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20:57 - 29:20

"I'm Jesse. And this is Pascal. And we're here representing Friends of Light tonight. As you already heard, Friends of Light is a worker owned fashion company. We operate within the fashion industry, but we also operate very far outside of the fashion industry - we come from a background of working in fashion and at some point decided that it needed a radical change, and so we started weaving jackets based on our values as opposed to based on economic decisions - and Pascal is going to talk more about our values, but I'm going to give you a background on how we decided to form a worker cooperative. Uhm Pastel actually has been looking into worker cooperatives for much longer than I have, and I joined her in about 2012 when we were participating in a sewing circle called Work circles and, there was on any given week, there would be anywhere between 8 to 30 participants and we sat around a table. We made decisions collectively, we made every single decision together about making one quilt. And that was where the stitches were gonna be. What color it's going to be, what fabric we were using, what were the shapes, and every single person had a part in that and then we start stitching and we'd talk about what is a worker cooperative. What are the different values in a worker cooperative? How do you make a worker cooperative work? And so that was very much a learning experience for all of us in about 2015 - we, Pascal, myself and two other members, Nadia and May. We decided to take all of this that we've learned and actually put it into the real world and still sort of in a project based way make garments together, make woven jackets as a worker cooperative. We then took that and had a sales event just to present our project to the world to sort of inspire people, to show what we've been working on. We were wildly surprised that we got ten orders in one night, so we needed to incorporate, make this a real business, and we've been a real business since 2016, so we're still fairly new. But it's been three years of working as a worker cooperative, basing all of our decisions on the things that we've learned about worker cooperatives and doing our best to work in that fashion, we also, I will mention that we, one year ago, in January of 2018, we participated in the Green Worker Cooperative, which is based in the Bronx, which, if any, of you are interested in building your own cooperative - I highly recommend it. It was every Monday night, 3 hours a night for six months and we - it was like going back School, but to make a business and to learn how to make a business and specifically how to learn how to make a green Worker-Cooperative business, which is amazing. So that's - that's that background and Pascal is going to share with you a little more about our company and our values." "Thank you Jesse. In fashion, it's quite unusual that clothes are being produced in the West nowadays. And we have quite an extreme product, and it started actually with the desire to work with farms upstate who are producing fiber. But they're not really connected to any design practices in New York City. It's a very separate community. So we did research and found and looked for different farmers and we decided to work with Sarah of Buckwheat Bridge Angoras. She has an amazing practice as a farmer and her goats and sheep she keeps very well and she has a very high quality wool. And we are weaving jackets and this is together with her. She also had a mill on her property. We developed yarns. And just the first series was a series of five yarns that we developed with her, and all the natural colors of the - and we started experimenting. In the beginning it was kind of after the work circles we really wanted to develop an economic activity to practice being a worker-cooperative for real and not just kind of doing it as a project. So these were the first experiments into if we could weave a garment to form. And there's different techniques involved. In the meantime, we are working with other farmers as well. We're working with linen farmers, and we've done a lot of research in different materials, so we work very closely with the source of our materials, and that's the only thing we want to do. We work with hand spinners at the moment, it's no longer being produced on machines, so it's an intense product. It's takes us about 160 hours to make one jacket. And they've been selling really well, which was a surprise to us because the price point is very high, we're now at $6000 a jacket. And that's been really interesting, that people do value the story that's connected. And also all our clients. Actually everyone in our value chain is - we're really good friends with them, and we grow to become friends because we also make everything to size for each client. And one could think that we're kind of exclusive because the jackets are so expensive. But we also do a lot of - we do workshops and we do talks like this. We educate people about worker cooperatives and what it means to - And also what it means to value artisan work in a Western context and to be able to do that kind of work. And that's what we've been advocating, like a lot, about because a lot of people here push prices down.To make artisan work and even local local fiber products possible. But we know it's not possible with the... In September we actually did a big project to kind of save one of the farm - one of the forms we work with because they couldn't sustain themselves. Not - especially not through our jackets. But we decided that we would do a project around making blankets and we invited other design studios in New York to participate in that project. So instead of kind of letting the farm disappear, we decided to develop a product to support them so it's also supporting - our objective is actually to create a flourishing local fiber and textile kind of structure. And that has been really interesting because the costs of the wool that went into the blankets was $1000, just raw material and that it doesn't give her any profit, actually. And that's, I think one of the biggest things that we are kind of trying to advocate and support, is how do we make local production possible again against a fair wage. And this is an extreme product, I know, but it has been very surprising to us that people do gravitate towards the story. They wanna participate in it by buying the jackets. We make our own materials, own looms, and these are a few of the jacket. And we do private sales events. We don't sign shops or anything like that. We make everything to the size of the customer, so there's a lot of personal attention that goes in every part of our value chain. Thank you."

