Keeping Afloat in Streetopia

Last month, I had the opportunity to install an interactive mixed media piece at Streetopia, the large-scale group exhibition at the Luggage Store Gallery, 509 Cultural Center, and other spaces in downtown San Francisco, curated by my friend Erick Lyle and others, to envision Utopian aspirations for the city.

When Erick put the call out for contributions to the show, I thought of a lot of things I wanted to do, including an interactive installation that only worked when two or more people cooperated on it together and workshops on paradigm-changing books by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, one on envisioning a shift back from social services to social justice, and another on the (im)possibilities of community accountability for acts of intimate partner violence in lieu of prisons, jails, and probation officers.

What got through the filter of my time commitments and feasibility within the physical and chronological space was this piece, called "What keeps you afloat?" Its components are simple: a question, a tub of water, and pencils, crayons, twigs, string, and paper boats--tools with which to answer the question.

The question came to me when considering my own participation in utopian social movements, of exhausting and exhilarating hours spent planning and carrying out actions--marches, squats, free cafes--to protest our society's ills--greed, hubris, war--and to show the world we want to live in, a world without those things.

It came to me when thinking about previous utopian social movements in the San Francisco Bay Area, like the Digger Houses, Wheeler Ranch, and Morningstar Ranch, places my mother lived before my siblings and I were born. It came to me when reading Cometbus #48, the zine in which punks whose parents had been "back-to-the-landers" recalled witnessing communities and families coming together, sometimes making beautiful things, and often tearing each other apart. It came to me when contemplating my own measured involvement in more recent manifestations of the immutable search for human dignity, like Occupy Oakland.

It seems to me, in connecting these different moments, that a fundamental difficulty that we face is in taking care of ourselves whilst participating in larger configurations, whether they be friendships or relationships or families or communities or movements for social change. By care I mean meeting our deep needs for connection and purpose and dignity while at the same time meeting our basic needs--for sustenance, for safety, for rest.  (For me, this meant attending the General Assembly meetings at Occupy Oakland and then going home to bed rather than staying in a tent in Oscar Grant Plaza and fighting the cops at 3 a.m.)

But maybe what I should be asking is how we take care of ourselves in isolation from each other, and if this is even possible. Because as much as I know that I cannot sustain the kind of energy I had in my 20s for raucous riot girl shows or turbulent antiwar protests, I also cannot live without connection or community, much as I would like to try at times. What I have come to realize is that the two things are mutually dependent: In order to participate in community, I need to take care of myself; in order to care for myself, I need community.

My contribution to the conversation about Utopian visions of San Francisco was to pose this question, "What keeps you afloat?," in a way that enabled people responding to the question to take care of themselves--through reflection, and each other--through sharing insights. Here are some pictures of what the installation has looked like.  I'm also keeping a list of the answers I've received so far.

May 18, Day One, Six Boats

By the end of the first night, the tub was full and the boats were saturated. Others had said to me, "I hope the boats don't sink, that would be so sad." But when it happened, it wasn't, somehow. Instead, to me at least, it just felt like the boats of others who had come before were holding the new ones aloft.

May 18, Day One, Full

Still, I wanted to make space for new additions and to preserve what people had written. So I came back and pulled the saturated boats from the water and strung them along clotheslines, for all to read.

 

May 19, Day Two, Clotheslines

And as the show continues, I repeat the process of pulling the boats out and stringing them on clotheslines, making space for more paper boats and messages, more signals to ourselves and each other on taking care.

June 4, Day 18, "Tacos, My Mom, Love"

 (Streetopia continues through June 23, Luggage Store Gallery, 1007 Market St., in San Francisco.)