Thursday, December 10, 2020; 5pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public debate broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Composer Raven Chacon and writer Candice Hopkins will present their new score, Dispatch. They write: "This score can be realized as a performance or as a series of imagined events. It can also be enacted in the real world. The players, the prompts, and the schematics are derived from an analysis of the dynamics and organization of the Water Protectors in defense of Standing Rock during the noDAPL movement, not glossing over the miscommunication, profiteering, and injustices. In an increasingly fractured society, new paths and new formations are needed to refocus our attention in an attempt to find truth. Participating in this score may produce sonic or visual artifacts, these are as important as the actions."

Candice Hopkins is a curator, writer, and researcher interested in history, art, and indigeneity, and their intersections. Originally from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation. She was senior curator for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art, and worked on the curatorial teams for the Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, and documenta 14. Her writings on history, art, and vernacular architecture have been published by MIT Press, BlackDog Publishing, Revolver Press, New York University, the Fillip Review and the National Museum of the American Indian, among others. Hopkins has lectured widely including at the Witte de With, Tate Modern, Dakar Biennale, Tate Britain and the University of British Columbia.

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. His work ranges from chamber music to experimental noise to large scale installations, produced solo and with the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity. At California Institute of the Arts Chacon studied with James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Michael Pisaro and Wadada Leo Smith developing a compositional language steeped in both the modernist avant-garde and indigenous cosmologies and subjectivities. He has written for ensembles, musicians and non-musicians, and for social and educational situations, and toured the world as a noise artist. As an educator, Chacon has served as composer-in-residence for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project, where he taught string-quartet composition to hundreds of American Indian high-school students on reservations in the American Southwest.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Thursday, December 3, 2020; 5pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public debate broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

New Red Order (NRO), a public secret society that works with networks of informants and accomplices to create grounds for Indigenous futures. If America is premised both on desires for indigeneity and the violent erasure of Indigenous peoples, NRO asks how those desires can be routed into something productive and perhaps even sustainable. Here, core NRO contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys discuss the group’s savage philosophies and use of humor, all while reflecting on what it might mean to become an informant. You can initiate your own informancy by calling 1-888-NEW-RED1 or visiting newredorder.org.

Indigenous artists are often invited to redwash institutions and check boxes, and also to fulfill a pedagogical function, to teach people about Indians. We are continually called upon to inform on our own communities. We wonder: If those familiar dynamics, with their attendant desires, were seemingly unavoidable, how could they be leveraged toward and through power? How to amplify the agency of the informant, rather than capitulate completely to compromised positions where we’re helping non-Indigenous people extract information from our communities in nonreciprocal ways?

“Decolonization is not a metaphor” has already become, for many people, a metaphor. We’ve been pursuing language that pushes beyond “re-” or “de-,” that offers alternatives to the vocabulary of repatriation or decolonization, which centers acts of displacement and dispossession. That’s been a frustration we’ve felt with Indigenous politics in North America, or the world, even, where Native concerns are constantly framed as a return to something that can’t exist anymore. But even though not everyone wants to live in a wigwam, we still want a place: to feel at home here. Give it back.

New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys. In our current period of existential and environmental catastrophe, desires for Indigenous epistemologies increase and enterprising settlers labor to extract this understanding as if it were a natural resource. New Red Order—emerging out of contradistinction from the Improved Order of Red Men, a secret society that 'plays Indian'—calls attraction toward indigeneity into question, yet promotes this desire, and enjoins potential non-Indigenous accomplices to participate in the co-examination and expansion of Indigenous agency. Working with an interdisciplinary network of informants the NRO co-produces video, performance, and installation works that confront settler colonial tendencies and obstacles to Indigenous growth. NRO has exhibited work at the Whitney Biennial 2019; Toronto Biennial 2019; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MoCAD); and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), among other institutions.

Never Settle: Calling In, 2020; video, sound, color, 3:57 min.; recruitment video. A short recruitment video for the public-secret society ‘New Red Order’, which simultaneously satirizes and sincerely engages with solidarity and the desire for Indigenous epistemologies.

