Notebook

Thu, Sep. 30, 2021 ⁄ 7:00–9:00pm

Film Screening: Break & Enter / Rompiendo Puertas (Newsreel #62)

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Please join us for the first screening within Infra(Structures), a new series of social documentaries screening for free at Confluence Studio’s Autonomous Mobile Media Unit, and organized by filmmakers Brett Story & and Morgan Adamson, and artist and Confluence lead-editor, Sam Gould.
About Break & Enter:
Break and Enter/ Rompiendo Puertas (Newsreel #62)
In 1970, several hundred Puerto Rican and Dominican families reclaimed housing left vacant by the city. They pulled the boards off the doors, cleaned and repaired the buildings and moved in. BREAK AND ENTER documents the activist work of Operation Move-In and the city’s attempts to displaced the families. This film offers a militant vision of gaining community control of housing and allows us to glimpse a different future that imagines residential autonomy beyond the gentrified city.
Series Information:
• All screenings take place outdoors at Confluence Studio’s AMMU (Autonomous Mobile Media Unit) located in the courtyard of 3032 Minnehaha Ave. adjacent to the 3rd Precinct and Moon Palace Books.
• All screenings are free and open to the public.
• Screenings start at 7pm
• It may get a little cold after the sun goes down, so please dress appropriately.
• Seating is limited, so bring a camping chair or blanket, and anything else that makes you comfortable.
About Infra(Structures):
Starting this September, Infra(Structures): A Social Documentary Film Series will be hosting a handful of films and filmmakers whose work creates spaces of interpretation, critique, communing, and hopefully, cooperative creation towards a common good. The program is interested in asking urgent and critical questions about “infrastructure” – the material and social world we have constructed for ourselves, its interconnection, its contradictions, its power, potential, and pitfalls. These works ask: How is space used and organized, what connections are enabled and/or disrupted, where do resources go and who benefits?
Living in a neighborhood experiencing impending radical transformation, we look to filmmakers considering the past and present of how small groups in the midst of big ideas with very real consequences grappled with their relationship to power and infrastructure. The prison industrial complex, housing and public health, conflict and the necessities of the democratic landscape, the films in the series ask us to considering the visible and invisible infrastructures that create the worlds we call home and, through a variety of means and experiments, how we might transform these material and social infrastructures for the benefit of the whole.
Documentary is also an infrastructure – a reflection of the political ecology we live in but also a way of making space – space for gathering, for reflection, for discussion, and for sharing. We offer a series of films which not only allow us to see ourselves, anew, but give a pretext for imagining, together, what kind of infrastructures we need and want to live, thrive, and be free.
Series Organizers: Brett Story, Morgan Adamson, & Sam Gould

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Sat, Sep. 25, 2021 ⁄ 5:30–8:00pm

An Introduction to: Reconstruction – Area – Memory

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Join us at our cargo-container studio, the AMMU (Autonomous Mobile Media Unit), in the courtyard of 3032 Minnehaha Ave at 5:30pm this Saturday, Sept. 25th for the launch of our newest social tool, R-A-M: Reconstruction-Area – Memory. 

 

R-A-M is a toolkit for recognizing others committed to constructing neighborhoods of care so that people may engage in conversations on street corners or host community forums to rebuild their neighborhoods, in our case, the 9th Ward enclaves of Powderhorn, Central, East Phillips, and Near Bryant. We’re gathering as creative folks, artists, organizers, and local troublemakers to experiment and collaboratively imagine with our neighbors to plan a different future for East Lake Street, one where a multitude of voices and visions lead.

East Lake Street is being rebuilt in ways that will continue to push out our neighbors, local businesses, and the communities we’ve formed here. Political Representatives, Property Developers, and other PIGs (Private Interest Groups) are hoarding the power to decide on what the future of our neighborhoods and city systems will be rather than creating forums and processes for us all to collectively decide through cooperation, care, and creativity. Our formation, Confluence, is an anarchic Community Design Studio for people to come together and redevelop Minneapolis’ 9th Ward from the grassroots. R-A-M, along with the AMMU, and other mechanisms in the works, are simple, open sourced tools for recognition and cooperative creation. They are free and available for all to use as they see fit.