01:05:15 - 01:07:21

"So anything else you could speak of that we kind of also address those like interpersonal - Relationships, dealing with collective decisions, money, equity, all that stuff. I would love to hear anymore about that." "We've done a lot of, both with the co-op and the artist residency, we've hired people to give us trainings. Lots of times - so you know it's not every year. Sometimes it's more than once, we've gotten - so we've received consensus-training, facilitation-training, so that we are all trained as consensus facilitators, so that not there's not one person who's like leading all the meetings, we can all lead meetings or sections of meetings. We've been doing it a long time, so we've gotten good at it and we've added people slowly so it's actually doesn't feel hard. It always feels good at this point. You know, sometimes it takes a long time and we're not ready to make a decision. We won't yet. If there's decisions, you know the decision to move into this space was like the most intense, fast - we have the opportunity now. We had no plans of moving. We don't need to move. We have a space we love already. This is gonna ruin everything if we do it. You know, it's very hard to do, but we use consensus process. Someone was like downward palms - Meaning like I'm not going to block it - But I'm not into it, and we still went forward - 'cause that's the rules of consensus. So that's the first time we've ever made a decision like that and everyone feels good about it, 'cause we've all bought into the process, so I would say as much training as you can. We've also done a lot of anti oppression training, which is kind of built into that as well, which is less around the process, but the process is, you know meetings can be opressive. That's why people don't like meetings, 'cause they're like there's underlying... or there's power dynamics that you're not addressing - That are in the room because of race and gender and class and all those things, and so those are things that we talk about. As you know, we're not perfect, but there's things that we try and talk about - 'cause that's why people - That's why there are problems in groups, because there's all kinds of forces that are kind of out of our control that we don't recognize. So by recognizing them - It helps. At least it's a start."

44:06 - 44:23

"It's super important to write everything down and to make sure that you can have someone opt in with as much of an understanding of how the policies, the systems and everything run and that they actually do run that way, not just written, but it's actually run that way."

39:53 - 40:30

"A huge thing is having shared values from the very beginning so we have so we have - You know we have two different groups that both have - we have a document called our Points of Unity which are kind of broad value statements that both groups even though both groups have different goals and identities to some degree. Uhm, there's this kind of shared set of values that we can always look back and be like - Are we following this? Is this decision somehow against these values? And then the other thing - you should be making sure that everything is super super clear and written down and then everyone reads it and can agree to it."

33:59 - 35:26

"From my perspective, it involves a little bit of everything and thinking about instead of having - You know you're you go to work and you are the person weaving - you're doing that. But then you're also communicating with the client and you're responding to press inquiries and writing out a budget for the rest of the year and learning a business plan, and you're doing a little bit of everything, and over time you find out who gravitates towards what role more, but you still lend a support role into the roles that you're not gravitating towards, so it's really like - you have to be a Jack of all trades in some way. I think for us it would - It was really big learning when we participated in the Co-op Academy. If we were making the jackets and we had a business model around those jackets, but we understood that we didn't account for a lot of this thing, a lot of the sweat equity that we were talking about. We had to kind of calculate all those things. So it's for me. It also has really been about learning how to run a business and not only just kind of - Nicely waving something to get up. It's really starting to understand, and we all - it was really important that all of us were in that program together and that we grow and learn together how to do that - that was for me, amazing."

