How-to Apologize
Building Community 101
How-to Apologize (live)
Alex will be presenting a brief version of the work showcased in this newsletter later this week, centering the images they’ve made documenting our community building.
Please tune in to the live broadcast if you are able!**
**and now, the chisme: although Alex will be presenting our work on the platform linked above, it is only to have the opportunity to study with artist Adam Broomberg. As part of a years-long pattern of avoiding accountability, the actions of PhMuseum have shown it to be an untrustworthy platform. And, as they could use a healthy dose of How-to Apologize, tune in to see what Alex shares with them.
relationships move at the speed of trust
Exploitation
When PhMuseum broke trust with Alex, their only attempt at repair was to offer Alex “exposure”. We will always choose accountability over exposure. 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.
“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.” via Max Liboiron CLEAR Lab Book
But the people who run PhMuseum are not unique in the scheme of bad actors. There is significant exploitation in agriculture, but that doesn’t mean we have to uphold the status quo. Because it is more profitable in our modern food system to simply throw food away, we work to disrupt these patterns as well as their bad actors.
Nuestra lucha es de clase
In short, without solidarity with folks experiencing poverty, in our action and intention, we are doomed to recreate the harmful systems that so many of us are working to destroy.
We started giving away produce at the corner bar on weekends. The produce comes from whatever surplus we have on the farm, plus the “ugly” fruit that is (still good to eat) donated from a produce stand in town.
You can support this work by joining us on Patreon where we are sharing the produce we give away as Still Life drawing exercises: patreon.com/cw/EsBuenoCompartir
What is our Patreon all about? Part still life drawing exercises (demos coming soon!), part farm ASMR, part free food and agriculture support for our community.
Above video: an hour of still life fruit in 10 seconds
Community Series
With this newsletter we are beginning a new series, picking up where we left off.
Community building can be difficult to define. This series will decode the work we are doing day-to-day, to breakdown and demystify what it means to build.
If you’ve been here a minute you might remember us detailing how we fixed the community drinking water with our neighbors. By helping them bring some pvc pipe out to where the water collects, we are growing our community’s knowledge. We are the youngest in the neighborhood, someday we’ll be doing the fixing by ourselves.
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.
To understanding the how of how we got here; we didn’t start yesterday, and we don’t expect to ever finish building community. Don’t let that indefinite timeline deter you!
We’ve seen the videos online of people frantically trying to unlock their door, before they are forced to interact with their neighbors. Those videos are meant to be a joke, but we’ve heard it from people directly, they don’t want to be obligated to their neighbors. Community building shouldn’t make you feel this way!
Privilege is power
We moved to Puerto Rico in 2021, but Steven spent childhood summers here at Abuela’s, wanting to be part of the generation to return.
Alex was born in Omaha, Nebraska where the legacy of redlining is not only still visible, but fully functional. To the extent that “well-meaning” white folks can live inside it, benefit from it, and still “not see” how their privilege is built on the inequity of literally everyone else. It is impossible to build community where people refuse to acknowledge the lived realities of their neighbors.
When Alex taught in university they would start new courses by introducing themself via their privilege, because privilege is power. Ask yourself, are you perhaps bothered to be obligated to your neighbors because of your unacknowledged privilege?
The contextual layers of our identities are not the center of this work, but engaging meaningfully with very warranted critiques of colonial-ass behavior is. Gringo GTFO.
Our Puerto Rican friend visited from where they are living in the US. Their partner at the time, a therapist, pulled Alex aside after visiting the farm and asked, “Alex, how do you do it?” This very loaded question is (a lot and) not the center of this work, but Alex’s response to it is: