Community series
“Failure to hear will matter to those who do not listen and those who are not heard, not only because stories without an audience do not survive but also because being heard or ignored impacts how the past resonates in the present.”
— Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard
On Listening
This bright pink scene is actually a scene of death and renewal; and a communication about where to find food. For a fleeting moment, before the pomarosa fruit makes an appearance, everything near a mature tree gets a pink blanket.
But you’ll miss it if you’re not listening.
No one in our area can afford to connect to municipal water. Meanwhile our tax dollars fund atrocities in Gaza, the West Bank, across the African continent, Caribbean, and beyond. Without support for the basics, our area has come up with ingenious ways of making do. The repercussions of settler colonialism are not a lifestyle choice; don’t call us sustainable.
TL;DR a story about how we collect water
This month we’re talking about water, specifically our drinking water and how that works for us. This newsletter is free for everyone, because water fucking should be.
“In feminist and anticolonial work there are going to be mistakes. There aren’t a lot of roadmaps in [art] for this kind of work, and [community] members are at different stages of understanding and enacting our values. We need to know how to apologize in ways that are feminist and anticolonial, rather than the ways many of us have learned that tend to foreground logic, self-preservation, judgment, or demands for other people’s apologies rather than focusing on our own accountability.” — Max Liboiron CLEAR Lab Book
How-to Apologize
One of the moral bankruptcies of the art world is the lie that exposure is a meaningful exchange for artists’ labor. It is exploitation. Specifically in the case of PhMuseum, and the photo world generally, it is exploitation that extracts value from vulnerable communities.