We’re reaching out to invite you to be a co-inventor of tools that amplify our power as the people who give life to East Lake Street and the surrounding neighborhoods so that we might reimagine and rebuild this place we call home.

Please join us at the AMMU (in the courtyard adjacent to the 3rd Precinct at 3032 Minnehaha Ave.) at 5:30pm this Saturday, Sept. 25th. Duaba, Sam, and Vic will give a brief overview of R-A-M, it’s design and use. From there we’ll test out the tool with your help.

Snacks and good cheer on site!

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Sat, Aug. 28, 2021 ⁄ 1:30–3:00pm

Naloxone Training and Care Network Introduction

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Like much of the country in full, our neighborhood in particular has been deeply affected by the growing opioid crisis. Many of our neighbors, to varying degrees, need an open door to care, some more acutely than others. As our neighborhood asks vital questions of itself in the wake of the 2020 Uprising, and we collectively formulate shared agreements regarding what “safety for all” means moving forward, it is urgently important that we consider health and safety as synonymous. 

If you are interested in joining a growing, organic network that’s aim is to provide access to tools for those experiencing an opioid overdose join Confluence Studio and a coalition of addiction and harm reduction groups on Saturday, August 28th for a Naloxone training workshop and info session.

A representative from Steve Rummler Hope Network will be present to provide training in how to recognize the signs of a person at risk of overdosing from opioid in-take and how to administer both Intramuscular (IM) and Nasal Naloxone as a life saving measure. As well, free IM and Narcan kits will be made available for those willing to carry and administer aid if ever the need arrives. Furthermore, we will take this time to discuss plans towards cultivating and maintaining an organic network of care for the Lake St. Corridor, a “design system as entryway” so that training in the administration of NARCAN and its availability is as commonplace as CPR training or a defibrillator kit for those in cardiac arrest.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

An amazing day hosting Marc Fischer for the first pop-up exhibit at the AMMU of two recent publications: Police Scanner and Legal Concealers. On view for at least another month…

Marc, Laura Baldwin, and Sam talked about the publications and the differences between navigating and observing the court system on a daily basis.

After a short break we jumped into a conversation between Sam and Kenneth Bailey of Boston’s Design Studio for Social Intervention…

Sam and Kenny’s conversation could have gone on and on, focusing on the poetics of social life and power, access to tools for grassroots transformation and so much more.

We’re excited to begin to transcribe these conversations and add them to a growing list of dialogues soon to be printed and distributed throughout the neighborhood.

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Confluence crew enjoying tortas by the river. Making plans and excited to introduce everyone to the AMMU on Monday.

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Mon, Jul. 26, 2021 ⁄ 4:00–9:00pm

Critical Downtime – Workshops and Printmaking – Conversation w/ Marc Fischer, Kenneth Bailey, Laura Baldwin, and Members of Confluence Studio

An Introduction to AMMU and Print Workshop: 4pm

 
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Join us for an introduction to Confluence Studio’s Autonomous Mobile Media Unit, a social tool conceived by Confluence Studio and placed adjacent to MPDs 3rd Precinct to energize a continuous space for recognition, critique, and publication – as in the formation of a public – around the past, present, and future of our neighborhood following the 2020 Uprising. Along with learning about the ideas and concepts behind the AMMU we’ll introduce you to the tools inside, make books, posters, and more such as copies of Design Studio for Social Intervention’s Ideas – Arrangements – Effects.
 

Pop-Up Exhibit: Legal Concealers: 4pm – 9pm

 
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The AMMU will host a pop-up exhibit of the new Public Collectors booklet, Legal Concealers. Continuing its “exploration of the court system,” Legal Concealers is a decades spanning collection of photo documentation of, as described by PC’s Marc Fisher: 
 
“…efforts by photojournalists to capture the faces of people as they experience being arrested, transported to and from court or jail, or appearing in court. I have only included photos where the subject has concealed their face from the camera. These photos include suspects, people who have been charged with or convicted of crimes, witnesses, law enforcement agents involved in sting operations, and informants. “
 

Marc Fisher in Conversation w/ Sam Gould & Laura Baldwin: 5:30pm

 
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As editor / publisher of Public Collectors, and one half of the long-standing collaborative Temporary Services, Fisher has often attempted to shine a light on and make sense of systems; the attitudes and overt and / or subtle violence they contain and support. For this conversation our primary focus will be two recent Public Collectors projects that Fisher facilitated: The Courtroom Artist Residency Report and Police Scanner. Each project, through its unique subjectivity, looks deeply at the objective reality of the systems at play, namely the daily workings of the court system and the police beat. To broaden the scope of the conversation and consider how the general public can mine the complexities of the criminal justice system from the outside in, we’ll be joined by Hennepin County Public Defender Laura Baldwin, along with Gould, a long-time friend of Fisher’s.
 