The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets, 2018; video, sound, color, 9:44 min.; commissioned for the Contour Biennale 8 // Sundance 2018. Filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil, in collaboration with artist Jackson Polys, investigate the recent court case that decided the fate of the remains of a prehistoric Paleoamerican man found in Kennewick, Washington State in 1996. The video is an urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and post-mortem justice.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Thursday, November 19, 2020; 6pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Join Maria Jenson, executive director of SOMARTS, in conversation with artist George McCalman, for her distinct and unfiltered perspective on the landscape of Bay Area arts institutions as we move through 2020, a fraught year of the pandemic and racial reckoning.

Maria Jenson is recognized as a leader in the arts for advancing innovative strategies to sustain creative communities in the midst of rapidly changing urban environments. As Creative and Executive Director of SOMArts, Jenson has deepened the organization’s commitment to racial equity, creating clear pathways for Bay Area artists to cultivate new ideas and grow their careers. Through her leadership, Jenson has expanded SOMArts’ public programs, advanced new public-private partnerships, and fostered groundbreaking exhibitions such as The Black Woman is God, The Third Muslim: Queer and Trans* Muslim Narratives of Resistance and Resilience, and many more. These projects represent SOMArts’ commitment to incubating the growth and careers of Bay Area artists and curators.

Prior to joining SOMArts, Jenson was a key member of the SFMOMA External Relations team during the museum’s expansion and was the Founding Director of ArtPadSF, an independent art fair launched in the Tenderloin at the Phoenix Hotel in 2010. A graduate of the 2018 Getty Foundation Executive Leadership Institute, Jenson is a sought-after thought leader on the role of cultural institutions advocating for a more democratic and equitable society.

After 14 years as a creative director in the magazine industry, working at highly respected magazines like Entertainment Weekly, Mother Jones and Readade, George McCalman opened the doors to his own practice in 2011. MCCALMAN.CO is a design studio built on the foundation of editorial expertise, bold brand messaging, and personal relationships; his editorial background gives him a unique perspective on commercial branding. In 2016, he recalibrated his professional life by embracing the artists’ path. He now incorporates all aspects of his creative interests into his studio practice, working as a visual journalist, commercial illustrator, and fine artist; in addition to his various branding projects. He is a culture columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. His first book ‘Illustrated Black History’ will be published summer 2021 by Harper Collins.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Thursday, October 22nd at 5pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

What are the ethical, educational, and aesthetic responsibilities of the museum in the age of falling monuments to colonialism and the Black Lives Matter movement? What is the political and social obligation of the institution to publics' contesting demands to "decolonize" or foreground diversity and inclusion, and also to prioritize the historical canon? Considering expressed commitments to addressing racial injustice, we will discuss the present role of institutionality from monuments to public education to staff treatment to archival collections to exhibitions, and whether these institutions are able to keep pace with and sufficiently address rapidly changing political conditions.

Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. In 2020-21 he is ACLS/Mellon Scholar and Society fellow in residence at the Magnum Foundation, New York, on the issue of "Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness." Among his many publications, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011) won the Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in 2013. How To See The World was published by Pelican in the UK (2015) and by Basic Books in the US (2016). It has been translated into ten languages and was a New Scientist Top Ten Book of the Year for 2015. The Appearance of Black Lives Matter was published in 2017 as a free e-book, and in 2018 as a limited edition print book with the art project “The Bad Air Smelled Of Roses” by Carl Pope and a poem by Karen Pope, both by NAME Publications, Miami.

Since the 2017 events Charlottesville, he has been active in the movement to take down statues commemorating settler colonialism and/or white supremacy and convened the collaborative syllabus All The Monuments Must Fall, fully revised after the 2020 events. He curated “Decolonizing Appearance,” an exhibit at the Center for Art Migration Politics (September 2018-March 2019). A frequent blogger and writer, especially for the art magazine Hyperallergic, his work has appeared in the Nation, the New York Times, Frieze, the Guardian, Time and The New Republic.

Zoé Samudzi is a doctoral candidate in Medical Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research engages colonial biomedicine, visuality, German colonialism, and the 1904-1908 Herero and Nama genocide in present-day Namibia. Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, The New Republic, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and Arts.Black, and she is a contributing writer at Jewish Currents. Along with William C. Anderson, she is the co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Our Liberation (AK Press).