30:04 - 31:12

"I personally love it and have a hard time imagining working in another way. At this point I've been part of the Co-op since it started, so you know, almost, yes - What do we say? 2010 so almost eight or nine years? So that's the short version. Of course, it's super hard. It can be really stressful at different times depending on what's going on or who was around or what the projects are, but I wouldn't trade any of that to not have a say over what we do or how we decide to change. I think the biggest - The thing I like most about it is the flexibility and the malleability of the organization. You know, we all - if something isn't/ doesn't feel right, we can bring up and we can change the whole organization. You know we can be like this thing. We can't do projects like this anymore for X reason or we need to hire more people who can do this kind of thing or whatever it is. We can just do that, and it's not easy to do, but we can do it as opposed to if I don't like the company I'm working for, well, you know it's another company, like you better quit. That's the only option sometimes, so that's probably the biggest thing for me."

12:03 - 16:32

20:57 - 29:20

30:04 - 31:12

33:59 - 35:26

39:53 - 40:30

44:06 - 44:23

01:05:15 - 01:07:21

12:03 - 16:32

"...we're a production company-cooperative as well as a media arts collective, and we're based in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, at the new art built space in the Brooklyn Army Terminal. Uhm, and so in the clip there were there was commissioned work. There were featured documentaries or journalistic pieces, music videos. Videos for magazines, nonprofits. And that's us. That's some of us - that's six of us up. So there's eight of us and we're all worker-owners, and we basically work on all of those projects, and we rotate our roles as producers, editors, cinematographers. Uh, we're all paid the same for a day's work for a time.Regardless of the projects we've worked on in the past, or you know or what our resumes look like. Uhm, we also make all of our decisions of how we run the organization through consensus based decision making processes. Uhm...And we also have - and we can talk a little bit more about what that means after - during the Q&A, if that's what if you're interested in - knowing more of how that works. What it basically means is we have three meetings a week. There's a lot of communication constantly, and we also have a working group structure to deal with all the admin so. What that means is you know, how do we ensure that all of our equipment is running smoothly? How do we ensure that any press requests are being responded to or any client requests are being responded to? Is we have various working groups that were all apart of and for that work, we are not paid. It's considered sweat equity. Uhm, that's the work that we do to be able to participate in the co-op to have access to the client work and all the shared resources. And I'd say that takes up about 8 hours a month, 8 to 10, it depends. We also have a weighted rotation system to distribute all the work fairly so that not just one person is only producing, that they're not working all the time, it's to distribute roles as well as the flow of work itself. What else - we share resources for personal projects. We also have benefits. We have a health stipend that we provide for all worker owners. Also patronage which is kind of like a bonus at the end of the year. And we also fund the media arts collective. Yeah, so I'll talk about the kind of other wing of Meerkat media so its a collective of artists and residents - it currently has 16 members. The group works on a huge variety of projects so some - a lot of the work is independent work that the individual folks are working on and we support each other on those. Sometimes we do big projects together where anyone who is available and wants to can work on a project in a more collaborative way, and we do all different things from short form, long form, documentary, experimental, a big project we did in 2016 after the election - was we did a large newsreel project where because we have both between both the co-op and the collective - we have, you know, a bunch of very talented people, so we were able to all kind of band together and make a whole bunch of short form documentaries around all different kinds of actions that were going on around the city and around. And we put out, I think like 10 to 15 short kind of short documentaries - in a short time frame, we also do skill shares and workshops, both for just for the folks in the group, but also sometimes we do it more outward facing workshops. We also - the group shares resources, space, equipment, brainpower with the co-op, and we also, that group is also totally self run - Uses consensus - consensus process in its meetings and is a self run project. So all the - also working groups to do all the admin and things like that. And we also have an annual retreat that both the co-op and the residency the collective do together."

