(The Domestic Struggle Part Threee)
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Songs
of Returning, Both Silent and Aloud (The Domestic Struggle Part Threee) |
 Let's Remake installation, Effigy of Monoculture, fifty cornstalks made from newspaper representing numerous food riots around the world in 2008. More images and explanation are on their blog: http://letsremake.info/blog/2008/08/food-future/  Let's Remake distribited this silk-sceened poster and Library of Radiant Optimism booklets.  We also distrubuted copies of a collaborative zine, Passing Notes, by Aaron Hughes and Nada Shalaby.  Aaron installed 25 Days to Chicago, which included graphite drawings, a small map of Chicago super-imposed on a military map of Iraq, photgraphs of troop patrols in "Chicago", an audio recording of a psychological evaluation of Aaron, and his military medical file.  Aaron also provided a description of all of these materials along his own brief contextualization in this pamphlet (pdf 1.5 MB).
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Songs
of
Returning, Both Silent and Aloud (The Domestic Struggle Part Threee) August 23-September 7, 2009 at Art of This 3506 Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis
How do we touch the land and how does it touch us? There is a long, vibrant history of so-called "back to the land movements." But in fact we have never left the land. We have always been dependent on the land--and the people who work closely with it--for our survival. When we fill the tank, flip a switch, open a bag of chips, sit quietly in a comfy chair, or get on-line--even though we are largely unconscious of it--we are in relationship to the land. We are constantly touching the land and it is constantly touching us back. Songs of Returning is an occasion to appraise different relationships to the land. It is an opportunity to imagine how stolen land can be given back, how people are coerced with physical and economic violence to relate to the land in ways they would not choose for themselves. And it is an effort to make a home, nurturing, imaginative places for speech and acts that begin to erode the colonial pathologies that pervade in our culture--our relationships to the land. Several cultural workers with intimate connections to different parts of the Midwest contributed to the exhibition, coinciding events, publications, and initiatives. Among the contributors are: Let's Remake! (Bonnie Fortune and Brett Bloom, www.letsremake.info), Dan S. Wang (www.prop-press.vox.com), Paul Durand, Jacob Chistopher Hammes, Aaron Hughes(www.aarhughes.org), Courtney Moran, Mike Wolf. Event
Calendar August
23, 7pm to 11pm August
26 A documentary by French writer, film maker Marie-Monique Robin that "pieces together the story of Monsanto, focusing on a look at its domination in the field of agricultural products." Snacks! (bring drinks to share) August
29, 7pm August
31
September
2, noon
Gone
Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of
Garbage Manoomin:
A Minnesota Way of Life The
Land Connection September
6 September 7th,
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 Art of This has a
small woodshop in the basement which made hanging out there during open
hours a lot of fun. We made two of these benches. Red76 made these signs to get people to
call 1-888-445-9148 and talk about the wars.  Where the Waters Gather, the Durand family kindly lent a digital reproduction of Paul Durand's hand drawn map of indigenous place names in the upper Mississippi water shed.  Detail of the map.  This is a detail from a potogrpah by Jacob Christopher Hammes in the show. It documents a stencil paineted on an interior door of a confined animal feedlot opperation (CAFO) that was recently built adjacent to his family's home in Iowa. (Appologies for the illegibility. hopefully I'll be able to find the text soon.) We painted another of this series of stencils on the rear door of the gallery. There was also a handmade book with photos and text pertaining to CAFO's.  Courtney and I made crates from scrap wood based on the crates we used working on Henry's Farm in central Illinois. We used these haul food and dishes around for the different parts of the Domestic Struggle Part Threee. They also make good stools. We used the same scrap wood to make booklet holders and shelves in the gallery.  Crates in use to haul stuff for the Peavey Plaza lunch.  We arrived at the gallery one morning to find our bench was missing so we erected this sign.  The following morning the bench was returned by a loud, friendly, possibly drunk man who found it a few blocks away and carried it back for us. He shouted, "You're welcome! God bless the troops!" We deemed it the Bench of Returning.  Iraq Veterans Against the War speeking at the Anti-war march. Aaron Hughes is on the tall guy on the far right.  Here Courtney inspects the effigy before we started the fire. There are additional, higher resolution images on Picasa. Posts about these projects and times on Dan Wang's blog: beautiful mpls, the cities part 2, and ,one more rnc report |
