Day 39 and 40 – Family Abolition, Gordon Matta-Clark, Growing Abolition, Poncili Creación, and Cara Romero

Splitting 1974 Gordon Matta-Clark

Day 39 and 40 - I’ve been thinking about what the sabbatical and this blog have meant to me so far, and I can’t emphasize enough the importance it has given to my natural tendencies to “wander” through the net and follow the various leads of the work I encounter!  I have the time – to wander, and to go down rabbit-holes I wouldn’t normally allow myself to go down.

 

I’m on the mailing list for a group of mental healthcare providers who network and converse about the intersections of community mental health, social justice, and psychodynamic theory called Reflective Spaces/Material Places – Boston.  There are often interesting events publicized in that group, and I recently received an email about a lecture on “family abolition;” bringing together psychoanalysis, Marxism, and queer kinship. The lecture put on by the London based Learning Co-operative and the Red Clinic UK, was titled, Abolish the Family? Psychoanalytic-Marxian perspectives. This was not my first time thinking about queer kinship, but it was my first-time hearing about the concept of “family abolition.”

 

The idea of family abolition has been around on the fringes for a while – This article Family abolition isn’t about ending love and care. It’s about extending it to everyone by Sophie Silverstein seemed to be a good introduction.  From the article I found this quote,

 

The nuclear family does not just hold the promise of fulfilling needs of love and kinship, but as an institution it is built on intersecting racism, sexism, and homophobia. As Melinda Cooper points out, for example, welfare restructuring in the United States explicitly enforced a particular model of the married nuclear family that would exclude African-American single mothers from receiving benefits. Defending the “monogamous, heterosexual, many-children family” is therefore not a neutral act of defending the right to a safe and cozy home but is more often than not tied up in other conservative political goals. Thinking about organizing intimacy and care beyond the family is less about taking away safety and coziness than it is about extending those very same conditions to everyone regardless of how they live and love.

 

And of course I was reminded of the work of Shayda Kafai (2021), Crip kinship: The disability justice & art activism of Sins Invalid.

 

The first speaker in the Abolish the Family? talk, M.E. O’Brien used photos by Gordon Matta-Clark – and I indeed found them quite arresting.

 

Apparently, there is also a movement called Growing Abolition.  Check out the description below.

 

The second year of a collaboration between jackie sumell, the Lower Eastside Girls Club, and MoMA PS1, Growing Abolition is a multipart project investigating connections between ecology and prison abolition. Developing gradually from spring to winter, Growing Abolition unfolds around a greenhouse designed by sumell and installed in the side Courtyard of PS1. An offshoot of sumell’s celebrated Solitary Gardens project, the greenhouse is scaled to the footprint of a solitary confinement cell from a maximum security prison. Transforming a space of confinement into one of possibility, the greenhouse offers occasion for both growing and learning: through plantings, conversations, and workshops, sumell and a group of interns from the Lower Eastside Girls Club (LESGC) explore questions such as: What can plants teach us about abolition, healing, and expanding our horizons of possibility? What does abolition have to do with natural building?

 

This sent me to a project being done in conjunction with the Growing Abolition – called Life between buildings:

 

Inspired by the history of community gardens in New York City, Life Between Buildings explores how artists have engaged the city’s interstitial spaces—“vacant” lots, sidewalk cracks, traffic islands, and parks, among others—to consider the politics of public space through an ecological lens. Bringing together select archival materials and artworks from the 1970s through the present day, the exhibition looks beyond a history of artists transforming buildings (such as MoMA PS1) to how they have engaged the spaces in between, turning negative spaces into sites for common life: gardens, installations, performances, and gatherings.

 

This summer one of the performances stood out to me: On July 29, 30, and 31, 2022, the Courtyard will host performances by Poncili Creación—a collective based in Puerto Rico with roots in DIY performance, puppetry, and street theater.  I had a lot of fun diving into the work being done by Poncili Creación.  PBS did a story on them last year that I found connected the community arts I was writing about yesterday and much of the other work which asks us to think outside the box!  The description of their work last summer was very inspiring.

 

Poncili Creación is an art collective, composed of identical twin brothers Pablo and Efrain Del Hierro from Santurce, Puerto Rico. Known for their creative and improvisational approach to puppetry, the brothers use their works as a form of protest and a call to action. Last August, in the midst of the pandemic, El Museo del Barrio in New York commissioned a recorded performance. The duo took to the streets of San Juan, where they had been in quarantine, for a parade across the city. Last month, the duo traveled to New York for a sequel, taking their parade from La Marqueta Retoña through East Harlem.

 

Last, this deep diver into MoMA’s work took me to an article in their magazine about Feminist art that featured Cara Romero’s work.  Wow!! And come to find out she has several local (for me) shows coming up!!  She’ll be exhibiting at the Addison Gallery and Peobody Essex Museum. I definitely hope to check them out. From the article:

 

Cara Romero uses her camera to share “self-representations” of Indigenous American women as a way of countering “a lifetime of seeing Native American women and Native American people represented in a dehumanized way.” A member of the Chemehuevi Indian tribe, Romero recognized early on that popular depictions of Indigenous Americans—particularly women—are typically inaccurate. Her First American Girl photo series confronts these ongoing stereotypes that lump distinct Indigenous cultures together. Using large-scale portraits, she spotlights women from tribal nations across today’s United States, each staged like American Girl dolls in boxes.

 

What a feast right?!!! Art, politics, social justice, and care.  Such great “work” to be diving into.