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Image: Removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes (sculptor: Marion Walgate) from the campus of the University of Cape Town, 9 April 2015. Photo by Desmond Bowles.

Thursday, October 1st at 6pm PST
90 minutes of conversation broadcast at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

André & Sadie checking in during a moment of grief, stillness and possibility, with discussion moderated by George McCalman.

André D. Singleton is a newly Bay Area (New York City prior) based educator, human rights activist, and multi-disciplinary artist born in Kansas City, MO. Widely known as the co-creator of ‘The Very Black Project,’ a social awareness initiative that celebrates the African Diaspora, he is a thread within a fabric of pioneers on a mission to unite people from an abundance of cultural backgrounds. He’s a Stage IV Hodgkins survivor (remission since 2005). As an artist, survivor and gay man he has been empowered to approach life with a fierce determination to be free and embracing of his truth. Singleton’s work continues to inspire courage, pride, and vulnerability, encouraging people all over the world to respect one another so that our communities might remain enriching for us all.

Sadie Barnette is from Oakland, CA and holds a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from University of California, San Diego. Her artwork reveals quintessential American truths through exploration of her own family history. Recent projects include the reclamation of a 500-page FBI surveillance file amassed on her father during his time with the Black Panther Party and her interactive reimagining of his bar — San Francisco's first Black-owned gay bar. She has been awarded grants and residencies by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Artadia, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Carmago Foundation in France. She has enjoyed solo shows in the following public institutions: ICA Los Angeles, The Lab and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; MCA San Diego, CA; and the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis. Her work is in the permanent collections of: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Brooklyn Museum, NY; Guggenheim Museum, NY; and the Berkeley Art Museum, CA. Barnette is represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles and Jessica Silverman in San Francisco.

After 14 years as a creative director in the magazine industry, working at highly respected magazines like Entertainment Weekly, Mother Jones and Readade, George McCalman opened the doors to his own practice in 2011. MCCALMAN.CO is a design studio built on the foundation of editorial expertise, bold brand messaging, and personal relationships; his editorial background gives him a unique perspective on commercial branding. In 2016, he recalibrated his professional life by embracing the artists’ path. He now incorporates all aspects of his creative interests into his studio practice, working as a visual journalist, commercial illustrator, and fine artist; in addition to his various branding projects. He is a culture columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. His first book ‘Illustrated Black History’ will be published summer 2021 by Harper Collins.

The Forum is a bi-weekly experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Saturday, September 19, 2020; 5pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Odell will be thinking through the question, "can time be something other than money?" Embedded in this question is the history of time under industrialization, changing notions of leisure, and what we might learn from other temporalities, including ecological and geological time.

Jenny Odell is Oakland-based artist, writer, and lecturer in the Art Practice department at Stanford. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Paris Review, and McSweeney's. Odell has been an artist in residence at Recology SF, the Internet Archive, and the San Francisco Planning Department. She is the author of How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Wednesday, September 16, 2020; 6pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Tiffany Sia wrote Salty Wet last year, in which she claims, “Hong Kong is the first postmodern city to die.” A subversive text disguised as a Hong Kong softcore porn magazine from 1989, the zine challenges the potential of solidarity from afar. In this webinar, Sia proposes that bearing witness is the least–and sometimes the most–we can do in times of crisis. Invested in mutual aid as the material choreography of political critique, she will discuss the generative potentials of care and solidarity, from creating folk infrastructures to the importance of developing political and cross-cultural literacy. The webinar will also touch upon the limits and fissures of political visibility. When does watching become voyeuristic, paternalistic or entangled with virtue signaling? Sia will be “leaking” parts of the forthcoming Too Salty Too Wet, weaving readings into the talk as a kind of “live” transmission from Hong Kong, through which she continues to critique the precarious politics of the “faraway.”