Kenneth Bailey in Conversation w/ Sam Gould: 7:30pm

 

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Since its founding in 2006, Design Studio for Social Intervention has brought design thinking to the grassroots, providing access to tools so that publics, often left out of the planning process and its effects, have the agency to address and alter the world around them. As a co-founder of DS4SI, Kenneth Bailey has played a central role in the Studio’s work to foster a  “creativity lab for social justice work in the public sphere.” Bailey and Gould will discuss the Studio’s work, rethinking long held ideas around activism, public life, and leadership, tools for social intervention and transformation, and much more.
 
Apart from all of the above, this will be an opportunity for us to introduce you to Vic Liu, a recent addition to the Studio’s collaborative, anarchic mix of conspirators who has just arrived in town. You can learn more about Vic’s work here, and / or just say hello to her in person on Monday. We’re excited to see you down at the AMMU as we continue to think about the tools and frameworks available to us as neighbors; living together into a shared future available to all.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

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Defund the Police? Refund the People!!!

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Deep thoughts with amazing Confluence collaborator Jennifer Newsom during our second class workshop for Fate is Kind.

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Fri, Feb. 19, 2021 ⁄ 11:00am–12:15pm

Tomorrow is the Question: Listening as Action

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Workshop #3 – Tomorrow is the Question: Listening as Action – Discussion begins @  11am / Friday, February 19th

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Looking towards aspects of the African diasporic tradition and its tools, such as cooperative creation, improvisation, and deep listening, we are provided both inside and outside of the context of musicianship, guides that can play significant and important roles in our lives as active neighbors in community. These are social tools to carry with us day-to-day.

For this third workshop for the class Fate is Kind, we will be joined by artist, musician, and 9th Ward elder Douglas Ewart. Centering our focus on the techniques and histories of so-called jazz, “social music” as it was described by Miles Davis, or simply, as described by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Great Black Music we will, in general, think through how this traditions qualities play a role for non-musicians to be more attentive neighbors. And in specific, we’ll listen to how these attitudes and qualities have played out in Douglas’ life and work, and what his experiences in cooperative creation can teach us moving forward in common.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

In preparation for our visit to the Fate is Kind class by 9th Ward neighbor, artist and musician, Douglas Ewert, we are viewing this conversation between Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richards Abrams, Frederick Berry, and George Lewis.

As well, we are listening to the first hour of a series of radio programs originally broadcast in the late 60s on NYC’s WBAI, a long conversation between composers John Cage and Morton Feldman.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

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Social Margins: An Assembly in Text

As part of the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind we are reading Michel de Certeau’s Walking in the City, an excerpt from his Critique of Everyday Life.

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“Act so that there is no use in a centre. A wide action is not a width.”

– Gertrude Stein

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Social Margins: An Assembly in Text

As part of the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind we are reading Action Around the Edges, an excerpt from curator and critic Douglas Crimp’s critical memoir, Before Picture. This essay, read in tandem with text from Situationist International, looks at the intersection between interventionist art practices, namely that of Gordon Matta Clark and his piece Days End – a structural intervention of a derelict warehouse pier on NYC’s Hudson River – and the historical legacy and politics surrounding the gay cruising scene of the same era around the Hudson piers.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

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Social Margins: An Assembly in Text

As part of the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind we are reading excerpts from the Situationist International Reader.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Sun, Feb. 21, 2021 ⁄ 6:00–7:30pm

Mt. Analogue Discussions #2 w/ Davu Seru & Patrick Shiroishi

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Sound and Self within the Social Landscape: Davu Seru & Patrick Shiroishi in Discussion