33:34 - 36:35

"We have operated both with the sense of urgency that comes of seeing how much harm is done by critique as its habitually enacted, and against that urgency. What do I mean by against that urgency? Perhaps we share a suspicion that drives to fix critique.Or to replace the current haphazard ways it gets practiced with something just a little less harmful if they aren't embedded in a will to see plainly, and to name plainly how the form serves oppressive forces. Will become a way of avoiding the deeper transformation that is called for. To return to Matthew Goulish's words, we discover our approach and we follow it. But what if you start to discover that yours appears to be an incredibly slow approach? Even an ambivalent one. Appears to need a long gestation period. Appears to want not to be published. Yet; at all. As anything like findings. And still it feels important to show up. Can something contribute to a shift in the field in these conditions? Without overperforming certainty. Or trying to lay claim to anything like a territory. Could ambivalence serve as a point of attachment? Could the work of not trying to settle in advance the relation of ambivalence to urgency become precisely the matrix we need for all the kinds of unmakings this moment calls for. If the long game is transformation of the practices of learning to generate ever more just and equitable conditions that serve abroad and thickly differentiated us.Then it's incredibly useful to let critique keep showing its hand. Revealing itself as a tool for Recentering or hyper centering. The already centered and further marginalizing or attempting to disappear the already marginalized. Each of us in the retooling critique working group in our own ways, and often in dialogue with one another, has taken some form of this approach. To study the thing in the act of doing the thing and to introduce into that study. Or maybe via that study? Kinds of noise that forced the form to reconfigure. And in so doing, perhaps to take some of the broader context with it. In orienting a new to the kinds of presents and futures that call.

16:25 - 17:16

"How do we understand something? We understand something by approaching it. How do we approach something? We approach it from any direction. We approach it using our eyes, our ears, our noses, our intellect, our imaginations. We approach it with silence. We approach it with childhood. We use pain or embarrassment. We use history. We take a safe route or a dangerous one. We discover our approach and we follow it."

01:36:53 - 01:38:11

"A group of students in the class picked this up and decided that they wanted a gesture language that could run simultaneous to a critique. And they developed gestures for various things like - I need you to make your point, you're going on too long. That could be said. They developed a gesture that was a kind of one hand sweeping across the palm of the other hand that was basically - you're using this moment to sort of throw shade at me - How about you don't? They used a gesture that went - with both hands from the hips to the shoulders, which signified - Is anyone else feeling a kind of way. And they experimented with running critiques where the conversation about the work was happening, but simultaneously there was a way for them to check in affectively. And those gestures started to produce other kinds of effects. So, there was a day in class where I could tell that I had lost them, and I didn't know what was going on, and I was able to sort of pull on that gesture and say I'm feeling a kind of way, what's going on? And the the fact that we had this way to talk about the dynamics and had practiced it in small and less charged moments meant that we could then loop that loop that back in."