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker, independent film producer and founder of Speculative Place. She is the author of 咸濕 Salty Wet. The first volume was published as a chapbook in 2019 by Inpatient Press. 咸濕 Salty Wet is in Tai Kwun Contemporary's Artists' Book Library collection and Asia Art Archive as part of the collection of print materials made in response to the Hong Kong protests. Sia directed Never Rest/Unrest, a short experimental film that takes up the provocation of Julio Garcia Espinosa’s “Imperfect Cinema” on the potential for anti-colonial filmmaking, resisting spectacular documentary and news narratives. She is part of Home Cooking, founded by Asad Raza, on which she contributes Hell is a Timeline. The series are performances and readings intended to provoke a materialist reckoning with our digital and real timelines.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Wednesday, August 26, 2020; 11am PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public conversation broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

A performative screen-sharing talk about collaboration and improvisation through filmmaking. Wu Tsang is a visual artist and film/theater director, whose works explore hidden histories and marginalized narratives through hybrid documentary-fiction forms. Her projects have been presented at museums, biennials, and film festivals internationally and she has won numerous awards including the 2018 MacArthur 'Genius' Grant.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

IMAGES: Wu Tsang and production photo from Tsang’s The show is over (2020)

Wednesday, August 12, 2020; 7pm
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public debate broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

The Holy Ghost in the Machine: Digital/Spiritual Storytelling in the Time of COVID-19

Marvin K. White explores and theorizes on the digitized new realities of sheltering-in-place and social distancing. Through poetry, prose, conversation and public theologies White invites us to reimagine what it means to operate in the creative and the prophetic during the twin pandemics of systemic racism and COVID-19. Without physical audience or congregation, how are we shaping or being reshaped creatively and spiritually in this virtualizing moment? How do we know without physical audience or congregation, that our art and our message have not become algorithmic? How do we know when we are experiencing The Holy Ghost in the Machine?

Marvin K. White, MDiv, is currently serving as the Minister of Celebration at the world-renowned GLIDE Church in San Francisco. He is a graduate of The Pacific School of Religion, where he earned a MDiv. He is the author of four collections of poetry: Our Name Be Witness; Status; and the two Lammy-nominated collections last rights and nothin’ ugly fly. He is articulating a vision of social, prophetic, and creative justice through his work as a poet, artist, teacher, collaborator, preacher, cake baker, and Facebook Statustician.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Photo: Fox Nakai

Wednesday, July 29, 2020; 8pm
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public debate broadcast live at thelab.org
RSVP HERE FOR ZOOM LINK

Lumbung, directly translatable as “rice barn,” is a collective pot or accumulation system, where crops produced by a community are stored as a future shareable common resource

Lumbung: a collective resource pot operating under the logics of commons; an agglomeration of ideas, stories, (wo)manpower, time and other shareable resources. Metaphorically, this modest living room welcomes citizens to participate in building up resources from the ground, and thereby to own the space themselves. It should be able to become a new space, formed by the intersections of elements, yet without absorbing (and therefore eliminating) them. The created actions and spaces intertwine with social relations and transactions. It imagines the relations of an art institution with and within its surrounding community: namely, as an active constituent. Here strategies are developed based on proximity and common endeavour. Is this model scalable?

In 2018, learning from its experience of establishing Gudang Sarinah Ekosistem, ruangrupa co-initiated GUDSKUL: Contemporary Art Collective and Ecosystem Studies together with Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara. This public learning space has been set up to practise an expanded understanding of collective values, such as equality, sharing, solidarity, friendship and togetherness.

ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based collective established in 2000. It is a non-profit organisation that strives to support the idea of art within urban and cultural context by involving artists and other disciplines, such as social sciences, politics, technology and media, to give critical observation and views towards Indonesian urban contemporary issues. In 2018, together with Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara, ruangrupa co-initiated a public learning space, GUDSKUL. As an artists’ collective, ruangrupa has participated in the Gwangju Biennale (2002, 2018), Istanbul Biennale (2005), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2012) and the Singapore Bienale (2011). ruangrupa was the curator of Sonsbeek ’16: TRANSaction and will also be curating the upcoming documenta fifteen.

