 5 at Midway Studios, 6016 Ingleside Ave., Chicago.

Solo Practice

Edra Soto Fernandez

Solo Practice encounters an open space for narratives by isolating a person playing drums. The drummer delivers a musical interpretation as if he were playing it with a band in real time, leaving silent spaces for an imagined and silent accompaniment. The incompleteness is presented as the subject of the piece. Excerpt: The Star-Spangled Banner (author: Francis Scott Key)

Economies of Touch

Sheelah Murthy

The problematic economic and affective exchanges between client and therapist, john and prostitute, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and their constituencies are all explored in this durational deep-tissue massage/performance piece. Clients will be solicited beforehand as well as “walk-ins.” The massages/performathon will take place in a small nomadic shelter inside the gallery, and will benefit the International Rescue Committee, specifically to support health services for sex workers in Southeast Asia.

Cranky, the Person Lingering With AIDS

Cranky P.W.A.

Morbid queer thoughts of the Cranky P.W.A., who also shares meditations on radical frivolity, living (or dying) with liver cancer, remembering Michael Bumblebee, and much more. http://crankypwa.blogspot.com

Revolution is an eternal dream

Ferd Eggan

A series of interviews with people who are thinking about the implications of their work for radical transformation of global society: Hank Jones, one of the SF 8, the Black Panther veterans being charged with the killing of a police officer at Ingleside Station, SF, in 1971; gay activist Jeffrey Edwards on gentrification and LGBTQ issues in Chicago; video-bloggers extraordinaires, Ryanne Hodson & Jay Dedman; anarchist/artist/activists Dara Greenwald and Josh McPhee; artist, writer, educator, advocate of Puerto Rican independence and former political prisoner Elizam Escobar, and others. – Ferd Eggan, http://www.ferdeggan.net

The New Yorkers’ Guide to Military Recruitment in the 5 Boroughs

The Friends of William Blake

As a counter argument to the grinding machine of military recruitment during the Iraq War, fighting in Afghanistan, and elsewhere, The Friends of William Blake, a small collective of artists, writers, and activists, has created “The New Yorkers’ Guide to Military Recruitment in the 5 Boroughs” – a pocket-sized, sixty-page, comprehensive guide to local military recruitment and resources for counter recruitment in NYC. Made in the spirit of The People's Guide to the RNC which they published in 2004, this book is a small part in the worldwide effort for peace & justice. It seeks to inspire hope while provoking conversation, informing potential recruits, and giving activists a new wrench in their toolbox. http://www.counterrecruitmentguide.org

Cloud Cover

Laurie Palmer

Cloud cover reflects the modification of our environment from energetic sanctioning of coal power production, unrestricted industrial growth, a car and highway culture, and massive consumption. It also affects our emotional well-being directly -- people living with less light get SAD. But weather systems, like emotions, are unpredictable, and our weather's response to capitalism is not based on a one-to-one linear relation. In this project, the intensity of atmospheric lighting in a windowless room (powered by a photovoltaic array) is regulated by the intensity of available light outside, while data collects, comparing current temperatures with historic averages.

Jimmy Carter's solar panels on the west wing of the White House, 1980, removed by Reagan the day after he was inaugurated. (photo by Bill Fitzpatrick)

a beautifully trial and error life

Claire Pentecost

A project that begins with an interesting story, generates an interview, becomes a drawing based on listening, a diagram of empathic reflexivity... not a series of portraits, but a search for pleasurable and non-linear ways of knowing a life, of re-telling someone's story, finding other routes to unfold a case study of desires. How do people determine their own paths of learning, create form from circumstance, end up surpassing themselves? What makes someone care about those things we call political?

Cheap Art For Freedom

CAFF Collective

We intend to investigate the production of bad feelings by "misusing" public spaces (for example, loitering, carrying boomboxes around, etc). We will make maps and objects that will allow others to participate in these activities and solicit others to make maps of their own; maps will be posted and solicited in a variety of media. Our initial solicitation, or "suitcase," will be "worry lines": clothes lines erected in public places that invite people to air their dirty laundry by writing down worries and pinning them to the lines.

A number of events invite participation. First: Sat. April 21 outside McCormick Center on the lakeshore path in the p.m. (during Green festival) Others: TBD

Suitcase Project: ORD-BEY-ORD

Charlotte Sáenz

This Suitcase Project arose out of my intense sadness and anger during last summer's war in Lebanon, as I wondered whether bombed bridges & roads could lead my loved ones to safety. It is an attempt to connect my communities here with my communities there--a simple idea that led to many unexpected connections, emotions, and challenges. For some of the participants it was just an exchange, for others a fragile and momentary connection, yet others took it as an opportunity to express their own emotions, in letters and packages prepared with much thought and care for a stranger over there.