01:23:29 - 01:28:06

"...against my biases, towards my students, and the biases that students bring towards me. And it's a space where we're reckoning with our histories of things that we embody currently, right? So I think there's a value of breaking silence and speaking up. But I also wonder through the modes of critiques, how forgiveness and reconciliation can happen so that we can move forward, 'cause I think that's important, right? Uhm? So that's something that I just wanted to ask, either as students or teachers. If you have encountered moments like that. Do you mean like moments of impasse like not knowing how to move the conversation forward or to even and engage with one another's complexities? And I think that discomfort is OK. And I think we need to embrace that. I think because we are not comfortable being this uncomfortable that we just kind of don't want to talk about it, right? But I think after then.We can acknowledge where we are, but I want to move forward. And I think it can happen through modes of critiques, right? But it is a lot of work 'cause I'm working through so much of how I've been educated and how I had been taught to teach." "My experience, both as a student and as an instructor trying to facilitate deeper engagements with one another in such a vulnerable setting, especially when we're also at an age where we're exploring parts of ourselves in ways that we haven't before questioning our history, our relationship to so much in a very public setting in school with people that we don't know, that we don't share language with. As an instructor, I think one thing that I try to do is to simply acknowledge that as a condition of the class that we all come with so much, we're all bringing so much, and that it takes time to prime these conditions, to prime these conversations. And that it's not something that we should expect to happen, in critique, without any sort of collective agreement or discussion or working towards. Even be able to see ourselves or each other in this way, and I think some of the the fault lines of critique is that it's just taken as this neutral space where we can all just come in and we know exactly how it's going to go, and there isn't any sort of preparation for priming that conversation." "If I can jump in just on that point of priming the conversation, I think it's really key. And and in one of our approaches, we have the phrase move from tacit to explicit. I think we either condition the sociality in the room, or we're conditioned by the sociality that walks in, and we know that the sociality that walks in has really uneven literacies around understanding one another. And so to take a moment before critique, even to locate critique within larger ways of knowing that are happening constantly, can actually happen quite quickly and allow a group together to identify practices that they want and obstacles to that practice, so that could concretely look like - placing a sample object on a table - Ideally not one of the students objects, and asking through how many lenses could we pick up or view this object so we could look at it through - a material lens, through a craft lens, a formal lens, a biographical lens, a historical lens - to just map all of those out and together come to a kind of agreement around which of those are the ones we're actually intending to do in the next few hours. And even naming like - what are obstacles to doing that so that there's a kind of lifting up in advance, and collectively having in the room the knowledge that there are obstacles to then be able to sort of thread a way forward."

01:11:28 - 01:15:14

"...my previous institution had worked itself into this kind of fever pitch around racial politics to such an extent that it had become an incredibly toxic - nearly violent place for the students of color - there was anti Black Lives Matter graffiti going up, there was alt right white supremacists threatening students.You know there there was a lot of activity and in that moment and in subsequent moments, I felt as though when I turned to...you know at that time I would have 60 or 70 faculty members - I was one of like three or four faculty of color - Only, I believe, like two of which had full time positions - That when I turned to them, it's... their suggestion was to not get involved. And that was a very difficult thing. It continues for a lot of my colleagues who find themselves in these more permanent positions. It continues to be their position. To not do that labor for the institution, in part because the system is set up in such a way as to. Expect for your responsibility, for your sense of responsibility for the student. For students of color, for their experience. To be strong enough to task you with that labor - Without any meaningful infrastructure being built or meaningful compensation meeting you. So I have some wonderful friends who do this kind of equity work at different kinds of organizations. Their suggestion is write in the contract... is to like demand compensation/ forms of compensation for that labor. Because moving into these environments. Because implicit in being a diversity hire is that you will do this labor, right. It's not written into the contract, but if we look closely enough - in a kind of Willy Wonka version of it, it would be there invisibly in the bottom right if it was held under infrared light, it would be there like. Like undo all of our white supremacy. I feel like some of my colleagues - their response is to just have it plainly written into. Well then I deserve X number of course releases or such and such kind of compensation to offset the fact that I'm gonna be sitting in these faculty meetings and I won't be the only person of color. And you were going to talk about how this is a white institution, and in that moment immediately erased not only me, but my colleagues and all of the students colour simultaneously. So now that I have to write myself back into existence, right, that becomes... that's the sort of Labor, right, that writing-oneself-back-into-existence kind of Labor."

01:04:00 - 01:05:45

"The limits of the conditions that we operate within. What are the constraints of the institution that obstructs this labor, and how can we set the focus of the class to include its own institutional conditions? As long as - It's all very well for, like the adjunct faculty, and like the students and the people who are in the most precarious position to be doing this work, but unless there are major changes to the way all of these institutions are run at the very top - Uhm, the change won't happen. And, I think for instance I mean - There were professors who were not rehired - and who were big allies of what we were doing on campus - and I can't help but have this like sense that as long as you know the people who are doing the most work are the students and the students are going to leave after four years - And if then they're entrusting - like the legacy of that work to faculty, and then the faculty can just be eliminated because there are other people around too - and not deal with actual restructuring - An actual relinquishing of power and authority - that nothing will get accomplished."

