This month four women involved in a collaborative project between Tomales Bay Institute (TBI) and In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre (HOBT) in Minneapolis will be writing blogs for on the commons. We’d like to share some of what we are learning from our collaboration and we invite your reflection on how art, theater and other community-based efforts can help reclaim the commons and in so doing, better preserve our neighborhoods, arts and culture and vital community-life for future generations and for continued creative creations.
Our collaboration grows out of a shared realization that we are at the threshold of a global water crisis of staggering proportions. The heart of our collaboration is based on HOBT’s creation of Invigorate the Common Well, an episodic production that will investigate issues of water quality, quantity and “ownership” and TBI’s commitment to theoretical, seeding, creative publishing and public education work on reinventing the commons in the dominant vernacular. The collaboration will explore the ways that the story of water told through Invigorate the Common Well can convey the significance of understanding water as a commons and identify how this story can be amplified and animated for broader impact.
Through this collaboration we seek to better understand how to create vehicles for making the commons of water concrete and visible to the general public. We want to educate about critical threats to water around the globe and encourage deeper public knowledge and interest in the significance of the commons in all of our lives.
We also want to know how ideas about art and the commons resonate in different contexts and how strategic partnerships, such as ours, use art to motivate collective action. To this end, last weekend I had the good fortune to attend a conference in New York City that explored the role of the arts in contemporary struggles over urban space. Titled “Art in the Contested City,” the conference brought together some of New York City’s brightest examples of artists, community organizers and city residents finding innovative ways to claim their collective rights to urban space in a city where battles between developers and residents are decades old.
Discussions explored the tension over the role artists can play in traditional development efforts that gentrify, displace and exclude. On the one hand, artists can be perceived as the shock troops of community development; when artists move into a low-income neighborhood because of affordable studio space their presence often makes the neighborhood appear more desirable. Soon skyrocketing rents and property values force artists and other long-term residents to move. On the other hand, artists and our creativity enables us to make unique contributions to collaborations which aim to preserve, protect and strengthen existing communities, keeping unwelcome development at bay and welcoming development that can bring positive change.
Artists and community activists at the conference shared exceptional models for staving off unwanted development and fostering development that nurtures community, stability and a sense of identity in relation to “place.” For instance, The Point, a culture, arts and community development corporation in the Bronx has its own theater, ethnic dance programs and an art gallery that highlights local folk artists. Focused on arts capacity for critical dialogue, the Point engages artists with the community to examine and express issues of identity and place, one of the results being the creation of print-making project that explored police brutality in the neighborhood.
El Puente in Brooklyn, a youth oriented community group based in a predominantly Latino and Caribbean area involved youth in researching the history of the international sugar trade and the ways young people are encouraged to consume unhealthy sugar-based foods. Youth took this information and created a dance performance using traditional Caribbean folk dance to tell their story about their research and their own families’ experiences.
Not an Alternative, a group of young artists and public relations activists spoke about their work as cultural production. Based in Brooklyn, this group examines and redefines community symbols, providing new interpretations of important icons. In the process, they hope to tear down traditional divisions between single issue politics and forge a new “culturally focused” and community integrated organizing process. Recently they participated in a fight over preserving public space – McCaren pool, a swimming pool built in the ’30s that had been closed for years was re-opened up for concerts. When Clear Channel sought exclusive rights to hold concerts there, Not an Alternative created creative posters and other public education tools to develop public awareness and stop this threatened monopoly on public space.
All examples of artists engaged and connecting with community residents, these groups all set the tone for how artists are a part of the larger struggle to preserve communities that support and sustain a range of diverse residents and lifestyles. These efforts are bold, exciting and add to the dynamic energy, vitality and safety of urban neighborhoods.
What struck me most about these effective collaborations between artists and community groups was how the terrain they seek to hold onto, is so elusive in the face of gentrification and an economic model that does not value or even recognize the commons. The space that these groups fight over is space that developers want to use for condos or commercial space – development that will increase rent and land values for whole neighborhoods, forcing both artists and low-income residents out. But unless the terrain upon which these groups are fighting is clearly established as out of reach from developers, these fights will continue over and over again.
Beginning the conversation, not at the line between developers and community residents, but between what we define, within a neighborhood, as a “commons” can provide a whole new starting point about where the line might be drawn to begin with. Of course this necessitates a shift in thinking about the rights community residents can and cannot claim. While this requires some deep and creative reflection, in the end, it can help change the boundaries from which we work and what it is we seek to protect. It’s a new way forward for communities to more permanently maintain the commons that rightfully belongs to us and all our neighbors.