The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Saturday, May 30, 2020; 10am
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of conversation broadcast at thelab.org

The Forum is a bi-weekly experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Dropping out. Quitting. Suspending. Saying no. Going on strike. Refusing. Basta. After being out of it, do we really want to go back? This webinar wants to research the possibility of dropping out as a political and personal act, as well as the connection of dropping out with feminism, feminization, and a dismissal of productivism (the belief that measurable productivity and growth are the purpose of human organization (e.g., work), and that more production (intellectual, artistic production) is necessarily good).

Dora García lives and works in Barcelona and Oslo. García represented Spain at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and participated in the Venice Biennale for the second time in 2013. She took part in the 56th Venice International Art Exhibition, dOCUMENTA(13) and other international events such as Skulptur Projecte Münster in 2007, Biennale of Sydney 2008, and Sao Paulo Biennale in 2008 and 2010. Her work is largely performative and deals with issues related to community and individuality in contemporary society, exploring the political potential of marginal positions, paying homage to eccentric characters and antiheroes. These eccentric characters have often been the center of her film projects, such as The Deviant Majority (2010), The Joycean Society (2013) and Segunda Vez (2018).

Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.

Wednesday, April 29, 2020; 12pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public debate broadcast at thelab.org

The Forum is a bi-weekly experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Artist and writer Hannah Black will give an informal overview of some of the solidarity projects aiming to deal with the pandemic crisis, primarily tenant organizing and mutual aid. She will attempt to draw some connections between the different efforts and make some general comments on the possible horizons and tendencies emerging from the current situation, based on conversations with organizers around the US.

This public debate will be followed by a survey of attendees requesting feedback on the current topic and suggestions for topics / speakers at our next forum.

Please join us.

Hosted with Wolfman Books, Pro Arts, and Performance Space New York.

Wednesday, April 15, 2020; 5pm PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public debate moderated by Jacques Laroche and broadcast via thelab.org
Participate via YouTube

The Forum is a bi-weekly experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?

Our first forum is with Astra Taylor, a filmmaker, writer, and organizer. Her most recent film is What Is Democracy? and her latest book, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone is out in paperback May 5th. She is a co-founder of the Debt Collective.

Since 2011 a debt resistance movement has been growing. The Debt Collective, a union of debtors, has been at the forefront of these efforts, innovating new forms of economic disobedience that help people leverage their debts to fight for social change. The Debt Collective’s ground-breaking student debt strike has won over a billion dollars of debt relief to date and helped put student debt cancellation and free college on the national agenda. Building off of Taylor’s work, this talk will look at the interrelation of debt and democracy and argue that debtor organizing has only become more urgent in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing economic collapse, which will push more people into debt and default. Corporate interests are well organized and have secured trillions of dollars of no-strings-attached public money over the last few weeks. The vast majority of Americans are indebted, and they should make their voices heard, demanding debt relief as an essential part of a sane and just response to the coming downturn.

Moderator Jacques Laroche is a computer scientist exploring the intersection of science, politics and society. In New York he was involved in the Occupy movement and worked with Strike Debt to abolish debt. In Miami he helped organize during the gestation of the Black Lives Matter movement. And, most recently, he is serving as an IT consultant for the Debt Collective.

This public debate will be followed by a survey of attendees requesting feedback on the current topic and suggestions for topics / speakers at our next forum.

Please join us.

Hosted with Wolfman Books, Woodbine, Tamarak, and Pro Arts Gallery and Commons.

Please join us for a conversation on autonomy with Fred Moten & Manolo Callahan followed by a free vegetarian lunch. ALL ARE WELCOME!

Fred Moten is a student of the black radical tradition. He works collaboratively with Manolo Callahan, Stefano Harney, Laura Harris, Wu Tsang and many others. His latest book is all that beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019). He teaches in the department of Performance Studies at New York University.

Manuel Callahan is an insurgent learner and convivial researcher with the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy. He also participates in the Universidad de la Tierra Califas and remains an active member of Acción Zapatista South Bay.