16:25 - 17:16

33:34 - 36:35

56:50 - 01:00:37 (context - 48:10 onwards)

01:04:00 - 01:05:45

01:11:28 - 01:15:14

01:23:29 - 01:28:06

01:36:53 - 01:38:11

01:14:22 - 01:15:10

"And in our collective work, it's interesting we have binding agreements around our resources and finances. So that we have very specific ways in which we will use the money that we earn. Say for example for teaching workshops and the money we like to pay people that have worked with us will, that would be a binding agreement as opposed to say, using money to pay for our meals or for any personal kinds of things. So that's a very explicit agreement that we have in the collective. How we use our finances, how we utilize our finances."

01:13:18 - 01:14:21

"...we talk a lot about kind of generosity as a practice which is another like. Not something that you hold people accountable for in some sense, but it works in many ways where it's like - You know we make it very clear. Like if you wanna do something we will make that happen for you - we will do this as a group, you're going to have much more success if we can have an open conversation about it than if you try and do this on your own or whatever, and so that actually I think, is another form of agreement that actually works really well in terms of giving people the freedom to do what they want and need to, and also kind of like building trust between as - you had mentioned earlier the leadership, not necessarily like the teacher or the the authoritative figure, right? So it's it's constantly building a different kind of agreement that that demonstrates, trust demonstrates generosity, demonstrates that kind of a way of of living in the world."

29:15 - 30:45

"Also, different kinds of context enable different kinds of group agreements, so I know in the collective work with BFAMFAPhD were an intergenerational collective from work, different moments in our lives, we have different strengths. Uhm, we need different things in terms of visibility and so we kind of, you know, we've cultivated deep relationships over a period of five years, and so there are some kinds - There are implicit agreements that have developed. And we have a kind of vocabulary around them. We use Paul Ryan's threeing as a method of firstness, secondness and thirdness. So the person in firstness would be the person that would present an idea. The person in secondness would respond to that idea, and then the person in thirdness would be a mediator possibly, and so we often say, OK, you're better at public speaking. You're going to be in firstness for this event. Or maybe you're a better support person and you can be in secondness and, so those are sort of implicit agreements that have occurred over a period of time have come from knowing and respecting and working together."

19:13 - 23:03

"...is a little different in the sense that everybody, so it's 65 what we call participants and five resident faculty, and about 15 of us that are on staff. And we all basically arrive in this rural location on the same day and we all leave, basically, on the same day. So we're together all the time - for nine week, and similar to Danielle's program, but also slightly different. Everybody is from a completely different place. Everybody is a different age. Everybody has different experiences within their practice. So in any given summer, well, we can use last summer as an example. The youngest was 21 and the oldest was 48. Some people have been in grad school. Will have a BFA. Some people have no higher education whatsoever, come from 20 different countries - Many different languages and were all thrown into this environment together and three years ago I started leading a session. Basically we call it Community life orientation, which is essentially the enactment of the group agreement. It is also not a group agreement in that... It is written by me. But, uh, I would say kind of the beauty of living and working together for an entire summer for nine weeks of intensive time is that I am not any different - Well I am different, but I am not that different from the people that I'm also living with. So the exchange that happens on a on a regular basis means that I'm not so shielded from the ways that the Community life orientation or that group agreement needs to be adjusted on a year to year basis. So I was just meeting with a colleague yesterday to kind of think about ways, other things we needed to include in our in our group agreement so that it's constantly evolving. It's constantly rigorous to kind of bring together 65 people that have one thing in common, which is this process of art making, and even that is not necessarily clear in how that is a shared value so. In order to keep it from going into the corny zone, I think that we we really boil it down to the very basics, about what is the purpose of all of our jobs as artists? and what are we seeking to kind of communicate to the world? And what does that mean when you're in a group with others that are not your people necessarily, so you know we talk a lot about placing a value on wrongness as much as brightness. We talk a lot about how voice is important to all of us as individuals. And sometimes our voices are not speaking about the same things, but then how do we begin to listen to each other? We talk about respecting people's spaces and privacies and things like that. Ours is very long. It's like a it's like an hour long process to go through all of the agreements and you know, I mean, I think sometimes it's also important to remember that these are also aspirations. A group agreement is is great on paper until it's actually enacted. And so we use that group agreement as a moment - as like a touchstone like - OK, so something actually did happen. Now how do we deal with it? How do we embody patience and listening and understanding and not automatic judgment and automatic kind of closing off from an inquiry with that maybe we didn't want to have, but we are having, regardless."

19:13 - 23:03

29:15 - 30:45

01:13:18 - 01:14:21

01:14:22 - 01:15:10

42:07 - 46:47

"I think as painful as those times are, they are so rewarding, because it requires that you reassess and decide to really commit. It's like, I could be doing this, I could be doing that. Actually, I'm doing this because this is not just my passion. There is something else that is driving me to do it. But I can't even describe it, I don't know what it is. Once you get to that place, windows start to open, and you start to realize things. I don't know if I would have come to, had I not gone through a rough time. 2018 was the year that I said, ‘What we're doing today should exist a hundred years from now.’ People should be growing food in their communities and creating an economic engine that provides jobs to the residents in the community, food, to the residents. And up to that point, I wasn't thinking. And the moment I thought, ‘a hundred years,’ I had to question a whole bunch of shit because I have always been inspired by anger. Anger is an amazing motivator. I realized once I had this notion that Project Eats should exist a hundred years from now, I realized you can't grow something with anger. You can start it with anger, it will motivate you and get you to levels of creativity, resourcefulness and imagination, but you can't grow it with that.

And then the next level of, ‘Wow. I've got to grow this thing.’ I've got some shortcomings. I hate to ask people for anything. And so if you're going to grow it, you have to grow it with resources. And we, for the most part, have used the most valuable resources that we all have, which is the ones we have. Well, we can't really grow for a hundred years with that. How do you build that? And building that requires you to ask them that. And so I have these battles that I'm having in my head and out loud, I'm not asking that. And then having to resolve that, you know as uncomfortable as that may be, you know, if you want this thing bad enough, then embrace asking. Figure out how to love asking.

And now I am really kind of psyched about fundraising. I'm really into it, I'm going to raise a whole lot of money. And I'm going to do it on my terms. So how do I do it and what do I do? You can always do it the way that is right for you to do it. And I think we get, again, socialized out of thinking that we can, that we have to follow through it again.

The most profound thing for me has been how I view approaching art. And that evolved from the end of 2018. I believe art should be discovered. I believe we should engage the cause we discover. The notion is this, this stuff makes no sense to me, that we have to schedule time to see art. That's not how art feeds our soul. I actually want people to engage with whatever I make on their own. Get rid of those text labels for Christ's sake. Don't bombard me with how I'm supposed to see something. 'Cause when you do that, you disrupt the very reason that we are creating this conversation, and it’s a conversation, it’s not a mediated moment where I have to bow to your schedules and bow to the way to say it. And in that, my notions of what I create now have expanded."

41:07 - 41:49

"I think a lot of that exhaustion comes from people not understanding what you're doing. For me, it's been a good exercise-- even though it’s absolutely exhausting-- to find the language to explain what we’re doing. Especially when we're working with technology. Telling the story of what we're doing and why we care about it, especially for POWRPLNT, is really important. People didn't understand why we wanted to put up a tech lab in that neighborhood, and it wasn't until we did it that we started getting grant funding. People saw it."

35:09 - 35:50

"I love human beings, and as much as I am disappointed by us, I am so hopeful. You know the glass is always half full. And one of the things that I don't understand about us is that we allow ourselves to be socialized in ways that are utterly self-destructive. We do not exercise our ability to use what we have to create what we need. There is not another form of life on this planet that doesn't do that."

35:09 - 35:50

41:07 - 41:49

42:07 - 46:47

http://badatsports.com/2019/episode-678-bfamfaphd-artist-run-spaces/

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