This class has been an exercise in reconnecting to my solar plexus - I have been feeling disconnected from butterflies in my tummy. Part of why I wanted to join this class was to get back into flow, into this dreamspace and imagination, to reconnect to a community of practice of study, of exstasis of learning! Learning with and from others! This certainly has allowed me to tap back into wonder and awe and making surprising and provoking connections.
Diagram of solar plexus, origin unknown
I’m still working on building my server from an intel Xeon processor, but I wanted to share some reflections on how I might want to use this server in the future - alchemizing some of the nodes of the web we’ve been building for the past couple months.
Throughout this class, I have been reflecting on interconnectedness or in Sufi Islam what we call wahidat al wujud - the oneness of being. We are deeply linked through land, water, ancestral and cosmological connection, but also through built and social infrastructures imposed on us by colonial and imperial legacies. When I walk through my neighborhood, I see concrete used to fill a former encampment site of mostly indigenous neighbors. I can’t help but see the connection to piles of concrete generated in the genocide being carried out against Palestinians by Zionist regimes. I think the more we expose the suprastructure of these infrastructures, the systemic-level, the more we can see the pathways into caring, abolitionist possibilities.
South Minneapolis
Gaza
I want to do a short exercise to ground us in our bodies and to reflect on this notion of care and speculative futures. This is an exercise that Jackie Wang shared at the 2015 PEN World Voices Festival.
I want everyone in the audience to close their eyes.
Keep your eyes closed and imagine a space where you feel safe and cared for. Hold that image in your head. Take note of the things you’re doing in the space. The people you’re with.
Okay, you can open your eyes. Raise your hands if there were police in the place that you went to in your mind. Really?? I thought police are here to keep us safe and make sure that we are cared for. No one? Okay, this is such a surprising result.
While the country and the world have gotten a glimpse into Minneapolis, its racial and economic disparities and violence, since the murder of George Floyd, for those living here on the ground these qualities of life in our city are neither new nor novel.
I recently joined Confluence Studio, a community arts organization committed to the holistic development of the East Lake Street Corridor and Minneapolis’ 9th Ward, and a central theme of the Studio’s mission is to gather and investigate the past while collaboratively envisioning a shared future where authentic security is implemented by the ideas, experiences, and cooperation of neighbors.
One extremely useful pedagogical tool is Participatory Budgeting. This process invites neighbors together in assembly to imagine a future vision of care and security by redistributing the existing Minneapolis Police Department budget, and budgets that may overlap with it, towards a holistic vision of security. The Studio has been hosting People’s Budget Assemblies as part of a project called The Future in Ruins: Overwriting the Third Precinct.
In May, we’ll be launching the Autonomous Request for Proposals to gather project ideas for imagined futures for the site of the third precinct. Neighbors in the 9th Ward will vote on the proposals from three different tracks - professionals, youth and neighbors.
Expanding on this work, Budget Social is an app that invites neighbors to imagine new forms of care and security collaboratively and, in turn, allocate funds towards that goal.
Before, during, and following the Uprising in response to George Floyd’s murder our neighborhood was rarely, if ever, listened to by city government. Agitation has always been the determining factor in bringing about change. But agitation is most always in response to power, and power can always create new crises as a distraction. Spaces for continued self-learning and collective knowledge building are rare.
Currently many of the initiatives to address security, care, and the built environment, if authentically connected to neighbors, remain top down. Budget Social is a grassroots platform that allows neighbors to use the Minneapolis Police Department budget as a pedagogical tool to imagine a future of collective care. Building off of our neighborhood assemblies, the app creates a digital off-shoot where neighbors can explore, play, and learn about the world we want to create together through storytelling, knowledge archiving, and participatory budgeting.
Following years of calculated silence and indifference following the 2020 Uprising, the City of Minneapolis seems on the move to “rebuild and support.” But this new sense of urgency comes with little to no authentic engagement with 9th Ward neighbors and often pits the City’s desires against the realities on the ground, further putting neighbors and neighborhoods at risk through predatory and violent policing tactics, infrastructural initiatives that do not speak to local needs, and social service initiatives that scratch the surface of neighbors needs if they address the underlying conditions of those needs at all. While Budget Social cannot, of course, address these issues in their entirety, what the app as a social tool can do is create broad and dynamic space for envisioning and organizing at the grassroots so that neighbors can imagine (and in time actualize) a future together where everyone feels safe by addressing basic needs and collective desires.
Thank you so much to Alice, Meghna and Oren and to my fellow solidarity infrastructure homies for your care and brilliance this semester ❤
Raschel Spider Web Shawl, 1987 Artist Arai Jun'ichi; Maker: Arai Riko
Knowledge Lineage - some resources I was considering while writing this
Cyberwitches Manifesto, first read in Catlow, Ruth, et al. Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts. Torque Editions, 2022.
“T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism.” The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism.