Artist, Professor
The River Composes Us In Concert Together
Saturday, October 3, 2020,
11am - 12pm
Santa Cruz, CA
Free
Join a socially distanced, outdoor performative public “hearing" hosted by Laurie Palmer, Beyond the World's End exhibiting artist and professor in the UC Santa Cruz Art Department.
Laurie will be joined by special guests The Anxiety Caucus, The Prefiguration, Pleasure and Play Group, Abolition Ecology Walking Tours, the Ecosocialist Working Group, and Love Boat.
More Event Details
This discussion is heightened by our incredible need for social networks rooted in care and response-ability in our society. Huge unemployment rates, weak public health infrastructure, millions without insurance amid a pandemic, state violence against BIPOC and poor bodies, rampant fossil fuel extraction, environmental deregulation through global climate change, and a profit-driven housing market allowed to run havoc in a city with the highest rate of houseless people in the nation.
On top of all of this and more, our very anxieties and other difficult feelings are also privatized—we are expected to keep our fears, dreads, terrors, furies, and despairs to ourselves. To deal with them personally, as if they were our own to solve and not effects of the travesties of racialized capitalism and privatization; or we are incited to channel our feelings into social media echo chambers where they largely remain individualized, depoliticized, surveilled and monetized.
Share your testimony and speak to the ways in which private property has created unlivable, degrading, and isolating conditions that deny our basic and common needs. Share testimonies about housing, food, health, education, jobs as these issues reflect on the violence of privatization seizing our commons. Feel free to include testimonies from non-humans as well, translated to language or other sonic forms, about the stresses of pesticides, of fossil fuel and other extractions, of drought, heat, of neglect and humiliation, of being deemed expendable. Share testimonies to de-privatize and de-monetize our anxiety, to make it public, shared, collective, political – and to allow the flow of the river to bring us together while reaching across the distances that separate us.
This is the first in a series of Multispecies Tribunals that will unfold as a series of public events in which a broad spectrum of human and non-human witnesses will be invited to present evidence of harm enacted against our common by private property.