WHEN: Sunday, February 21 at 6:00 PM (US Central Time)
WHERE: via Zoom  https://carleton.zoom.us/j/93952480199?pwd=U0svZHB1Rkd4VkdnU1VnT1VESmVCZz09
Patrick Shiroishi and Davu Seru, mid and west coast stalwarts of expanded composition, have each in the last few years composed pieces that speak to the power and social necessity embedded in the history of improvisation, “social music,” and the continued role that abstract sound plays in our understanding of the spaces between us. Be those spaces the distance between us, or the distance between ourselves and the realization of our best selves.
In 2018 Seru premiered Dead King Mother, a piece inspired by the oft-told family tale of his Uncle Clarence and his desperate actions following the assassination of  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In early 2020 Shiroishi released Descension, an album of extended solo saxophone inspired by his family’s history in American concentration camps during WWII.
For this second session in the Mt. Analogue Discussion series, Seru and Shiroishi will delve into these two works, the intersection of familial and collective historical trauma, the systems and impulses that guide and manipulate them, and how they each utilize the tools of sound and voicing in abstraction as a means of expression and communion with intersecting histories.

About Davu Seru

Davu is an improvising musician and composer. He’s worked with numerous improvising musicians and composers throughout the United States and France and is bandleader for the ensembles Motherless Dollar and No Territory Band. For the year 2017-2018 he served as the first-ever composer-in-residence at Studio Z in Saint Paul. He’s curated concert series for over the past 20 years and has received awards from McKnight Foundation (2020 Composer Fellowship), Jerome Foundation (2017-18 Composer/Sound Artist Fellow), American Composers Forum (Minnesota Emerging Composer Award), the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (Next Step Fund) and has received commissions from the Zeitgeist Ensemble and Walker Art Center. In addition, Davu is a published author and is a visiting instructor in the Department of English at Hamline University.

He lives in Saint Paul, MN, with his partner Emily and son August.

About Patrick Shiroishi

Patrick Shiroishi is a Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist & composer based in Los Angeles.

· Resident Weirdo· ∞

Tue, Feb. 16, 2021 ⁄ 5:00–6:30pm

Mt. Analogue Discussions #1 w/ Julia Bryan-Wilson

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Art, Work, Craft, Resistance: Julia Bryan-Wilson in Discussion

WHEN: Tuesday, February 16 at 5:00 PM (US Central Time)
WHERE: via Zoom  https://carleton.zoom.us/j/94805489346?pwd=d0hpdXhlWEpoOGdQSVZ0eXY4a3NPUT09

 

From her pre-academic days in radical feminist media networks to her focus on art and labor, craft and activism, and now the role of dance as a cultural form of grassroots resistance to repressive structures, Julia Bryan-Wilson has paid unique focus on how matters of everyday existence intertwine with deep rooted needs for cultural production as a social force for change. For this first session in the Mt. Analogue Discussions, Confluence Studio’s on-going series of conversations with artists, academics, activists, and global thinkers, we are proud to collaborate with the Art Dept. of Carleton College to host a discussion with Bryan-Wilson about how she sees her role as an art historian who works across difference and geographies and how she sees her work as a scholar as co-extensive with her work as an activist. Through this personal frame we hope the discussion will provide space to reflect more broadly on both the state of artistic production today as well as the role that the academy could play in furthering the cause of equity and equality.

 

About Julia Bryan-Wilson

Julia Bryan-Wilson is Doris and Clarence Maro Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also directs the university’s Art Research Center. Her research interests include theories of artistic labor, feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, performance and dance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California, 2009); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); and Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017).  She is the editor of OCTOBER Files: Robert Morris (MIT Press, 2013), and co-editor of three journal special issues (“Amateurism,” Third Text, 2020; “Visual Activism,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2016; and “Time Zones: Durational Art in its Contexts,” Representations, 2016).

Bryan–Wilson is an adjunct curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where in 2019 she co-curated the exhibit Women’s Histories: Artists before 1900; in 2020 at MASP she organized Histórias da Dança/Histories of Dance. With Andrea Andersson, she curated Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in 2017 and traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, the ICA Philadelphia, and MOCA North Miami. She is currently writing a book about Louise Nevelson.

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