“Sometimes my shared breath says ‘WE’”: Taking ‘To The Streets’

December 18, 2024 Fall 2024

We started To The Streets with something seemingly simple -– a handful of seeds, stashed in our back pockets. From there, we branched out over 5 weeks, exploring what it means to be present (and sometimes invisible) in the streets.

Through shared experiences of Maintenance, Movement, Intervention, Publishing, and Collective work, we found a way to re-root ourselves in the people’s streets, our streets.

Each week, we met on our own street corners of the world wide web – our Zoom ‘street’ and a collective, evolving document we called “the sidewalk.” And – spoiler alert: a lot of the work ended up taking place on the sidewalk!

In between sessions, we tended to our own sites – community gardens, benches, playgrounds, beaches – many of which were increasingly getting stifled under relentless capitalistic urban and infrastructural expansion. At these sites, we practiced forms of engagement inspired by those who have occupied the streets before us – agitators, dissidents, revolutionaries, artists – across all the ways these roles and those adjacent to them intersect.

We practiced maintenance in our first week by crafting the spaces that we will share over the 5 weeks to come. Starting from our memories in the streets – between street memorials, encampments, anti-biennales, and family members protesting the US war machine, we found collective grounding. Next, we created viewfinders as potential tools to help us direct our gaze toward our chosen sites. Finally, we crafted group manifestos articulating our collective visions for sharing space and practicing in the class and the streets.

Manifesto for Maintenance of the Publics:

• “Choose to participate in public life, knowing your neighbor, tending to social ecosystems, grounded in the space. Public life is a public voice.”

PRACTICING IN THE STREET MANIFESTO

1. The Streets Are Home, The Streets are Homes, Be MINDFUL
2. We Enact Each other, We Keep Us Safe
3. Think Beyond the Big Moment
4. Planting and Maintaining Growth - Growth as a Daily Practice
5. Life Happens in the Streets Protect it at all Costs (see #1)

Bringing in initial encounters with our sites, we moved towards movement. Reflecting on witnessing landscapes of violent gentrification, industrialization, and depoliticization of the streets, we pondered upon the subtle ways we chose to nurture and maintain our sites – from burning incense to stickering. We questioned how we can move in spaces fenced off against us, spaces our ancestors have long been alienated from, and how we can take space – both virtually and physically, building on top of the work of Pope L, the mothers of Plaza de Mayo, Adrian Piper, and more. Scores and derives emerged as strategies we wanted to hone in on.

• “so many forms of noticing can happen when we move slow”

Before diving into intervention, we regrouped this week to perform the scores we had developed for our sites. Participants engaged in counter-cartographic practices, appropriated infrastructure, and sound walking, among other methods, to navigate their environments. In considering intervention, we critically examined the roles of legibility and visibility in the streets. We asked ourselves: what tactics allow individuals to be "visible and emboldened to each other while remaining invisible to the state?" Reflecting on practices like Black Bloc, call and response, and the coded folklore songs of families of Palestinian prisoners, we explored intervention strategies that center the collective, moving away from the desire for celebrity on the people’s streets

• “The magic of what happens in the streets is the magic of disruption / interruption.”
• “Disruption doesn't always mean chaos – we can disrupt through mutual aid and care...but burning things down is great too!”

As a culmination of our interventions and a stepping stone in our journey in the streets, we thought of ways one could publish. Outside of the realm of the institution, what does publishing entail? How does it depart from or overlap with communication? What really grounded us that week was a presentation of the work of class instructor Lukaza (<3), who examines the practice of archiving the movement as it goes, and the roles that the image-maker and the publisher can take on to provide for those in the streets.

From that conversation, we brainstormed on the crafting of street tools – discussing tactics like wheat pasting, stenciling, and tracing. The class’s street practitioners shared their hacks and experiences as we planned for the week ahead.

Finally, we got together as a collective, making maps reflecting on our time together — thinking of where our sites lay, how we maintained them, and how we intervened there. The map-making prompts included:

• How do you show what your site feels, sounds, tastes like…? With words, with acts, what is the revolutionary language of your place?