7:30pm Doors / 8pm Sound
Tickets $18 (discounted or free for members)
Get Tickets Now

Canadian sound artist crys cole and Australian polymath Oren Ambarchi carve out an intimate and human sonic space across a diverse array of compositional approaches, sound sources, fidelities, and textures. Partners both creatively and romantically, this unique duo reimagines electro-acoustic music, not simply as “abstract” sound, but as a diary, a love poem, a dream. 

Oren Ambarchi is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and musical polymath who has been releasing records with the frequency of someone who prefers studio time to sleep. His remarkably prolific and diverse oeuvre since the 90's has included releases such as Grapes From The Estate (2004), Audience Of One & Sagittarian Domain (both 2012), Quixotism (2014) & Hubris (2016). A voracious collaborator and musical explorer Ambarchi has worked with an endless stream of notable artists including Alvin Lucier, Keiji Haino, Jim O’Rourke, Ricardo Villalobos and many more. For the past 10-years Ambarchi has run the Black Truffle label, releasing his own projects and those of his close collaborators alongside important historic works. Ambarchi was the cover artists of the August 2019 issue of the Wire magazine (UK). His latest solo release is Simian Angel (Editions Mego 2019).

crys cole is a Canadian sound artist working in composition, improvised performance and sound installation. Generating subtle and imperfect sounds through haptic gestures and seemingly mundane materials, she creates texturally nuanced works that continuously retune the ear. Cole has performed worldwide both solo and in an array of collaborations, and has ongoing duo projects with Oren Ambarchi and James Rushford (Ora Clementi). She has been published by Black Truffle (AU), Penultimate Press (UK), Ultra Eczema (BE), caduc. (CA), Bocian (PL), Another Timbre (UK), Students of Decay (US) and Infrequency editions (CA/DE). Her work has been exhibited in Canada, Russia, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the UK and Thailand.

7:30pm Doors / 8pm Sound
Tickets $15 (discounted or free for members)
GET TICKETS NOW

Composer, vocalist, multi-instrumental electronic musician, and multimedia artist Christina Wheeler’s sonic explorations include forays in a myriad of styles and forms. She blends an amalgam of improvised electronic music from an array of sources: processed vocals, vocal loops, hand-triggered sampler, theremin, Q-chord, autoharp, and electric mbira.

For this evening’s concert, she will perform Tres Es un Número Mágico: Kaleidoscopic Triptychs, a three-part, solo composition in audience-generated, chance order and direction, for voice, electric mbira, electric autoharp, Q-Chord, delay loops, and electronic effects processing.

A Los Angeles native, Wheeler is a graduate of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and Manhattan School of Music. She has performed and recorded internationally with many artists, including John Cale, Talvin Singh, Marc Ribot, Chris Whitley, Zeena Parkins, John Carter, Fred Hopkins, and Andrea Parkins. Wheeler was a featured artist with David Byrne: the band toured internationally and performed on The Late Show with David Letterman, and on PBS’s Sessions at West 54th Street. Wheeler performed at Central Park Summerstage's Joni’s Jazz concert, featuring the music of Joni Mitchell, with Chaka Khan, PM Dawn, Ravi Coltrane, and Vernon Reid.

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Rodolfo Córdova is a vocalist, composer, and improviser. They possess a BMus in Composition from the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music and a MA in Composition from Mills College in Oakland, California. Their music has been described as "slow-boiling, apparently timeless" with "an odd momentum of its own" (The Washington Post). Their work fuses diverse influences with electronic media, chance operations, gradual processes, noise, improvisation, extended vocal and timbral techniques of composition. Córdova also explores intersections with literature and visual arts and engages with issues of colonialism, gender, geopolitics and migration. As a touring vocalist and improviser with The Art Ensemble of Chicago, they have performed nationally and internationally in Washington D.C.; Chicago, Illinois; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Paris, France. They're also an active member of the improvising bands Monopiece and Temoleh, with whom they have toured in the United States and Mexico. Other collaborators include Dirt and Copper, Kris Force, Theresa Wong, Nicole Mitchell, Timothy Russell and GeraldCaselDance.

7:30pm Doors / 8pm Sound
Tickets $12 (discounted or free for members)
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As a solo performer, Theresa Wong takes the listener into the molecules of the materials at hand, revealing a relentless digging to unearth the raw vibrations of the cello and voice. Her work draws upon the questions: how can I rediscover the core of the cello as wood and string and hair, or even simply as a tree; and how can the voice take flight in all its infinite possibilities? Like a microscope set to an object, Wong focuses on the elemental qualities of her instruments through amplification, extended techniques and the interplay of improvisation and composed forms. Drawing upon sounds of the natural world, pure harmonies, transient melodies, noise and sensations of genetic sonic memory, Wong offers a timbral merging of the voice and cello, giving birth to new acoustically synthesized sounds. 

Wong will also perform O Horizon, an improvised performance in which audience members are invited to bring objects of any kind (common or otherwise) as instruments for her sound making. She will perform a sonic ritual that brings awareness into the sensual microcosm and fantastic qualities of everyday materials. O Horizon refers to the nutrient rich area of a forest floor, where fallen materials are transformed into new ones through decomposition.

Theresa Wong is a composer, cellist and vocalist active at the intersection of music, experimentation, improvisation and the synergy of multiple disciplines. Her works include The Unlearning (Tzadik), 21 songs for violin, cello and 2 voices inspired by Goya's Disasters of War etchings, O Sleep, an improvised opera for an eight-member ensemble exploring the conundrum of sleep and dream life and Venice Is A Fish, a collection of solo songs. Wong's commissioned pieces include works for Vajra Voices, Splinter Reeds, Del Sol String Quartet and pianist Sarah Cahill. She has collaborated with many singular artists, including Fred Frith, Ellen Fullman, Chris Brown, Luciano Chessa, dance pioneer Anna Halprin and filmmaker Daria Martin. In 2018, she founded fo’c’sle, a record label dedicated to adventurous music from the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, featuring inaugural releases by Ellen Fullman with David Gamper and Stuart Dempster, Chris Brown, Powerdove and the Lijiang Quintet.  She has performed internationally in venues including: Fondation Cartier, Paris; FOCO Festival in Morelia, Mexico, Cafe Oto in London, Fabbrica Europa Festival in Florence, Italy, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and The Stone and Roulette in New York City among many others. She currently works and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.theresawong.org & focslemusic.com

DunkelpeK is Japanese born percussionist Nava Dunkelman and Canadian-American guitarist Jakob Pek. This iconoclastic duo creates an experimental improvised music that reimagines the possibilities of the duo and music itself. Visceral, organic, and spontaneous in nature, DunkelpeK’s sound transfigures and transmutes, offering listeners a holistic exploration into the essence of listening and musical experience. At times cathartic and pronounced, meditative and serene, the music of DunkelpeK is unlike anything else. dunkelpek.bandcamp.com

9pm Doors / 9:30pm Sound
$18 Tickets (discounted or free for members)
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Throughout his 15 year career Darren J. Cunningham (aka Actress) has established himself as one of the pre-eminent and singular voices in UK electronic music. His work has been released by a variety of different recording labels, which most prominently include Ninja Tune, Honest Jon’s Records, Nonplus Records, and Werkdiscs, a label he co-founded in 2004.

In addition to his recorded work, Actress has been photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans, and the late celebrated photographer Lord Snowden. He has worked collaboratively on projects with White Cube artist Eddie Peake, Mehdi Lacoste, Dan Emmerson and Belgian visual artist Pierre Debusschere, as well as fronting campaigns for Fashion brands Acne and Cav Empt, during which he has performed sell out shows at The Barbican Center and Tate Modern London, Sonar Tokyo and Berghain Berlin.

8ULENTINA is a DJ, producer and interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. 8ULENTINA’s work focuses on the use of non Western sounds and traditional Middle Eastern instruments within the genres of dance music, ambient, noise and sound design. 8ULENTINA is the co-founder of Club Chai, a Bay Area based event series, record label and curatorial project that highlights diasporic narratives and queer and trans people of color. 

8pm Doors / 9pm Show
SOLD OUT

The Residents, in collaboration with media artist, John Sanborn, are bringing the seminal 1988 album to life in this unique and limited performance. This event is the dress rehearsal for the show which will move for three performances at The Museum of Modern Art the following week.